Civility and Compassion"

In my last sermon a few weeks ago, I talked about positive change and I noted that people become the type of person they are - largely because of the way they think. We create our own reality. If, for example, a person becomes fixated with anger

toward a certain person or persons, they will probably be filled with hatred. This will certainly impact their entire waking life. Simply put, it’s difficult to be filled with hatred toward someone or something and be a loving person toward others.

Negative emotions are consuming and they impact who we are and, perhaps more importantly, who we are becoming. And all of this, of course, affects our spiritual being.

Photo by Nathan Lemon on Unsplash

I noted that reaching for the stars is all about becoming a loving and caring person and it is also about so much more. It is about living one’s life with love in our heart and love in our life. It is about projecting this love into the world and creating love for others. It is difficult to emphasize how absolutely essential this is.

Let me ask you a question. Look back on your life. Have you noticed that over the course of your life the emphasis on good manners, politeness, and courtesy has changed? If you are like me, I think you will agree that the answer is yes and not for the better! It seems to me this is a sad situation.

It seems as though the pace of life in American society grows faster every day and certainly through every decade. And it seems that the way people treat each other in day-to-day life situations continues to deteriorate. What is worse, our society seems to be accepting the fact that rudeness and lack of civility are just the ways

things are in a high technology, highly competitive world. I find this incredible in a nation where a majority of citizens consider themselves faithful and practicing Christians; members of a faith which demands adherence to the golden rule of loving others as you love yourself” and calls for “turning the other cheek” to those who hurt you. Apparently, people are not practicing what is a central belief in Christianity.

Naturally it is easy to blame the politics of America on the ever-increasing lack of civility in our society. I do not think there is anyone here who is not sick at heart at what is happening in our political system. Attack ads, name calling, false accusations, slander, bigotry, and just plain meanness are the norm today and it

doesn’t matter what political party we are talking about. It is common across the political spectrum. But I don’t think it is politics that is the cause of lack of civility. Instead, I think what we are seeing in politics is merely a symptom of a bigger problem. Unfortunately, being rude and obnoxious seems to be the norm across America in so many ways. There are even reality TV shows where wives fight over some trivial matter and men fight just to show how strong and masculine they are. So many people apparently think these shows are entertaining and worth watching?

Then there are extreme examples of this such as road rage where drivers who feel they have been wronged by another driver chase the other car aggressively and, in some cases even attempt to shoot the offending driver. In 2023, the latest year statistics are available, someone was shot and wounded or killed in a road rage

shooting incident on average every 18 hours.

Who here has not seen clashes between service providers and customers. We see it at banks. We see it at grocery stores and in shopping malls. We see it at restaurants. (Apt in Brewster). We see it everywhere where someone feels they have been wronged and want to lash out at someone. In many cases the person they

are screaming at is just an employee and not responsible for the problem that has occurred. People want to shoot the messenger so to speak.

And then, of course, there is social media, online diatribes and electronic communications in general. I have often seen email exchanges between co-workers grow progressively more heated and watched people say things in emails to others that they would never say in person. Lest you have any doubt about how rude people are in electronic communications, take a look at a lot of blogs where people comment on an article or event. The rudeness, inappropriate comments and even death threats are breath taking and, in my view, quite cowardly since the offending person rarely leaves their name or a way to identity themselves. They just want to spew venom at someone else or, perhaps, it is a way at screaming at the world and their life in general.

Another problem in our communication age is that people seem to think they must be continually available to anyone who wants to contact them – often times at the expense of a person who is with them at a given moment. I am sure you know what I mean. I have been in business lunch settings where there are several people seated at the table and everyone is talking to someone else on their cell phone instead of talking to the people they are with. Most of the time, I will not carry a cell phone into a restaurant because I just think it is rude to talk on the phone when you are with someone else. I seem to be in the minority though.

It's not just words, it’s actions as well. Think about how people treat each other in shopping malls and grocery stores. Think about how many times you have been in a checkout line and a new lane opens. Rather than having the next person from another lane who is in line first move to the newly opened lane, it becomes

survival of the fittest as people cut in front of each other to be next.

I usually hold the door for people in public places and sometimes I watch them walk by me as though they think I was standing there all day just to hold the door for them when they arrived. When I hold the door and I am ignored, I almost always cheerfully say, “Your welcome.” Sometimes when I do this, people look

embarrassed and quickly mumble a thank you but, amazingly, a lot of the time, people just glare at me with disgust. Just incredible!

What is also distressing is the lack of civility is often linked to a very overdeveloped sense of entitlement. Some people just seem to think the world revolves around them and they have no obligation to be considerate to others. I can remember a scene in an airport a few years ago when the jetway door was closed and a flight prepared to leave. Shortly after, a woman walked up to the gate demanding the door be opened. When the very polite agent explained the flight was past gate departure time, the woman demanded the door be opened and began cursing at the agent. She told the agent she had been shopping in airport stores and had expected the flight to be held for her until she arrived. Amazing.

As you know, I worked in Washington D.C. several years ago. One of the very profitable businesses in the Washington area is human resource consultants who come into a workplace – a government agency or private sector company and work on improving workplace morale and communications. These HR gurus as very clever. They periodically repackage their message in different forms and resell their “new management techniques” to companies and government organizations. These messages and recommendations are really the same but they sound new and different. Some typical management workshop titles included: “Total Quality

Management or TQM,” “Secrets to Improving Morale” and “Lean Six Sigma.”

(All have different names for basically the same thing but everyone wants to hire them!)

Now I will say that management workshops can be valuable but very frankly, in most cases they all have the same message. They all revolve around creating a civil workplace where employees respect each other and are respected. They call for management to communicate with their employees and care about them. I often wonder why is a human resource guru needed to teach the obvious? The answer is that a lot of supervisors and a lot of companies and government organizations just don’t seem to get this!

In the world of young people there is an alarming development which mirrors the lack of civility and compassion in our society – and this is the dramatic growth of bullying – whether it be physical bullying or cyber bullying. Bullying, of course, has been around as long as there have been humans but I am quite sure it is on the increase – not because of children, but because of the direction that society is going and because parents are not emphasizing the practice of civility and compassion to their children. And, of course, children’s access to social media doesn’t help because it is a tool for bullies.

Even worse, children see how their parents act every day and children adopt their parents’ behaviors. If parents are rude and obnoxious and demonstrate an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, rest assured their children will do the same. My wife, Virginia, taught first grade for more than twenty years and I well remember stories she would often tell me about the behavior of some of her students. I frankly can’t believe the language and behavior she described from some of her six- and seven-year-olds. Except in rare cases, kids did not act like this years ago; in fact, kids didn’t even know how to exhibit the behavior my wife tells me about. What is worse is that in parent-teacher conferences, my wife would tell me that some parents don’t even think their child’s rude behavior and foul language is that bad. In many cases, the parents themselves were rude to teachers and staff.

As most of you know, I teach Leadership at Nichols College in Dudley MA. The course is required for all freshmen and I applaud Nichols for mandating the course for all students – particularly since I believe that most people do not understand what good leadership entails. Naturally since I am teaching “Generation Z” there is no way I can present the typical college lecture you would have seen in days gone by. So – we do cover everything in the syllabus but I do so by showing short YouTube clips of various leadership qualities and styles and we talk about it. There are a lot of great leadership characteristics explained in the textbook and in videos but missing is one of the most important – if not most important leadership quality and that, in my view is compassion. Leaders who do not possess and do not exercise compassion toward their employees have a difficult time getting the most out of their employees and they have a hard time earning their respect.

Compassion is not just important for leadership – it is important for every human being to project toward everyone in their life and, for the most part, to everyone they come in contact with even those they are in conflict with. This, I believe, is what is missing in the world today and this is why rudeness and poor manners

abound in society today.

So critical is compassion that it is found at the center of every major religion. Adherents of the world’s religions are called to be compassionate in their dealings with others. The Buddha believed that compassion is so mportant, that he said it is a critical key to happiness, spiritual enlightenment, and the attainment of nirvana

and bliss.

Compassion is about caring and it is about love. Compassion is that single human quality that transforms hatred into understanding and even friendship; restlessness into patience. It is that quality which turns anger into kindness, jealousy into acceptance; prejudice into sympathy. Compassion is creative and it is life-giving.

To understand the absolute importance of compassion, one need only consider its absence. We have all known and met people who have little or no compassion. Most often, these people are not civil in their behavior towards others. They may be brilliant and accomplished people. They may have good values and ethics. They may be essentially good people. But people who have no compassion are barren and sterile; impossible to reach out to; impossible to relate to, and impossible to love. Study after study and certainly, good common sense, has revealed the tremendous importance of compassion in human development and in human happiness. Frankly, compassion is as importance as food to our very existence. Failure to be loved can kill as readily as lack of food: Hence the term, “he or she is starved for love.”

To be a compassionate person is to be accepting of other people, and importantly, not necessarily accepting of their actions! And when you are accepting of people, you may just find that you can change them. Being a compassionate person has transformative power. You can change someone by showing love and compassion

toward them. You can help them. You can bring them friendship where they may have none. Compassion may raise a person from the depths of loneliness and despair. Compassion can even teach another person how to love.

It can be very discouraging to reflect on the direction of our society and to acknowledge that civility seems to be on the decline and that fewer people seem to exercise compassion even though a major percentage of Americans, at least older Americans, attend church every Sunday where they, at least theoretically, embrace

compassion and civility. So why does civility and therefore compassion seem so rare?

I think the answer is multi-faceted. To begin with, the world grows more competitive with each passing year and the pace of life continues to speed up. All the modern inventions that were supposed to make our life easier and give us more leisure time have actually done the reverse. Communications is a good example.

Where once a letter or memorandum would arrive by mail and a response was expected in a week or even two weeks, now responses are expected in hours or minutes or even seconds. The result is that electronic communications have increased the pressure and stress on people in their jobs and in their lives in

general. As a person’s world speeds up and people face ever increasing pressure and stress, civility and compassion can suffer greatly.

Another cause of bad manners, rudeness and lack of compassion is that in the absence of a moral compass, some people become so self-absorbed they care only about themselves and forget there is a world of people around them. In other words, lack of civility and compassion is a sure sign of being a selfish person and

quite possibly; a person who is in a vicious circle; a person who is becoming increasingly selfish and uncivil as people no longer response to them or are rude to them in return. It is too often likely that when a person continually experiences rudeness and no one seems to care about them, they will in turn, will become ruder

and even more selfish.

There are many places in the world and even right here in America where politeness and compassion are common place and bad manners and selfishness are rare. I also find it curious that some of the poorest countries I have been to in the world have some of the most polite and caring people. In 1991 when I left New York to go to Seminary in Berkeley California, I decided to drive across country by taking only small roads and traveling through small towns. I ended up taking nine weeks and driving 13,000 miles from the east coast to the west coast. It was an incredible experience. What I found was that people in most of America were actually very polite and very quick to offer a helping hand. What is notable is that these people were most often those in small towns where the pace of life was slower and where parents still instilled in their children the importance of good manners and caring for others.

In short, we need to develop new coping mechanisms for reconciling our fast-paced competitive world with a need for communal and global civility and compassion. We need to develop a new ethic where bad manners and attacks on others become wholly unacceptable. We need to live as though we are all in a global village where care, compassion and respect bind the village together. The good news is that each and every one of us can help make this happen by the actions we take in our day-to-day life. Each of us can practice civility and

compassion, and in so doing, we can encourage others to do the same. All we have to do is care about others. Most people in America seem to accept the golden rule that Jesus stated in Luke Chapter 6 when he said: “And as you wish men would do to you, do so to them,” or from Matthew 22, “You shall love your neighbor as

yourself.” It is important to note that these words or similar words can be found in nearly every religion and culture around the world from ancient to modern times. We need only put these words into action!

The word civil shares the same etymology as the words civilized and civilization. For a “civilized society and civilization” to work, all members must care about each other. The collective is more important than the individual. Perhaps this is why bad manners and lack of compassion or so prevalent. People become so self-

absorbed and so self-centered they forget they are part of a bigger society and world. When we stop putting ourselves at the center of the universe, we can start thinking and caring about others and we can be more careful in how we treat other people.

When we care about others, we acknowledge their presence and we show respect. We see the dignity in others. You may have seen the hand sign and words when an Indian person meets another. The bow slightly, clasp their hands together and say, “namaste” which means. “I see the divine in you.” What a wonderful

acknowledgement. Humility, kindness and calm in the face of adversity from another person is indeed

difficult but it can be done and it goes to the center of a person’s spiritual being. When we show humility; when we refrain from anger; when we show good manners and care and compassion for others, we make a powerful statement and we lead by example.

For our society and civilization to survive, we all must strive to embrace civility and compassion. To do otherwise will slowly erode the structures of civilization. To do otherwise, is to erode our own spiritual potential – for the Buddha was right, civility and compassion are critical components of enlightenment.

You and I and all our other brother and sister humans walk together in this world; companions trapped together on a tiny ball swirling endlessly in a faraway corner of this vast universe. Each day we watch and we wonder. Each day the mysteries we discover increase and we ponder. But how can we find answers; how can we

find peace – if we are not at peace with each other – if we do not love each other as we would have others love us?

As the Dalai Lama said, “the whole purpose of religion is to facilitate love and compassion, patience, tolerance, humility, and forgiveness.”

Reverend Christopher McMahon

UUMH

January 26, 2025