We’ve been considering covenants in our services and spiritual exploration this month. And as the month closes, I’d feel remiss if I didn’t bring one of my favourite TV shows into the conversation. Perhaps you’ve seen it, as well. But if not, The Good Place follows Eleanor Shellstrop, who wakes up one day to find that she has died. No longer alive in the sunny state of Arizona, she realizes she left behind a life marred with selfish decisions.
So imagine her shock when she finds out she has gone to the Good Place. A perfectly designed afterlife realm for everyone who racked up enough Good Points during their time on earth. But despite appearances, she and her friends are in fact in the Bad Place, a realm of eternal torment. What’s more, the cosmic Points System that determines your afterlife is so outdated and unnuanced that no one has gotten to the Good Place in five hundred years.
All of this revolves around one ethical question. “What do we owe each other?” Sitting on my couch hearing that question in a sit-com, I thought I had had an epiphany. It made an intuitive sense to me. But I had never deeply considered it as an ethical position. It has not been a prevailing framework in the country I come from. As one viewer of the show wrote, ““[This idea] is, in a way, deeply un-American — an affront to our central mythology of individual rights, self-interest and the sanctity of the free market.”1 A much needed, if awfully small, correction for those open to it.
There are no Unitarian Universalists in this show, so far as I know. But the ethics of what we owe each other are familiar to us. We do not take for granted that “what is good” comes to us from on High. And this framework is not as self-concerned as the Golden Rule, instructing us to treat others how we want to be treated. To assume everyone needs what I do.
This ethical perspective has become a cornerstone of my ministry. In communal life, in a congregation, that isn’t always easy to answer. What exactly do we owe each other? Perhaps you have been like me before. Believing that what we owe each other is a lifeline. Something easy to throw out quickly and offer someone else some support. Which we can do again and again and again. Perhaps you’ve been an especially generous person with your care and attention. Someone who gives it away freely, with an easy-come-easy-go attitude, and few boundaries to preserve your energy.
So did someone else I knew. She had a reputation for being the first on the frontline, someone who would give you the shirt off her back if she could. Bree worked in a profession that welcomed her gifts. One that gave her plenty of practice in applying them. It matched her faith’s call to honour everyone’s dignity. She gave of herself freely to the people who walked into her office, to people she met online, and to her close and not-so-close friends and family. If Bree had a lifeline to throw – and she always seemed to find one – then you knew she was going to throw it.
I admired that about Bree. Many did. But I wondered when she was going to run out of rope. She did eventually, with someone close to her. She had a lot in common with her friend Jeremy. They both understood our world in many of the same ways. Both knew how oppressive it could be, and experienced an unfair amount of that themselves. They shared the deep conviction that if we have some lifeline to throw, we have an ethical obligation to do so. In their own ways, they were trying to build small pockets of heaven on earth.
This was also true though. More often than not, it seemed like Bree had more lifeline to give than Jeremy did. He saw what many did, that she always found a way, and gave freely of herself. And given the strength of her convictions, why wouldn’t she? She was an upstanding person to everyone in her life, including Jeremy.
Jeremy and Bree gave and took as much as they could with each other. But Jeremy’s life took one rough turn after another, and he leaned on Bree for more and more. The more of her line she threw, it seemed the more he pulled in. Then in one season of her life, Bree’s own lifeline frayed. She had no more line to give, and the fallout between them left them both hurt.
This is true for many loose boundaries. They can appear to be a principled choice. Or a habit we learned a lifetime ago. That conceding ground in our lives is the way we sustain social life. That we owe each other whatever we have to give.
There is much that I don’t know about Jeremy’s circumstances. But I do know how Bree reacted. She became more jaded, more withdrawn. She extended less and less of herself. Her lifeline had been too slack, her boundaries too loose.
Bree might remind you of yourself, or someone you know. And what she did next might be familiar, too. She built a wall. The bright line of her promises to others faded. In place of the lifeline she used to throw so freely, instead she threw up a high, impervious wall. Her boundaries would be firm from now on. She had learned her lesson. But as it happened, those boundaries were too firm. Her wall was towering, imposing even. Black and white, with a sign outside that said “DO NOT CROSS.” It let nothing out, and let no one in. She wondered, “What do people owe me?” But also didn’t know how to ask.
Between the overextended lifeline and the unflinching wall, the relationships around her deteriorated. Bree and Jeremy, and likely the people around them, had emerged into a pattern of relationship. One where their needs and what they owed each other were scarcely considered or expressed. They had stumbled into a hell on earth. Expanding on Jean Sartre, the ethicist T.M. Scanlon interprets the famed phrase “hell is other people” in this way.
“You could say,” he writes, “hell is other people, that is to say, hell is the relationship with other people that you create by treating them badly. My idea of The Bad Place is the place that you’re in where you’ve spoiled your relations with the other people you’re living with, and you can’t be friends or trust each other, or do any of the things that you’re supposed to do when you interact with friends or even strangers.”2
He’s someone who has given a lot of thought to what we owe each other. It’s the subject of his most notable work, and a major inspiration for the show, The Good Place.
This might not excuse the outcomes, but it does explain them. Have you seen this shift happen in yourself, or someone else? Where rigid boundaries in the present have overcorrected for loose ones in the past? Where no one acts as though they owe you anything, so you contend that you don’t owe anyone anything, either. That boundary is also unsustainable.
Few of us have the resources to throw a lifeline into the choppy waters of life, again and again, with nothing clearly supporting us. And on the other hand, if our boundaries are firm as reinforced concrete, then little love can get out, and little love can come in. We can’t easily bend to accommodate the ways life shifts around us.
Looking back, I wonder this. What would I have done differently, if I knew then what I know now? How might I have been a better friend to Bree, and by extension Jeremy? What would any of us have done?
So let me propose this to you. What we actually owe each other is a safety net. A net can hang loose or hold firm. It will catch many things that fall its way, and let others pass through. And most importantly, a net is strong. It is complex. A net is formed of many strands, all connected and catching what falls their way together. It is both firm and flexible. And no one strand is holding all the weight.
We are that net. As the adage goes, “We keep each other safe,” in more ways than one. This safety net shows us a vision of caring, communal life. It represents a truth we hold reverently, the interdependent web of our existence. And it is an assumption built into the practices we share to keep each other safe. Including the most vulnerable among us.
We keep each other safe when we ask for consent with words and body language. We keep our children safe by making sure each child has at least two other people in a room with them.
The safety net, the interdependent web, also shows where our safe steps meet our covenant. With it, we promise one another that we will ask for the help we need in navigating challenging situations. We acknowledge that we are here for one another. I want to be clear that our Covenant of Right Relations is first and foremost a covenant for engaging conflict. That distinction matters. And: its principles hold true for other aspects of relationship. We can ask for help in caring for each other too. Bree might need help, or just a hug, but Jeremy isn’t up to it right now. But he knows that I can help instead. We are each a strand of the safety net, and together we can carry more than each of us can alone.
If “Hell is other people,” then Heaven, too, is other people. If “hell is the relationship with other people that you create by treating them badly,” then Heaven is an experience where we have nurtured our relationships with one another. Through mutual care and consideration.
When we leave this place, consider this. Consider who is building the safety net with you. Building this Heaven on Earth "will be hard, we know, and the road will be muddy and rough. But we’ll get there, heaven knows how we will get there, but we know we will.”3
Previous versions of this sermon have been preached at First Unitarian Church of Des Moines, First Universalist Church of Denver, and Mountain Vista Unitarian Universalist Congregation.
1. Sam Anderson, “The Ultimate Sitcom,” The New York Times, October 4, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/04/magazine/good-place-michael-schur-philosophy.html
2. Maliya V. Ellis & Woojin Lim, “Asking Philosopher T.M. Scanlon ‘What We Owe Each Other’”, The Crimson, October 10, 2019, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/10/10/scanlon-and-the-good-place/
3. Loughty Amoa et al., “Woyaya,” in Singing the Journey: A Supplement to Singing the Living Tradition (Boston, MA: Unitarian Universalist Association, 2005), #1020.