In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Bruce Springsteen explains that going through life is like riding in a car where new people get in all the time but no one ever gets out. Every experience you’ve ever had, every person who’s ever been important to you as well as all of your own younger selves are all in the car with you. So the big question that determines where you go and how you live your life is not who’s in and who’s out — cause everybody’s in — the question is, who’s driving?
For some of us, it may be a very young, childhood self that’s driving, still trying to win the approval of a parent. For some of us it may be the experience of having overcome a serious illness that’s driving, and the sense of responsibility and preciousness of life that comes with that. For some, it’s an experience of sudden loss and so we only drive down wide, well-lit roads, well below the speed limit, trembling, shrinking away from any risk of being hurt again.
For many religious traditions, the goal is to put God in the driver’s seat. This is where you get phrases like, “Let go, let God.” And bumper stickers like, “My boss is a Jewish carpenter.” Pastor Rick Warren of Saddleback Church uses this metaphor a great deal, urging his congregants to put Jesus in the driver’s seat. He says, “Here’s what Christians tend to do: When we become believers in Christ, we give him the driver’s seat and then promptly hop into the backseat and become backseat drivers. We’re constantly giving him ‘advice,’ like, ‘No, turn this way. Stop. Wait. Faster! I want to go that way. I want to see that sight.’”
When you think about it, even for Unitarian Universalists, whatever or whoever we put in the driver’s seat of our car is, for all intents and purposes, our God. It’s what guides us, motivates us, shapes our actions, and what we believe in most fervently as “the truth.” So it’s a crucial question for us: to what kind of God do we want to give that kind of power within us?
For Herman Dawson, the juvenile court judge that Ari mentioned in his homily, it seems like his childhood experience of poverty and discrimination may be at the wheel along with his mother’s response of harsh punishment and tough love. His mother raised him on poverty wages with five siblings. She was a strict disciplinarian who, in his words, “didn’t play.” He saw her get beaten up on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday and he himself was a victim of violence in protest marches. He learned from the time he was a kid that life is hard, there is no room for making mistakes, no time for pleasure, no forgiveness – if you screw up or act out in any way, the world will punish you.
And he takes that worldview and transmits it to all the children and parents who come through his court. He sentences kids to long detentions for first offenses, he makes parents pay court fees that are usually waived for juvenile cases (even if they say they can’t afford it), he punishes kids severely for the tiniest infractions of their probation terms, for “acting up” at home, sometimes requiring them to maintain a certain grade point average and locking them up again if they don’t. He claims he is saving them from getting into even worse trouble later on. But angry parents along with experts in the field all say that his punitive approach is backfiring in these children’s lives and turning ordinary kids into criminals. Everyone except Judge Dawson can see it. Because the compassionate, caring, forgiving Herman Dawson who is undoubtedly in there, in his car too, is not in the driver’s seat.
I believe that Judge Dawson really is well intentioned. He really wants to help these kids stay out of trouble and get out of poverty. But, although he may well have caring voices within him, the only language he has available to him to show his caring is the language of his painful experiences – the language of punishment and authority. And though he may well have forgiving impulses, the only God he has available to him to drive his car seems to be the harsh and exacting God of judgment.
To some extent, and in different ways, we are all like Judge Dawson. We all carry with us some painful experiences of our past and we let them drive our understanding of the world. So often those experiences give us the only language we have available. So often we act out of our places of woundedness without even knowing it. Sometimes we get frustrated, playing out the same bad patterns over and over again, hurting ourselves and others. Freud called it the “repetition compulsion,” where we repeat our own trauma, or put ourselves in situations where it’s likely to happen again. What was done to us as children, we do to our children, or as in Judge Dawson’s case, other people’s children. And it’s all with the very best intentions. Because when our experience of fear and pain is in the driver’s seat, the universe feels like it is, in fact, a scary and unloving place. Acting from this experience, the best we can do for ourselves and the best we can teach others is to grow a thick shell of armor, try to dominate and control, and look out for our own needs.
As Unitarian Universalist, we know that this God of judgment, born out of fear and pain, is not the only God in our car. Our God, to any extent that “we” collectively have one, is the God of compassion and love, the God of possibility and transformation. And this God is in the car too. Just as we’ve all had painful experiences that teach us of the harshness of life, we have each also had experiences of unfathomable love. Each of us was cared for when we were infants, vulnerable, fragile, and utterly dependent on the nurturing of our caregivers. Those mothering figures, whoever they were, are in the car with us. Each of us has had the experience of success, overcoming adversity, doing something we didn’t think possible, or even surviving trauma. The teachers, therapists, spiritual guides, and mentors who helped make it possible are in the car with us. Each of us has done something to make the world a better place – we’ve been a good friend when our friend desperately need it; we’ve had moments of truly serving our constituents or customers with integrity in our work; we’ve had moments when we’ve been wise and loving parents to our children. Each of the people who we have helped are witnesses to own inherent goodness, and they are in the car with us too.
We all live in a cloud of all the experiences we have ever had — painful, pleasurable, exciting, monotonous, and transformative. All those experiences are part of us — they are in us and with us always. We have demon parts and we have angel parts and we have parts that defy all definition. So we can’t call an exorcist to get rid of the demons inside us any more than Bruce Springsteen can kick a passenger out of his car. And we wouldn’t want to even if we could. All those part of us have their place, they’re all there for a reason, and collectively they make us who we are. But we can become conscious of who’s at the wheel at any given time. We can notice what’s driving us, who or what is our God at that moment and ask ourselves – Is that the God that I want to give all that power to? Is that the God I want in the driver’s seat? Is that the God of the Unitarian Universalist vision of the interconnectedness of life and compassion for all?
If not, you might want to lean over, and get a good look at the God that is driving. Don’t try to eject it from your car, but be gentle and even loving with it. This God, this experience has served you and done important work for you and it’s deserving of your thanks. But if you don’t want it driving your car, give it a tap on the shoulder and say, “Hey. You look tired. You’ve been driving for a long time. At the next light, switch with me. I’ll take the wheel for a while.”