What a summer this has been. I hope it has been good for you. I hope it has been a time of personal growth and refreshment. All of us need to change, sometimes in little, sometimes in major ways. Blessedly, summer often offers opportunities, sometimes even for transformation. Summer gives us space, time for reflection, time for stone over scissors, for paper over stone. My summer worked that way. I feel better about myself than I did when summer began. I cleaned a few mental and spiritual closets. I am ready for the new year.
This said, I can't imagine a worse summer. Unlike last year's. Last year's was a People Magazine summer. The most important thing to talk about as it ended was the death of Lady Di. Not important in a big way. Just telling and touching. A reminder of mortality in the midst of our bubble world. But it was a car crash, not the crash of an airliner, not the bombing of two our Embassies, not a meltdown in Russia, not panic on the Eastern Rim driving the market down 15%. With baseball -- the Yankees and Mark McGwire -- offering the only clear counterpoint, while reclaiming the national pastime as a source for honest joy, this has been the summer of our discontent. And it ends, not with the death of a glamour queen but with the potential impeachment of a president. Our president. This fall, before we can talk about new beginnings, we have to search our souls and our nation's soul. Soul searching is never easy. And searching another's soul without examining our own can be dangerous. No sin is more corrosive than hypocrisy. And yet, the squalor that our President has put himself and our nation through soils us all. I hate this, but I read the Starr Report and must do my best this morning to respond to it. I wish I could do so with the full confidence of my convictions, but I can't. This is one of those times when people of conscience have to speak and act on 60% convictions, even on convictions that keep slipping under and then back over the 50% line of honest, humble confusion.
Carolyn and I had two dinner parties this week, the first with an eclectic mix of All Souls staff and members, the second with Carolyn's new work team at Ernst and Young. At the first party, one guest suggested that each of us go around the table and say -- if we had the power to make this happen -- whether or not we would have President Clinton resign the following day. Because the results were so moving, really deeply moving, we repeated this game -- a very serious game -- the following evening. At the end of the second round, I said I could take one sentence that everyone had spoken and weave them together into a long paragraph that I could fully embrace. Each person came to his or her conviction with a different argument. I may have disagreed with the bottom line, but the arguments, each one of them, were deeply felt and thoughtfully presented. Because of something said on Tuesday about the importance of keeping an elected president in office if we possibly can, Carolyn changed her position on Wednesday, from Clinton's resigning to remaining in office. As for me, I have changed my mind twice this week. When I was interviewed yesterday by National Public Radio, I had to admit that by the time the interview ran this morning, I may have changed my mind again.
I wish I were more certain, more sure, but I am not. What I have to say this morning is therefore painful, tentative, and more guarded than I would like. As of now, I don't believe the President should be impeached. He should resign only if he believes that can no longer perform his duties, the duties we, knowing many of his failings, elected him to perform. Despite my uncertainty, I do see an opportunity here for personal growth, even civic growth as a nation. Strangely, if sadly, this tawdry soap-opera presents us with an opportunity for real and deep soul searching. Certainly this has been true for me, and I welcome that.
As for the president himself, everyone now knows that he is a profoundly flawed man. I think we have always known that, even when we elected him. We have also known that he is a talented politician and an effective leader. Let me begin, therefore, by trying to put this presidential scandal in historical perspective. About the presidency in the 1980s I concluded that Jimmy Carter proved that the presidency was an impossible job, and Ronald Reagan proved that anyone could do it. In retrospect, that was probably unfair to both of them. The presidency is a supremely difficult job. One who performs his official duties well, regardless of how we view his politics, tends to serve our country well. We should be far more grateful to and appreciative of our leaders than we are. These are not high paying positions, not for the responsibility they entail. And in a democracy, we depend mightily on the people we elect, first to shape our agenda, but also to help us feel good about who we are as a people. In general, we can be grateful for the leadership we have chosen over the past 200 plus years. And yet, as the son of a United States Senator who served his country, honorably I believe, for 24 years, I am aware of the pain and anguish that our leaders feel, of the disruption of their private lives, even of the compromises they must sometimes live with if they are to succeed in their work. No senator is perfect. No president is perfect. And the rules keep changing.
Before I criticize President Clinton, and I shall do so without much pity, let's take a moment, just a moment, to place this crisis in perspective. During the last year of his office President Wilson was almost completely incapacitated. His wife ran the country. Almost no one knew. President Roosevelt served four terms without the American people knowing that he was handicapped and in a wheelchair. The odds are, given the attitude toward "cripples" back then, that had we known he would have been defeated. During his years in office, President Kennedy had a much more sordid personal life than President Clinton. He even had a mafia moll in his bed, compromising the presidency not just the president. Many reporters knew this. They didn't let us know. Presidents Wilson, Roosevelt and Kennedy are among the most widely respected in our history.
As for lying, the one vote my father couldn't forgive himself for was his vote in favor of the Gulf of Tonkein resolution. In retrospect we know that President Johnson lied -- a bald-faced lie -- to the American people, in order to gain our support for a full-fledged engagement in Vietnam. As an direct result of this lie, 55,000 American soldiers died, not to mention hundreds of thousand Vietnamese.
I have only mentioned Democratic presidents. I'm afraid that if we impeach President Clinton for the sex and lies that are the whole burden of the Starr report, we might have to think about impeaching the entire presidency. Go all the way back to Jefferson. Give a special prosecutor the equivalent of 40 million dollars and 150 FBI agents and see if he or any of his successors could have survived. Maybe Abraham Lincoln. Maybe Jimmy Carter. I wouldn't place a bet on too many of the others. And though its not a fair comparison, because we rightly hold our president to the highest of standards, I can almost promise you the same about yourselves. It may not have been sex, or even money, but each of us has done things or misrepresented things that we would cringe if the world were made privy to them. This week another member of Congress, Helen Chenoweth of Idaho, after running a commercial calling for the President's resignation, was forced to confess to her own affair. She says that, unlike the President, she has asked for God's forgiveness and received it. Somehow, given the corrosive effect of hypocrisy when combined with passing judgment on others, I am less than impressed.
This said, I hold not the special prosecutor, nor the congress nor the media, but the president himself fully responsible for his actions and the inevitable reactions that follow upon them. His behavior has been squalid and completely reprehensible. Whatever we may think of Monica Lewinsky, there is a clear abuse of power in their relationship. He has demeaned his office and lost so much respect that I still struggle with the question of whether or not, for our sake, even perhaps for his own, he should resign. The rules may have changed. I may find this unfair. He may find this unfair. But that's just the way it is. For the sake of our future leaders, I hope and pray that we will address the dangers of an untrammeled special prosecutor's office, independent of the judiciary, the congress and the executive branch. Witch hunts are toxic to our honored tradition of privacy, at least a modicum of privacy. While deeply distressed by the president's pattern of dissimulation, I am equally frightened by the inevitable consequences of uncontained moral zealotry. Still, as much as I would like to, I can no longer blame Ken Starr for the morass in which we find ourselves. I blame the president.
I am also angry with him. For the most part, I share his political vision. He has compromised his ability to put forward the agenda he espouses. Although, unlike Kennedy and Johnson -- yes, Reagan too in the Iran Contra affair -- Clinton's personal behavior, his liaisons and his lies, have not directly compromised his office, they indirectly compromise it in profound ways. I hope I am wrong, but we may look back on this summer not as the summer that the president was nakedly exposed as a sinner and a liar, but as the summer that our national leaders failed to respond effectively to the growing danger of nuclear and chemical terrorism. When I read accounts of our clandestine hobbling of the UN team investigating Saddam Hussein's secret development of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, I wonder, despite our anti-terrorist responses in Afganistan and the Sudan, whether our president has been so diverted by his personal dilemma from potentially unpopular actions in response to the growing tide of terrorism, that we, as a people and as a civilization, are placed in greater jeopardy than we otherwise would be. Such thoughts make me waver about the possible utility of the president's resigning his office for our greater good.
This said, I am not unmoved by Bill Clinton's recent statements of apology and contrition. Perhaps they are only politically motivated. We cannnot see into the president's soul. But, I will say this. Even as news from our doctor of a fatal illness promts a predictable pattern from disbelief to anger to depression to acceptance, the same kind of predictable pattern tends to follow when we are caught in a sin. First we deny it; then we get angry; then we express contrition; and, finally, when we get it, if we get it, we set forth on a course of repentance. President Clinton has followed this familiar pattern by the numbers. When first accused, he denied the charges. When finally caught, a month ago, he confessed but was angry. Over the past week he has begin the journey from contrition to repentance. I will be more assured of his sincerity, if he reaches out for counseling. If there is such a thing as sexual addiction, this man is surely its poster child. For his own sake, the sake of his family, and the sake of any other innocents or even groupies who cross his path in the future, he will be well served by a deep examination of his own impulses and demonstrated lack of personal self-control.
Which brings this home to us. Maybe some good will come from all of this. For instance, anyone who reads the Starr report and concludes that maybe an affair would be a cool thing to experiment with is almost certainly out of his or her mind. Looked at objectively, none of the illicit sex acts we are forced today to contemplate is in any way appealing. Primarily because they are soulless, cheap, and tawdry. With a love partner almost any sex act that gives both partners pleasure and elevates their closeness is absolutely fine. But put into this kind of a context, even a kiss reads like an obscenity. This said, if we handle the discussions rightly, I am comong to believe that even our children can benefit our shared reflections on what otherwise is such unwanted and unwelcome exposure to graphic sexual behavior. In addition to an appropriate measure of judgment, we should also take this opportunity to teach our children the potentially redemptive virtue of forgiveness. Forgiveness is not a free pass. They need to know that. But forgiveness is something all of us need, even something we will deserve if we change our behavior to merit it.
One more thing. They need to know, we need to know, that it is as easy to slip into a personal hell as it is hard to climb out of it. It is far easier to fall than it is to recover. If the road to Hell is a water slide, the hard trip back is a rock climb. But since we all fall, at one time or another, we have almost all experienced the transformative redemption of recovery.
I know this from personal experience. At the end of my marriage with Amy and before I married Carolyn six years ago, Carolyn and I engaged in an affair. We both regret that deeply. Not the end of our first marriages, not that we got married -- which is a daily blessing -- but the deception with which our marriages ended. We didn't lie publicly, but we lied to our spouses and we were caught. We now are grateful for this, because to get away with a lie is almost always more corrosive to the soul than to get caught in one. In part this is because we can only receive forgiveness if we ask for it. For Carolyn and me, the forgiveness of our children and of this congregation were godsends. But they would not have been deserved -- and I pray they are deserved -- if we hadn't suffered, and hadn't continued to this very day following the long hard road from contrition to repentance.
So I understand when the president speaks of sacrificing on the altar of a broken spirit. I understand when he says "I must have God's help to be the person that I want to be, a willingness to give the very forgiveness I seek, a renunciation of the pride and the anger which cloud judgment, lead people to excuse and compare and to blame and complain." These are beautiful words, but I also know that it is mortally dangerous to play games with these words. When we do, not our lives, not even our careers, but our very souls are in jeopardy.
One final word. Strangely, my own experience makes me both more compassionate and more judgmental toward the president than I might otherwise be. For his sake, the sake of his family, and our sake as well, I pray he is and continues to be sincere in his contrition. If he can -- and only he and God will know this -- move from contrition toward true repentance, not only will he be a far better man, but he may-- and for all of us I pray he will be-- a better president.
Amen. I love you. May God bless us all. Copyright AllSouls 1998.