THE 10 COMMANDMENTS – OR LESSONS MY FATHER TAUGHT ME

Jean Wallace
July 1, 2001

If God had handed down the 10 Commandments to the Unitarians, instead of the Israelites, he would probably have called them the 10 Guidelines for Ethical Behavior, and even then, we would probably have appointed a committee to study them and see how many we agreed with. 

In dismissing the Bible as a history of the Jewish people, written in archaic language, Unitarians, are at risk of “throwing the baby out with the bath water” and not seeing the underlying wisdom recorded there.  In view of the fact the Bible has gone through at least three translations, a certain amount of scepticism is, I think, justified, but in between the violent stories of an avenging and wrathful god there are moral, ethical and spiritual ideas that are still relevant today. 

How do you feel about the 10 commandments?  My father, Frank Bonham, who is now 92 years old, is a firm believer in the 10 Commandments, even though he never went to church, except for weddings and funerals.  He is one of the few truly good men I have known.  He left school at 14 but continued to study politics, religion, ethics and morality all his life.  He didn’t feel it was necessary to attend church to be a good person.  “There are not many recorded instances of Jesus going to the Temple” he told me once, and added, with a twinkle in his eye “and one of the few times he did, he was so disgusted with what he found there, that he overturned the tables of the money changers and chased them out of the Temple”. 

Take the Commandment “Thou shalt not kill”.  Having lived through two world wars, my father was very fortunate in not  being called upon to fight in either of them, but he did endure the harrowing job of rescuing people from burning buildings and trying to stop the fires from spreading during the bombing of Coventry in 1941.  If he had been called, I feel sure he would either have volunteered to be ambulance driver, or some other non-combatant job.  Where would you draw the line? Would you fire a gun to protect America, making a stand at the U.S. coastline, or would you go abroad to protect “America’s interests”?  Would you draw the line at your State’s borders, or your city limits, or the fence around your own property?  

And what about abortion?  Is that killing?  And if so, what about pregnancies as a result of rape or incest.  Where would you draw the line?  For me abortion may sometimes  necessary and sometimes expedient, but I don’t believe it can ever be a good thing.  But I would certainly stand up for a woman’s right to choose.  I don’t want any government interfering with a woman’s right to decide for herself what is the right thing to do.  It should be between the woman, her doctor and her family.  My father often said, “You can’t legislate people into being good.”  For me, everything depends on her intentions, her motives.  If she has chosen abortion as a lazy option to birth control, my personal feeling is its not right.  But if the mother is a child herself there may be good enough reasons for an abortion. But I have no patience with the “Right to Lifers” .  I feel that unless one is prepared to adopt the unwanted baby, one is in no position to criticize another woman’s decision.  Also, it annoys me to see the media’s assumption that one must either be Pro Choice or a Right to Lifer and to be pro choice means a person is in favor of abortion on demand, which is certainly not the case with me.  For me, it all depends on the circumstances in each case. 

What about animals, birds, fish and insects?  Is it O.K. to kill them? As Unitarians, we profess respect for the web of life, of which we are a part, but do we in fact practice what we profess?  My father had reverence for all life.  He was an organic gardener, before the term was even coined.  He never used herbicides or pesticides on his pea patch, and other gardeners would look enviously at his peas and carrots and say, “I don’t know how you do it Frank, your stuff always looks better than mine”.  Do you, as Unitarians practice organic gardening, or do you rush for the chemicals because you “don’t have time to weed” or freak out at the sight of a bug on your fruit or vegetables not stopping to ask “is this a good bug or a bad bug?”  Can you tolerate mole hills in your lawn?  We know now that these chemicals get into underground water and eventually find their way into rivers and into the sea. How many fish, birds, frogs, are you going to be killing this week? 

Thou shalt not steal.  I discussed this with a friend of mine.  She told me about walking in the park with her father when he found a satchel full of banknotes lying under some trees.  The park was well-known as a favorite haunt of drug dealers. So her father took the money home, saying he hoped it would put a drug dealer out of business.   My friend thought this was perfectly O.K but I couldn’t help wonder what happened when the drug dealer went to collect the hidden money and found it gone.  Did he fly into a rage and go after the drug runner, who was supposed to leave him the money and “blow him away”?  If so, did taking the money that didn’t belong to him cause my friend’s father to be an accessory to a murder? 

Another friend was coveting her neighbor’s iris, particularly the white ones.  They were growing at the edge of the sidewalk and she vowed to go out one dark night and take a tuber.  After all, she said, iris have to be split up occasionally, I’d be doing them a favor.  I didn’t say anything but afterwards I thought I should have said, “what a good idea, I’ll come with you, I’d like some too, and I bet my friend Pat would love some for her new garden, and we could get one for the church garden as well, and I’d kind of keep this up, until she realized I was being sarcastic and then perhaps she’d see a lesson in it.  My father taught me this lesson many, many years ago.  My father was taking my sister and me for a walk in the park and he gave us each a candy from his pocket.  I unwrapped mine and let the wrapper fall to the ground.  He looked at me sternly and suggested I pick it up.  Rebellious as always, I asked why, its only a little bit of paper.  My father said, “but what if everyone did that?”  I looked around the park, and there were about 75 people or more using the park that day, and suddenly I saw a mountain, a blizzard of candy wrappers and I realized, no, it would not be O.K. if everyone did what I had just done.  With a new respect for my father’s wisdom, I bent down and picked up the offending paper.  I decided it was a good idea to always ask oneself, “What if everybody did this, what kind of a world would it be?”

  Fortunately for us, most people do not steal, kill, commit adultery or bear false witness, but what a sorry world it would be if we couldn’t trust anyone; if we had to continually be on guard not to set our purse down even for a second, even in church, or had to constantly be on guard against pick-pockets, bag snatchers and robbers.

  Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it Holy.  This Commandment is the one that is probably ignored the most in present day America. .  In view of the fact that the Calendar bears no resemblance to the Calendar of 2000 years ago, I don’t believe there is any particular merit in keeping Sabbath only on a Sunday, but I do believe the Scriptures were really advising us to take one day of rest each week, whether or not that would fall on a Sunday.  As a Realtor, Sunday was often my busiest day, but it was a pleasure and a relief to take off on a Thursday to go for a walk on the beach, or visit Mount Rainier or, in the winter, just curl up with a book.   One day a client remarked that it must be very hard to be always working at the weekend.  I replied that it wasn’t too bad, because I usually took my “Sabbath” on a Thursday.  “Oh” she said, “What church is that?  I never heard of a church that celebrataed its Sabbath on a Thursday”.  You see, she equated “Sabbath” with “going to church”—not with a day of rest.

The children in a Sunday school were asked to write down as many of the 10 Commandments as they could remember.  One child wrote, Thou Shalt not admit adultery!   A lot of adults (including a recent President) have felt the same way.  That its not really a sin if one keeps it a secret., if one is discreet.  There is a bird in Britain called a cuckoo that doesn’t build a nest of its own, but lays its eggs in the nests of other birds, and the step parents feed the baby cuckoo just as if it was there own. And that is where the word “cuckold” comes from.  But the Jewish leaders knew that man is not made the same way.  Most men need to know with reasonable certainty that the children in his “nest” are his before he will commit his money and his protection to them. So its easy to see why fidelity in marriage is important in the rearing of children.

 When I was a young girl and read in the Bible that the sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children, even unto the 3^rd and 4^th generations, my first reaction was “how unfair”.  But I see now that this is not the way God planned it, but merely a fact of life, that the bad things we do can affect not only our children, but even our children’s children, right down to the 3^rd and 4^th generations.  You can see it in the statistics— drug addicted mothers giving birth to drugged babies; children who are beaten growing into violent adults; fatherless children joining gangs to find the acceptance and company of a father figure they never had at home.

  My father had an 11^th Commandment:  “Leave the world a little better than you found it” and with his love of gardening, his 60 years of devotion to his wife and family and his great commonsense, he is certainly doing that.  But my father is no saint.  He does not suffer fools gladly, which made him hard to live with.  He can be grumpy and sarcastic, and throws up his hands in despair at “man’s inhumanity to man”.  He does not call himself a Christian, having often failed, as he freely admits, to uphold the greatest Commandment of all, “To love thy neighbor as thyself”.  He once remarked to me that Christianity had not been tried and found wanting, but had never been really tried, it being too hard for most people.

One little boy, asked by the nun at his Catholic School to write a note to God, wrote, “It must be very hard to love everybody.  There are only four people in our family and I am finding it hard to love all of them.

  In conclusion, Kurt Vonnegut, in his commencement address at M.I.T. said “ Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it.  Advice is a form of nostalgia.  Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past out of the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than its worth”.