I recently received a letter from an inmate at one of our correctional facilities asking if I woul d write a character reference for him to the Parole Board. What do I say for someone with whom I have had but one previous contact, and that by letter? What do they look for in such a letter and how would I know it? I haven't figured that out yet, but it got me thinking -- what's a character reference anyway? What is character? What's the difference between character and personality? What is good character? Who decides?

I looked up character in the dictionary and found many descriptions. Character is the aggregate of features and traits that form the individual nature of some person or thing. Personality is the visible aspects of one's character; that which other people see. Personality, like character, is described as the features and traits that make up a person. But personality and character are not the same. The word character denotes moral or ethical qualities: trustworthiness, courage, integrity, kindness, honesty, generosity. To call someone a person of character usually means something good. It denotes status or capacity. On the other hand, when the word is used with reference to personality it could mean odd, eccentric, or unusual. We have described ourselves as a cong regation of "characters." When the word is used with reference to behavior it could mean something along the lines of a suspicious character. At the same time, a character is: a person represented in a drama, story, etc.; a part or role, as in a play or film; a symbol as used in a writing system, as a letter of the alphabet. In genetics it refers to any trait, function, structure, or substance of an organism resulting from the effect of one or more genes as modified by the environment. For a computer, character means any symbol, as a number, letter, punctuation mark, etc., that represents data and that, when encoded, is usable by a machine.

Character is a big word. It comes from the Greek character, which means a stamp or impress, as on a coin. Character, then, is what is impressed or stamped upon us -- by what? By our nature, our nurture, our history, our experience, the wider culture and so forth. Character, in its many guises, holds the meaning of all that has been impressed upon it. Thus the first definition I shared, character as the aggregate of features and traits that form the individual nature of some person or thing, lies close to the Greek etymology of the word. While at its root character refers to who we are, all of who we are, all that has been engraved upon us by life, character also refers to what we make of that in ethical terms.

Although the world impresses itself upon us, our characters need not be passively formed. I believe that we can shape and mold our characters throughout our lives by the choices we make, by the ethical values we do or do not act upon, by taking responsibility for the consequences of our choices. We can keep learning, keep growing. As long as we live, our experiences keep imprinting themselves upon us, changing us by small or large amounts. What do we do with those impressions? How do we use them in the service of our deeply held values? I think that working with our character, tending to it, is life work. It's work we do as individual Unitarian Universalists and as a UU community.

Can we take on such a challenge? Many of us would like to think that the imprint has been made and we, like newly minted coins, simply make our way through the vending machines of life until, worn out, they take us out of circulation. We meet success and failure, satisfaction and disappointment. We might say, in the face of challenges, I'm too old to change. I'm tired. I'm too set in my ways. I know someone who, at 50, thinks of herself as concentrated, frozen orange juice. Her character has been dehydrated and whoever she is has concentrated, thickened, and settled. I think she likes it that way. Me, I want to be fresh squeezed. I want to keep on strengthening the helpful, creative, loving parts of myself, and I want to take some of the edge off the parts that do harm to myself and others. I want to keep experiencing life as new. I want to keep my sense of wonder and awe. It means I have to keep paying attention. I have to welcome new qualities and changes to old qualities within the aggregate of features and traits that make up me. I have to allow myself to be continually chiseled, continually stamped by my experiences and learn to use them in the service of my beliefs and values.

About a week ago I returned from a retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen Master whose community I am a part of. Each day he gave a dharma talk, (one can think of the dharma as the way of life, the teachings of the Buddha, the path), and by the third day I realized that he was giving us a key to the development of character. He offered us the practice of openness and he showed us the many forms which openness can take. How does a person remain continually impressed, stamped and chiseled by life? How does one integrate those stampings to enable one's character to grow and develop and deepen in congruence with one's ethics? Through a practice of openness.

One of the tenets of openness practice is the recognition, the acceptance, the respect for, and the celebration of difference. Out of this arises empathy and from empathy arises connection. To honor and embrace difference is, in itself, an ethical choice. A choice that leads to connection, greater understanding and peace. We know this. Yet do we really know how closed we can be? Closed in our preferences, closed in our tastes, c losed in our opinions, closed in our beliefs. Meals on retreat occur in silence. Nine hundred people eat in silence together. It's a startlingly isolating yet intimate event. I mean, you sit across from a stranger. Do you look him in the eye if you can't say anything to him? Do you just lower your head, mindful of your food and not of the other people at the table? Do you ignore her when she gets up to leave? Eating in silence with strangers gets complicated. But I digress.

One evening at dinner a young man sat opposite me. We smiled. Another young man joined us at the table and he sat next to me. We smiled. I went back to eating. But in the course of chewing I glanced over at his plate. I almost gasped out loud. Piled high on top of his pasta were black olives, lots and lots of black olives. Piled high on top of his veggie burger was green relish. Lots and lots of green relish. I hate relish. I hate veggie burgers. I hate olives. This guy was eating food that I wouldn't touch, given the choice. It was what I call over my dead body food. Yet here we sat, sharing this silent meal.

Where does openness practice fit in? As I watched him eat laughter rose up in me. (Silent laughter of course.) I felt so happy for the differences between us. That he likes olives and I do not. When it comes to relish and pasta with olives, my food preferences are strong, and probably closed. But my appreciation of the folks who enjoy relish and pasta with olives opened up with a joyful amusement at my own locked up tastes. And in the appreciation of those differences, I became more open. Rather than simply dismissing this food as unappetizing, I found myself enjoying his enjoyment of it. I knew, in some strange way, the deliciousness of olives and relish. Greater empathy. More connection. A small thing, perhaps, but in the letting go of some of my judgment on these lesser matters, I prepare myself for openness to much larger differences between people.

Song -- Sing Out Praises for the Journey

What are some of your ethical values? Working with the imprints that life has stamped on me, I know my experiences have molded me. I know too that I can mold myself so that my character reflects those values I hold as important. Among them are respect for all beings and for the planet, courage, honesty, kindness, curiosity, trustworthiness, generosity, humor, patience, flexibility, to name20a few. In the process of ever-developing and growing character, the practice of openness plays a key role.

There are many ways in which we close our minds and hearts and our character can suffer for it because we make different choices when we're closed than we make when we're open. We can dismiss, disrespect, even do violence to the ideas, customs, and values of others because they differ from our own, because we think we already know the truth, know the answers, know the rights and wrongs, know the story, been there and done that. Because we're smarter, stronger, richer, more beautiful, whatever. This is, as Zen Buddhists say, full tea cup mind. A samurai comes to the teacher and asks to become his pupil. The teacher pours him a cup of tea and keeps pouring although the tea runs over the cup and onto the samurai. When the samurai jumps up and tells the teacher he's a fool, the teacher asks the samurai how he can expect to learn anything when his mind is, like his tea cup, already so full that no more can get into it.

If we choose to wall our hearts off from one another, to behave as if there were no interconnections, we can increase our suffering. We put up barriers around us to avoid any more pain and then we don't know how to dismantle them. We don't commit. We don't try because we don't want to embarrass ourselves, we don't want to meet failure again. We want to be safe from our fear, guilt, regret. We close ourselves.

Another Zen story: A fire began in the home of a man and his young son. The man got out but did not see his son in the confusion of the fire. He fell into deep grief. He secluded himself from the world, closed his business and went off by himself. Some time later a boy knocked upon his door. "Go away" called the man. "Father, it's me, your son. Since the fire I have been trying to find you." "Go away," said the man. "My son was killed in the fire. Do not mock me." And he would not admit the boy into his new home. Sadly the boy, his son, left. They never saw each other again. Full tea cup heart.

Tending our characters is about making choices about how we will be with other people, how we will be in community, and as citizens of the world. It is about making choices to use our experiences in ways congruent with our ethics. We might not have control over what we feel, but we always have a choice about how we express our feelings. Closing our hearts and minds, behaving in ways that show disrespect, disregard for the basic needs of others, cruelty, violence, destruction as a means of expressing anger, fear, confusion, frustration, pain are choices we make, even if they do not always seem like choices. Thich Nhat Hanh suggests that many of these choices come from misperceptions and misunderstandings and that a practice of openness can lead us to different, more peaceful and compassionate choices. When our minds and hearts are full tea cups, we assume that we know what we may or may not actually know and we make judgements and draw conclusions and take actions based upon what we think we know. What would happen if, before we criticized or judged or declared war, we asked ourselves "Are you sure?" We assume we know what another person is thinking, or what he/she intended, what he/she meant and we base our anger, or our hurt feelings upon that assumption. What would happen if, before we expressed anger or hurt, we asked the other person what he/she was trying to say or do? How often have we made critical judgements about one another before we heard the other's point of view? How often have our own words been misunderstood, giving rise to all sorts of confusion and suffering? Asking "Are you sure?" keeps our minds and hearts at least partially open and keeps the lines of connection functioning. Asking "Are you sure?" gives us different choices.

Another way we close minds and hearts is by pidgeon-holing ourselves and other people, not allowing ourselves and others to change. We can put our families, our partners, even our old friends into a box. If our sister was very sarcastic when we were growing up, we might find that we consider her a sarcastic adult, whether or not she still practices sarcasm. We expect it from her. The choices we make regarding how we interact with her are based upon our expectation. We do not see her as she is now and still see her as she was then. We treat our forty year old son as if he were still a child. We treat our parents as if they still were the flashpoint of our teenaged rebellion. People can change; people can grow. If we treat each other according to what we thought we knew of each other however long ago, we have closed ourselves off from connecting with each other as we are now.

We do the same thing to ourselves. All my life I insisted that I hated peanut butter. Why? Because someone forced me to eat a peanut butter sandwich as a child and the stuff glued my mouth shut and I broke out in hives. Moral -- I resided in the don't like peanut butter box. Our retreat took place at Stonehill College, south of Boston. Sodexo, a large food service corporation, provides the food for the college. For our retreat, at our request, they served only vegan food. Let me tell you, corporate food service is not yet ready for vegan. It was pretty bad, though you have to give them a lot of credit for trying. I was desperate for protein. Beside the bread one day I spied a bowl of, yes, peanut butter. It looked fresh. I was desperate. From the very first bite I discovered that I love peanut butter! Who knew? All my life, because of one bad experience, I had chosen to cut myself off from peanut butter. It took me decades to learn that I had changed. Maybe one day soon I will muster the courage to see if I still dislike olives and relish as much as I think I do. We can surprise ourselves sometimes by trying something new. We can liberate ourselves sometimes by trying something old.

The practice of openness provides us a key for living in a way that allows us to continuously and intentionally develop our characters. As a gardener tends a garden, watering and fertilizing what he/she wants to grow, what is healthy, what is beautiful, what works in the soil and the climate;pulling weeds that would choke growth, removing bugs that would harm the plants, so are we the ones who tend to our characters. The aggregate of the features and traits that form our individual natures, the impressions and engravings which experience etches upon us, continually change us, even as we remain who we are. We develop our character through the choices we make with the materials we have. We can mold and shape what is inscribed upon us so that our character reflects our deepest values. A practice of openness will help us in this. A commitment to practice openness is, in itself, an ethical act. Openness to differences so that we do not merely tolerate them, but actually celebrate them, growing our own empathy. Openness to questioning our own thoughts, ideas, opinions. Listening to others, learning from others, understanding other points of view. Openness to forging ties with others, to building friendships, to caring, even to love. Openness in our ability to see ourselves and other people as they are now rather than as they were then. Openness in our trust that people can change and grow, even you and I. Lao Tzu said "When I let go of who I am I become what I might be."

Wherever our paths take us, may we remain mindful of living our ethical values. May we learn to open those closed pockets of our hearts and minds so that our characters embody all the wisdom, courage and strength that life has to offer. May it be so.

Song #108 My Life Flows On

Closing words:  (anonymous?) 
"Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.