“What
of Our Lives and Labors Lasts?”
Sermon
for the
Unitarian Universalist Church of
Winchendon,
Massachusetts
3
December 2006
The
Rev. Jennie Ann
Barrington
Vanity
of vanities, says the Teacher; vanity of vanities! All is Vanity.
What
do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun?
A
generation goes and a generation comes. But the earth remains
forever.
The
sun rises and the sun goes down, and hurries to the place where it
rises.
The
wind blows to the south, and goes around to the north.
Round
and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns.
The Morning Sermon:
When I first began working on this sermon, I thought I’d start it with the quote by Emerson, “Most people live lives of quiet desperation.” After looking through two of my Emerson books, I couldn’t find the quote. Turns out it isn’t by Emerson; it’s Henry David Thoreau. He wrote, in Walden, in 1854, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” If I, a scholar of Unitarian history, can’t remember correctly the differences between what Emerson wrote and Thoreau wrote, then what of our lives and labors will last?
I told a few friends that the topic of this sermon would be the question, “What of our lives and labors lasts?” I said I was researching what remained of some ancient civilizations that had been destroyed, like the Maya culture and the people of Pompeii. My friends all cried out, “Oh, no! Oh, God! When archeologists of the future excavate my garage, they’re going to find all this junk! Plastic, styrofoam, computer parts, discs of information that they won’t even have the ability to read!” Well, it isn’t my intention to make anyone feel bad about their accumulation of stuff. But since the earliest days of human civilization, people have wondered whether their lives and labors will make any meaningful difference. Wondering about that can cause real fear and emotional pain. A person can awaken tormented by the possibility that they will one day die feeling they have never really lived. Carl Jung wrote, in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, “About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be described as the general neurosis of our time.” Jung’s time was the 1920s and 1930s. [referenced in Harold Kushner’s, When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough] But we, in this new millenium, despair as to whether our lives will be more than futile. And so did the author of Ecclesiastes, in the third century B.C. The Hebrew for “vanity of vanities” can be translated as “vapor, breath, or meaninglessness.” The author of Ecclesiastes was “Qohelet,” which seems to have been a title rather than a name. It can be translated as “teacher” or “preacher” or “sage.” Qohelet noted the wise sayings of his time, particularly from the common people, and collected them in a cohesive form and distinct style. The book of Ecclesiastes is more a commentary on our lives on earth and the sense of futility in it than theology of God’s involvement in our lives. Since a teacher or preacher was one who brought people together, and the author of Ecclesiastes brought the people’s phrases together, perhaps his chief answer to the conundrum of the futility of our lives is that we should come together with others and make a stronger impact for a higher wisdom and a greater good for future generations than we are able to individually. We are each a part of several groups-- our birth families, or groups of friends and loved-ones which serve as alternative “families of choice,” congregations and non-profit organizations. These groups and the good we are part of through them will live on after we are gone. I can think of several examples of ways this occurs. The first that comes to mind is a woman I knew during my internship named Theresa Boettner. Most tragically, her teenage daughter had died in a schoolbus accident. How would she ever process such indescribable grief? It takes years, and it never completely goes away. But after some years, Ms. Boettner learned how to be a hospice volunteer. She had to travel some distance to do so, as there was no hospice organization in her area at that time. She then founded Pine Tree Hospice in central Maine. Through Pine Tree Hospice, she helps to train many hospice volunteers every year, who assist people who are terminally ill and their families in processing the complexities of the last stages of life in an open, honest, and compassionate way, rather than with secrets and shame. Most people who volunteer for Pine Tree Hospice and other hospice organizations do so because they experienced the death of a loved-one, and feel moved to help other people during their most difficult time. Here in our congregation, how might we make some meaningful lasting good from our grief at the loss of Kay Nicholson? At our recent Governing Board meeting, it was suggested that we do something special with some of the money that was donated in memory of Kay. That’s something we would all take some time to decide together. But perhaps we could establish an annual choral concert series in her honor and memory. And through the agency I work part-time for in Keene, called Residential Resources, I have been able to help people with disabilities be treated with dignity and respect as full members of the communities in which they live, whereas they had been previously been shut away in institutions, often treated inhumanely. Residential Resources may not seem to be doing anything monumental or grand. But it’s changing the quality of people’s lives, including mine, such that respect, empowerment, and compassion are the guiding principles for how we interact with one another. That quality of interaction, in time, permeates through hundreds of people and down through many generations. I think of Thomas a Kempis’s quote, “Would to God that we might spend a single day really well.” To me, that ultimately comes down to how we are with one another, not what honors and awards we receive, nor monuments we build.
In Ecclesiastes’ day, the people were wondering a lot about why, though they tried to live each day well, injustices still seemed to abound. You could call the main question in the book of Ecclesiastes, “Why do good things happen to bad people?” There’s even a verse which reads, “I hated all my toil in which I had toiled under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to the man who will come after me. And who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool? Yet he will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This is also meaningless.” [2:18,19] That concern would never have occurred to me-- I believe that we are supposed to leave things better for the generations that come after us-- We have certainly benefited from the work and sacrifices of people who came before us whose names we will never know. Yet this familiar verse from Ecclesiastes names injustices that all adults have witnessed: “Again I saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the people of skill, but time and chance happen to them all. For people do not know their time. Like fish which are taken in an evil net, and like birds which are caught in a snare, so the people are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them.” [9:11-12] Rabbi Harold Kushner surmises that the people of Ecclesiastes’ time, with their questions to God about injustice, were in something of an adolescent phase, aware of the contradictions of living as adults in an increasingly complex society, but still wanting God to take care of everything for them as if they were little children. In his book, When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough – A Search for a Life that Matters, Rabbi Kushner writes: “A religion that defines morality as obedience to its commands is appropriate to children and immature people, and may have been appropriate to humankind as a whole when civilization was immature. The Bible may speak in terms of ‘Thus says the Lord;’ it may promise rewards to the righteous and punishment to the wicked, because it was addressed to people in the earliest stages of their moral development. The Bible… may not be God’s final word not because God’s ability to express Himself was limited but because people’s ability to understand God was. A religion which persists in understanding ‘good’ to mean ‘unquestioningly obedient’ is a religion which would make perpetual children of us all. [pp. 127,8] …That wish for someone to step in and take over when life starts to get complicated is the child in us speaking from our adult bodies. When religion panders to that wish, when religious leaders keep us in childlike submission and dependence, telling us what to do and asking our obedience and gratitude in return, it does us a disservice. This is where the religion of Ecclesiastes’ day failed him. Authentic religion should not listen to us when we say, ‘This is too hard. Tell me what to do so that I don’t have to figure it out for myself.’ It should urge us to grow, to leave childish patterns behind even if we would rather remain spiritual children. Religion should even encourage us to challenge its own positions critically not out of adolescent impatience with limits but on the basis of an informed adult conscience. (‘Encourage’ is such a good word. Religion should give us courage to find our own way.)” [pp. 129, 130] Rabbi Kushner goes on to say that, “Ecclesiastes, at the end of his religious phase, may well have said to God, ‘what more do You want of me? I have groveled, I have offered You unquestioning obedience, I have done everything You asked me to. Why, then, have You withheld from me that sense of completeness, that promise of eternity that I was looking for?’ And God may have answered, ‘What pleasure do you think I take in your groveling? Do you really think I am so insecure that I need you to diminish yourself to make Me feel great? I wish people would stop quoting what I said to the human race in its infancy, and listen to what I am trying to tell them today. From children, and from spiritual children, I expect obedience. But from you, ‘unquestioning obedience’ is just another name for the failure to act like an adult and take responsibility for your own life. Do you want to feel complete? Do you want to feel as if you have finally learned how to live? Then stop saying, ‘I only did what You told me to do,’ and start saying, ‘You may or may not like it, but I have given it a lot of thought and this is what I feel is right.’… God is mature enough to derive pleasure from our growing up, not from our dependence on God.” [pp. 131, 132]
What does it mean to be spiritually grown up? Scholar James W. Fowler examined that concept in the late 1970s and published his groundbreaking work, Stages of Faith – The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning. After extensive research which included listening to children, adolescents, and adults talk about their faith, he defined six stages that a person’s faith passes on its way to greater maturity. Not everyone agrees with Fowler’s theories-- Certainly a person’s faith might have some characteristics of more than one stage at time. And not everyone’s faith development will progress linearly. But Fowler’s stages of faith can help us each understand our own faith development, as well as why some adults’ faiths differ so drastically. And Fowler’s theories align beautifully with Unitarian Universalism. In our congregations, we acknowledge that a person’s beliefs and values do change over time. We allow for that, and encourage open discussion about that. In our congregations, no one’s beliefs have to fit inside one tiny narrowly-defined box. In an interview in 1981 with Harold Straughn, James Fowler summarized his stages of faith as follows: “From birth to two years, we have what we call undifferentiated faith. It’s a time before language and conceptual thought are possible. The infant is forming a basic sense of trust, of being at home in the world. The infant is also forming pre-images of God or the Holy, and of the kind of world we live in. On this foundation of basic trust or mistrust is built all that comes later in terms of faith. Future religious experiences will either have to confirm or reground that basic trust. Then Stage One characterizes the child of two to six or seven years old. It’s a changing and growing and dynamic faith, marked by the rise of imagination… experiences and images that occur and take form before the child is six years old have powerful and long-lasting effects on the life of faith both positive and negative. The second stage we call mythic / literal faith [usually around seven to ten years old]. The gift of this stage is narrative. The child now can really form and re-tell powerful stories that grasp his or her experiences of meaning. There is a quality of literalness about this. The child is not yet ready to step outside the stories and reflect upon their meanings. The third stage has its rise beginning around age 12 or 13. It’s marked by the beginning of what Piaget calls formal operational thinking. That simple means that we now can think about our own thinking. It’s a time when a person is pulling together one’s valued images and values, and pulling together a sense of self or identity. This stage tends to compose its images of God as extensions of interpersonal relationships. God is often experienced as Friend, Companion, and Personal Reality in relationship to which I’m known deeply and valued. Stage Three can be an adult stage. We do find many persons, in churches and out, who are best described by faith that essentially took form when they were adolescents. Stage Four, for those who develop it, is a time in which the person is pushed out of, or steps out of, the circle of interpersonal relationships that have sustained his or her life to that point. Now comes the burden of reflecting upon the self as separate from the groups and the shared world that defines one’s life. Many people don’t complete this transition, but get caught between stages three and four. The transition to Stage Four can begin as early as 17, but it’s usually not completed until the mid-20s, and often doesn’t even begin until around 20 years old. Some people, however, don’t make the transition until their late 30s. It becomes a more traumatic thing, then, because they have already built an adult life. Their relationships have to be reworked in light of the stage change. Sometime around 35 or 40 or beyond, some people undergo a change to what we call conjunctive faith… There is a deepening readiness for a relationship to God that includes God’s mystery and unavailability and strangeness as well as God’s closeness and clarity. We are ready for a new kind of intimacy with persons and groups that are different from ourselves. Stage Five is a period when one is alive to paradox. One understands that truth has many dimensions which have to be held together in paradoxical tension. Some few persons we find move into Stage Six, which we call universalizing faith. These people experience a shift from the self as the center of experience. Now their center becomes a participation in God or Ultimate Reality. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the last years of his life,. Thomas Merton. Mother Teresa. Dag Hammarskjold and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. These are persons who in a sense have negated the self for the sake of affirming God.”
Ours is a Post Modern time in history when we can no longer expect that God will give us a clear answer that will solve all our problems. Ours is a Post Modern time in history when we must all seek answers to questions much more profound than, “Why does my neighbor or brother or sister have more power, belongings, or money than I do?” Ultimately, the answers our troubled world needs may come, not from politicians concerned for their legacy and their ego, but from ordinary people of mature faith, grounded in trust and goodness and hope for the world-- people who admit when they’ve been wrong, and know that we all have more growing and learning to do-- people who understand that real life is full of contradictions, and that insight can be found in all nationalities, ethnicities, races, and walks of life-- people who openly struggle with challenging dilemmas, who makes some mistakes, but learn from them. As the common people of Ecclesiastes’ day said:
“For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.”
Let it be and, Amen.