Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Monday, September 18, 2006
"Securing Success" by Mark Harris - September 24, 2006
“Securing Success” - Mark W. Harris
First Parish of Watertown - September 24, 2006
Opening Words - from Emily Dickinson
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
Not one of all the purple host
Who took the flag to-day
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of victory,
As he, defeated, dying,
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Break, agonized and clear.
Sermon
What do we mean by success? I hear the term a lot these days as part of school vernacular. We want your child to achieve success. I have never quite understood what they mean. I expect many of us understood it as good grades, acceptance at a good school, and then a career that leads to recognition by peers and financial reward. We usually imagine that all the children in a Unitarian Universalist Sunday School will be smart, good looking, high achieving wonders, mirrors of Garrison Kellior’s ideal. This summer in the conference I led on Unitarian Universalists and Class, I heard from many of my participants that it was difficult to be part of a UU congregation and be perceived as or feel like a failure. Do the highly educated, economically secure majority make you feel alone and miserable if you do not meet these exacting standards of success? Do you feel safe enough and affirmed enough to share your pain with others if you fail, or if your child fails? Well, we hope so, but it is difficult when achieving success in life is fraught with such competition and the drive for economic success. The genesis for this sermon began with a conversation with Andrea around MCAS scores. We heard that our town was not achieving like the other towns around us, and the comparison seemed to be how we fared in the context of their high scoring achievement, and not in terms of a bar for everyone that might indicate success, or even that there might be different kinds of measures of success.
The local professional baseball team measures its degree of success based on whether they make the playoffs or not. This year they are failures, made more so by the success of the early months contrasted with their dive into oblivion. We often think that spending money on all the best players will result in success. Yet the seemingly perfect roster does not necessarily produce a winner on the field. There is a good baseball metaphor for this in the context of the conditions under which we play the game. The average person might think the ideal day for a ball game is one of those beautiful sunny, blue skies days, where there is not a cloud in the sky. Yet for a ball player a cloudless blue sky can be a disaster for trying to catch a ball. This is not due to the sun in your eyes, but rather that a ball gets lost more easily in that perfect sky. There is no depth, no contrast. The sky metaphor extends to painting exhibits as well. Last week I spoke of Americans trying to achieve artistic success in Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Their worked was judged by juries in order to be exhibited at shows. The worst fate was to be rejected outright, but nearly as bad was to have your painted “skyed” in a show. That is to say that the work of art is hung so high on the wall that no one can see it. So hanging high or a cloudless day can be signs of failure in the worlds of baseball and art.
The cloudless day as the surest way to miss a high fly ball echoes the theme of Emily Dickinson’s opening words. Success or the longing for success is sweeter for those who never seem to succeed or are never allowed to. Think of how it was for the first women preachers who were told time and again - you do not belong in the pulpit, you do not have the voice, you do not have the intelligence. Those who have all the privileges expect to be given more, and that helps build up their expectations and confidence that to those who have more will be given, and to those who have not - no education, wrong sex, wrong color, or a school child, with no parent who speaks up for them; all will fail. But we often help those who have the loudest voice, or the constant presence, not those who do not have the advocates or resources. Of course it was Jesus who observed this unfortunate tendency of society, and became an advocate for those who society shunned as less than conventional successes.
Yes, Jesus was saying those who have more will get more, but there is a flip side to this that is embodied in the cloudless blue sky. If you are so perfect and lovely, you are going to drop the ball. George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “there are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.” This tends to temper our desires to have more and be more than our neighbors. In fact we understand life and its trials, and often learn more from it through our failures than our successes. In a recent Globe column Donald Murray wrote, that too often in school we give the impression that life should be a series of successes, as if we were all monkeys always swinging easily from tree to tree, when in life we often fall and have to find a way to get up the tree again.” Murray writes that it served him better in school to forget the past and start anew. Critically he said that in a new school he was able to work on the task at hand building on the strengths he had within rather than the weaknesses others saw in him. Too often those weakness become the stigmata we feel we carry around - troublemaker, talks too much, can’t spell. Every student wants to make it up the tree, but we often fail to discover what will help them begin to climb, or give them the help they need. I recently heard that 85% of the students in our middle school need remedial reading help. Maybe this is a little late to be offering reading assistance to those who need it. Why do administrators continue to refuse to teach phonics? Here is an instance where seeing and admitting a failure might help system administrators move on to teach in a new and different and perhaps more successful way. We learn from our failures, but first we must recognize them. Igor Stravinsky understood this when he wrote, “I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions not my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.
People are not going to learn anything if they operate under the assumption that they already know it all. Sometimes student ministers (this will sound like a warning to Mark) assume that they know everything about ministry because they have vast experience as lay leaders. So they operate in a church like I have nothing to teach them, and are just jumping through the hoops in order to be certified. They may find that their wisdom from their particular lay setting has no relation to a different situation where they are the minister of the congregation rather than an active member. Student ministers would be better off failing than making a situation into something it is not. What if we failed to correct Mark last week after he tried to sit us down following the first hymn?. Now he could have beat himself up, but more important he learned how we do it, and next time, God willing, he will do it the right way. We hope. But he will learn more about leading worship, preaching, teaching and ministry in general if he learns from his mistakes, and we give him some honest feedback rather than just tell him how wonderful he is. Once in a while that might be good. But you will ruin him if you do it all the time.
One of the problems with the pressure to succeed in our world is that the fear of failure can lead to severe emotional distress. This fear of performing, that was discussed in the article on Stage fright, is powerful among those of us who do public speaking for a living. When I was a student I was plagued by dreams of terrible things occurring during the services I conducted - words that made no sense juxtaposed with flying objects and incessant offerings. No, I am not talking about a typical First Parish worship service. I was scared to go before those people - What if I sounded and looked stupid? What if my clothes fell off? What if they laughed at me? I was exposed, as the article says, to my own personal terror and shame. This is a trial and a challenge to any public performer. We may feel like we are being judged or evaluated constantly, and could always be shouted down for the things we say or do. In his fear, one of my predecessors in Palmer used to vomit before every service. I hope that relieved his anxiety. Sometimes we preachers may feel like saying, I’ll show them how talented or smart I am. I find the famous actor Laurence Olivier’s response enlightening. Before every show, he stood behind the curtain muttering at the audience, “you bastards.” Perhaps he sought the courage to say you will not get to me with your criticism of my failings. But he was also gearing up his inner strength to show them all of his great talent. I will show you.
We might ask what makes for success in preaching? Unlike the stage, preaching is dependent upon a relationship built upon time and trust. Usually a minister and congregation know one another, often over a period of some years. This is different than proving your talent to an audience. Young actors will learn from their mistakes, but this is usually in many apprentice appearances. Here there is an element of trust that if you make a mistake it will be all right. You will be forgiven. Often this trusts allows a preacher to say something that he/she might not otherwise for fear of condemnation. Obviously we must use some discretion, but there is also a level of support that exists. So why the fright or worse, the vomiting? There is still that pressure to perform, that drive for success that makes us anxious. We all wonder , will I be good enough? Will they continue to accept me, to respond to me? And so even if stage fright gets better over time, the exposure of all these ideas and feelings to a group is anxiety producing. It helps to see certain smiling faces out there who encourage simply by their presence.
Ultimately, we must face the challenge. Each of us goes through this in whatever test or job demand is before us. There is pressure on each of us in this situation. The pressure to be a success in our chosen field or in a given job, or even on a certain Sunday will often make us crazy literally. My best friend in seminary decided to leave the ministry because he felt he could not be good enough on Sunday morning week after week after week. The pressure to produce a sermon was too much. He had the fright before he even got to the stage. He worked for Target Corporation for 25 years in personnel. Now he works for the UUA, and is back in fellowship as a minister, BUT, as an administrator he does not have to preach each week.
When it comes to reflecting upon securing success, I think first of my father. He came from a family that had been successful in business at one time, but then was wiped out by the depression. That failure led to further problems, because the worse things became, the more his father drank. My father was determined to make a success of himself, and give his family all the benefits of that economic boon. But the pressure he put on himself, and the effort he made eventually led to some kind of emotional breakdown, although the details are shrouded in family mystery. From the period between 1946 and 1966 he worked constantly courting customers and driving trucks. By the time I was 15 years old, what had been a constant struggle to keep the business above water became a booming success. This success was so evident that he was able to spend less time literally working, and more time enjoying those things in life that he loved - gardening, tennis and fishing. We used to laugh that he was semiretired in his later working years. All he did was go on a Saturday collection route, and pick up the money that was owed him.
Somehow he was able to feel secure enough in himself that he did not have to continually drive himself to further successes. He no longer had to work, at least in the self-evident way of constant labor that had been true before. Who knows what kind of business contacts he was cultivating? This reminds me of the jokes people sometimes make about ministers. What an easy job. You only have to work an hour a week. This view emphasizes the most public part of the job and ignores everything else. It is hard to tell what work is sometimes. It often feels like everything I see and do and read is sermon fodder. So even if you come into the office, and I seem to be staring off into space, I am not loafing, but contemplating the cares of all of you and the world. Yet we have often had a hard time not working in this country. Benjamin Franklin gave us the archetype of the workaholic, and we know from statistics that that kind of obsession with work is worse than ever. We have disdain for the image of the idler in America, which argues that the highest calling is to do as little as possible. Yet most of us feel immense guilt if we are sitting around. Few of us can be the slacker like Melville’s famous character Bartleby the Scrivener, a copyist in a law office, who when he is invited to get to work says, “I would prefer not to.” Few of us are able to define success as doing the least possible.
This past June our former intern minister found himself disappointed with some of his colleagues that he met at General Assembly. The reason was that rather than getting to know each other, or finding ways to discuss support or collegiality in ministry, he said the ministers he met were obsessed with numbers and size, women as well as men. This gets at the heart of our understanding of success. We fear we have not achieved success unless we are bigger and better than the next person. I can then put you down for not being my equal. While size may impress some people, it certainly does not equate necessarily with quality of relationships.
Henry David Thoreau is an interesting example of one of our forebears who struggled with vocation. How did he define success? Prior to being a writer, he was a pencil maker, the family business, and then a teacher. He had innovative ideas about teaching that eventually led to his demise. He was fired because he refused to practice corporal punishment. As a teacher, he certainly did not define his success ratio by how well his students scored on some test. Thoreau had the crazy idea of making education a pleasant thing for both the teacher and the student. He believed a teacher would be most helpful to the student, if they were learning together, that there might be some kind of relationship where they were fellow students together. Teaching could stand some of this enthusiasm and relationship with students.
Like the critics of his own day, I am afraid most of us would not accept Thoreau’s idea of success. After one of his lectures, a reviewer commented, “It is rather curious to see a gentleman of cultivated intellect retiring from the world, dividing his time betwixt literary labors and cooking, hunting and fishing.” The world couldn’t stand that success for him, especially in the wake of his “experiment” at Walden Pond. This became a deep exploration of the world and all its knowledge and mysteries. He wrote, “The fact is, Man need not live by the sweat of his brow—unless he sweats easier than I do—he needs so little.” Living the simple life became Thoreau’s success. While few of us might want to emulate him, and give up our comforts, we still feel the urge to move our life ever so slightly in the direction of our dreams of finding success in what we love and in simpler living, as my father did with his garden and his fishing. He discovered, I think that he had enough of the world’s success, enough struggle, and then needed to find pleasure, find joy in what he loved. He was lucky. Few of us feel as though we can stop working.
Yet I have found that success for me is carving out time for those things I love - teaching and discovering historical paths. I am lucky enough to make them part of my job. What is true about this is that the greatest love is in working with others, and seeing them get excited about what I get excited about. The problem with our usual understanding of securing success is that it centers upon putting someone else down or getting what fills my needs or my children’s needs, and ignores the needs of others and of systems. We won’t be able to help our children find true success if we only project our definition of it upon them. Success must be not a measure of comparison, but a measure of the depth of relationship by listening and observing rather than demanding they fit our definition of success, like girls I have known who did not fit the parental prescription for beauty. When I was young my father used to retell the story of Alexander the Great, who conquered the world, and then wept because there were no more worlds to conquer. When you measure success by size and conquering others, then it is difficult to admit failure, as we see with our President, and when we only seek to be better than all the rest, as the commercial says, you end up weeping because there is only success, but no meaning to it, except more success.
This is why when we think about teaching our children to achieve success in the world, it is more than the test or the grade. You see this in the lovely film “Akeelah and the Bee” when Akeelah purposefully misspells a words in order to maintain the relationship rather than beat the opponent. What do you sacrifice in the path to success? I know for myself I find success mostly not with the size of my church, but rather with when people are pleased with what I do, or what we accomplish together, but it has taken me a long time to realize this. Does someone recognize my work as good? My colleague at First Church Boston made me feel affirmed this week, not by saying how much larger and more important his church is than mine, but by telling me he wished I wrote more for public consumption, because everything I write is good. He made me feel like what I do is successful. What is success for children? Often we get caught up in fighting to give them everything they need, but we lose track of the larger picture of nurturing emotional and spiritual needs. How do they respond to others, rather than how do they dominate or be better than others?
Levi had a birthday party on Friday with some friends of his from Watertown. One of these enterprising young boys had a lawn mowing business, and had bought his own weed whacker. I think I am going to hire him for First Parish. He had brought his own money to the party, and purchased his own game room tokens. At the end of the party he had many tokens left. We talked about saving them or giving them to other kids at the party, but he said, no, I just want to give them to somebody, and so he just went up to a stranger in the game room, and handed him a cup of tokens. It was moving to see his indiscriminate kindness. I think with our drive for success, sometimes we forget that success can be measured in whether our kids are nice and not mean, whether they are giving, and not selfish, whether they listen to others. Success is found in the quality of our relationships. Thoreau realized this when he emulated native culture that there is a cycle to gift giving. The fish we take from the river is not merely consumed, but we give back to the river, or to others what we have been given, and we continue the cycle. In our drive for success we have often failed to keep a cycle of giving going. It is simple to just take, but real success is founded when we teach our children that you don’t just take what you can get for your own success or edification, but rather that what you take is a gift from someone or from nature, and it is up to you, to have real success, to give it back, and keep the spirit alive of gratitude, of relationship, of continuity, and of blessings for a life that has been given by those who came before.
Closing Words - from Henry David Thoreau
I have learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.
First Parish of Watertown - September 24, 2006
Opening Words - from Emily Dickinson
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
Not one of all the purple host
Who took the flag to-day
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of victory,
As he, defeated, dying,
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Break, agonized and clear.
Sermon
What do we mean by success? I hear the term a lot these days as part of school vernacular. We want your child to achieve success. I have never quite understood what they mean. I expect many of us understood it as good grades, acceptance at a good school, and then a career that leads to recognition by peers and financial reward. We usually imagine that all the children in a Unitarian Universalist Sunday School will be smart, good looking, high achieving wonders, mirrors of Garrison Kellior’s ideal. This summer in the conference I led on Unitarian Universalists and Class, I heard from many of my participants that it was difficult to be part of a UU congregation and be perceived as or feel like a failure. Do the highly educated, economically secure majority make you feel alone and miserable if you do not meet these exacting standards of success? Do you feel safe enough and affirmed enough to share your pain with others if you fail, or if your child fails? Well, we hope so, but it is difficult when achieving success in life is fraught with such competition and the drive for economic success. The genesis for this sermon began with a conversation with Andrea around MCAS scores. We heard that our town was not achieving like the other towns around us, and the comparison seemed to be how we fared in the context of their high scoring achievement, and not in terms of a bar for everyone that might indicate success, or even that there might be different kinds of measures of success.
The local professional baseball team measures its degree of success based on whether they make the playoffs or not. This year they are failures, made more so by the success of the early months contrasted with their dive into oblivion. We often think that spending money on all the best players will result in success. Yet the seemingly perfect roster does not necessarily produce a winner on the field. There is a good baseball metaphor for this in the context of the conditions under which we play the game. The average person might think the ideal day for a ball game is one of those beautiful sunny, blue skies days, where there is not a cloud in the sky. Yet for a ball player a cloudless blue sky can be a disaster for trying to catch a ball. This is not due to the sun in your eyes, but rather that a ball gets lost more easily in that perfect sky. There is no depth, no contrast. The sky metaphor extends to painting exhibits as well. Last week I spoke of Americans trying to achieve artistic success in Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Their worked was judged by juries in order to be exhibited at shows. The worst fate was to be rejected outright, but nearly as bad was to have your painted “skyed” in a show. That is to say that the work of art is hung so high on the wall that no one can see it. So hanging high or a cloudless day can be signs of failure in the worlds of baseball and art.
The cloudless day as the surest way to miss a high fly ball echoes the theme of Emily Dickinson’s opening words. Success or the longing for success is sweeter for those who never seem to succeed or are never allowed to. Think of how it was for the first women preachers who were told time and again - you do not belong in the pulpit, you do not have the voice, you do not have the intelligence. Those who have all the privileges expect to be given more, and that helps build up their expectations and confidence that to those who have more will be given, and to those who have not - no education, wrong sex, wrong color, or a school child, with no parent who speaks up for them; all will fail. But we often help those who have the loudest voice, or the constant presence, not those who do not have the advocates or resources. Of course it was Jesus who observed this unfortunate tendency of society, and became an advocate for those who society shunned as less than conventional successes.
Yes, Jesus was saying those who have more will get more, but there is a flip side to this that is embodied in the cloudless blue sky. If you are so perfect and lovely, you are going to drop the ball. George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “there are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.” This tends to temper our desires to have more and be more than our neighbors. In fact we understand life and its trials, and often learn more from it through our failures than our successes. In a recent Globe column Donald Murray wrote, that too often in school we give the impression that life should be a series of successes, as if we were all monkeys always swinging easily from tree to tree, when in life we often fall and have to find a way to get up the tree again.” Murray writes that it served him better in school to forget the past and start anew. Critically he said that in a new school he was able to work on the task at hand building on the strengths he had within rather than the weaknesses others saw in him. Too often those weakness become the stigmata we feel we carry around - troublemaker, talks too much, can’t spell. Every student wants to make it up the tree, but we often fail to discover what will help them begin to climb, or give them the help they need. I recently heard that 85% of the students in our middle school need remedial reading help. Maybe this is a little late to be offering reading assistance to those who need it. Why do administrators continue to refuse to teach phonics? Here is an instance where seeing and admitting a failure might help system administrators move on to teach in a new and different and perhaps more successful way. We learn from our failures, but first we must recognize them. Igor Stravinsky understood this when he wrote, “I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions not my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.
People are not going to learn anything if they operate under the assumption that they already know it all. Sometimes student ministers (this will sound like a warning to Mark) assume that they know everything about ministry because they have vast experience as lay leaders. So they operate in a church like I have nothing to teach them, and are just jumping through the hoops in order to be certified. They may find that their wisdom from their particular lay setting has no relation to a different situation where they are the minister of the congregation rather than an active member. Student ministers would be better off failing than making a situation into something it is not. What if we failed to correct Mark last week after he tried to sit us down following the first hymn?. Now he could have beat himself up, but more important he learned how we do it, and next time, God willing, he will do it the right way. We hope. But he will learn more about leading worship, preaching, teaching and ministry in general if he learns from his mistakes, and we give him some honest feedback rather than just tell him how wonderful he is. Once in a while that might be good. But you will ruin him if you do it all the time.
One of the problems with the pressure to succeed in our world is that the fear of failure can lead to severe emotional distress. This fear of performing, that was discussed in the article on Stage fright, is powerful among those of us who do public speaking for a living. When I was a student I was plagued by dreams of terrible things occurring during the services I conducted - words that made no sense juxtaposed with flying objects and incessant offerings. No, I am not talking about a typical First Parish worship service. I was scared to go before those people - What if I sounded and looked stupid? What if my clothes fell off? What if they laughed at me? I was exposed, as the article says, to my own personal terror and shame. This is a trial and a challenge to any public performer. We may feel like we are being judged or evaluated constantly, and could always be shouted down for the things we say or do. In his fear, one of my predecessors in Palmer used to vomit before every service. I hope that relieved his anxiety. Sometimes we preachers may feel like saying, I’ll show them how talented or smart I am. I find the famous actor Laurence Olivier’s response enlightening. Before every show, he stood behind the curtain muttering at the audience, “you bastards.” Perhaps he sought the courage to say you will not get to me with your criticism of my failings. But he was also gearing up his inner strength to show them all of his great talent. I will show you.
We might ask what makes for success in preaching? Unlike the stage, preaching is dependent upon a relationship built upon time and trust. Usually a minister and congregation know one another, often over a period of some years. This is different than proving your talent to an audience. Young actors will learn from their mistakes, but this is usually in many apprentice appearances. Here there is an element of trust that if you make a mistake it will be all right. You will be forgiven. Often this trusts allows a preacher to say something that he/she might not otherwise for fear of condemnation. Obviously we must use some discretion, but there is also a level of support that exists. So why the fright or worse, the vomiting? There is still that pressure to perform, that drive for success that makes us anxious. We all wonder , will I be good enough? Will they continue to accept me, to respond to me? And so even if stage fright gets better over time, the exposure of all these ideas and feelings to a group is anxiety producing. It helps to see certain smiling faces out there who encourage simply by their presence.
Ultimately, we must face the challenge. Each of us goes through this in whatever test or job demand is before us. There is pressure on each of us in this situation. The pressure to be a success in our chosen field or in a given job, or even on a certain Sunday will often make us crazy literally. My best friend in seminary decided to leave the ministry because he felt he could not be good enough on Sunday morning week after week after week. The pressure to produce a sermon was too much. He had the fright before he even got to the stage. He worked for Target Corporation for 25 years in personnel. Now he works for the UUA, and is back in fellowship as a minister, BUT, as an administrator he does not have to preach each week.
When it comes to reflecting upon securing success, I think first of my father. He came from a family that had been successful in business at one time, but then was wiped out by the depression. That failure led to further problems, because the worse things became, the more his father drank. My father was determined to make a success of himself, and give his family all the benefits of that economic boon. But the pressure he put on himself, and the effort he made eventually led to some kind of emotional breakdown, although the details are shrouded in family mystery. From the period between 1946 and 1966 he worked constantly courting customers and driving trucks. By the time I was 15 years old, what had been a constant struggle to keep the business above water became a booming success. This success was so evident that he was able to spend less time literally working, and more time enjoying those things in life that he loved - gardening, tennis and fishing. We used to laugh that he was semiretired in his later working years. All he did was go on a Saturday collection route, and pick up the money that was owed him.
Somehow he was able to feel secure enough in himself that he did not have to continually drive himself to further successes. He no longer had to work, at least in the self-evident way of constant labor that had been true before. Who knows what kind of business contacts he was cultivating? This reminds me of the jokes people sometimes make about ministers. What an easy job. You only have to work an hour a week. This view emphasizes the most public part of the job and ignores everything else. It is hard to tell what work is sometimes. It often feels like everything I see and do and read is sermon fodder. So even if you come into the office, and I seem to be staring off into space, I am not loafing, but contemplating the cares of all of you and the world. Yet we have often had a hard time not working in this country. Benjamin Franklin gave us the archetype of the workaholic, and we know from statistics that that kind of obsession with work is worse than ever. We have disdain for the image of the idler in America, which argues that the highest calling is to do as little as possible. Yet most of us feel immense guilt if we are sitting around. Few of us can be the slacker like Melville’s famous character Bartleby the Scrivener, a copyist in a law office, who when he is invited to get to work says, “I would prefer not to.” Few of us are able to define success as doing the least possible.
This past June our former intern minister found himself disappointed with some of his colleagues that he met at General Assembly. The reason was that rather than getting to know each other, or finding ways to discuss support or collegiality in ministry, he said the ministers he met were obsessed with numbers and size, women as well as men. This gets at the heart of our understanding of success. We fear we have not achieved success unless we are bigger and better than the next person. I can then put you down for not being my equal. While size may impress some people, it certainly does not equate necessarily with quality of relationships.
Henry David Thoreau is an interesting example of one of our forebears who struggled with vocation. How did he define success? Prior to being a writer, he was a pencil maker, the family business, and then a teacher. He had innovative ideas about teaching that eventually led to his demise. He was fired because he refused to practice corporal punishment. As a teacher, he certainly did not define his success ratio by how well his students scored on some test. Thoreau had the crazy idea of making education a pleasant thing for both the teacher and the student. He believed a teacher would be most helpful to the student, if they were learning together, that there might be some kind of relationship where they were fellow students together. Teaching could stand some of this enthusiasm and relationship with students.
Like the critics of his own day, I am afraid most of us would not accept Thoreau’s idea of success. After one of his lectures, a reviewer commented, “It is rather curious to see a gentleman of cultivated intellect retiring from the world, dividing his time betwixt literary labors and cooking, hunting and fishing.” The world couldn’t stand that success for him, especially in the wake of his “experiment” at Walden Pond. This became a deep exploration of the world and all its knowledge and mysteries. He wrote, “The fact is, Man need not live by the sweat of his brow—unless he sweats easier than I do—he needs so little.” Living the simple life became Thoreau’s success. While few of us might want to emulate him, and give up our comforts, we still feel the urge to move our life ever so slightly in the direction of our dreams of finding success in what we love and in simpler living, as my father did with his garden and his fishing. He discovered, I think that he had enough of the world’s success, enough struggle, and then needed to find pleasure, find joy in what he loved. He was lucky. Few of us feel as though we can stop working.
Yet I have found that success for me is carving out time for those things I love - teaching and discovering historical paths. I am lucky enough to make them part of my job. What is true about this is that the greatest love is in working with others, and seeing them get excited about what I get excited about. The problem with our usual understanding of securing success is that it centers upon putting someone else down or getting what fills my needs or my children’s needs, and ignores the needs of others and of systems. We won’t be able to help our children find true success if we only project our definition of it upon them. Success must be not a measure of comparison, but a measure of the depth of relationship by listening and observing rather than demanding they fit our definition of success, like girls I have known who did not fit the parental prescription for beauty. When I was young my father used to retell the story of Alexander the Great, who conquered the world, and then wept because there were no more worlds to conquer. When you measure success by size and conquering others, then it is difficult to admit failure, as we see with our President, and when we only seek to be better than all the rest, as the commercial says, you end up weeping because there is only success, but no meaning to it, except more success.
This is why when we think about teaching our children to achieve success in the world, it is more than the test or the grade. You see this in the lovely film “Akeelah and the Bee” when Akeelah purposefully misspells a words in order to maintain the relationship rather than beat the opponent. What do you sacrifice in the path to success? I know for myself I find success mostly not with the size of my church, but rather with when people are pleased with what I do, or what we accomplish together, but it has taken me a long time to realize this. Does someone recognize my work as good? My colleague at First Church Boston made me feel affirmed this week, not by saying how much larger and more important his church is than mine, but by telling me he wished I wrote more for public consumption, because everything I write is good. He made me feel like what I do is successful. What is success for children? Often we get caught up in fighting to give them everything they need, but we lose track of the larger picture of nurturing emotional and spiritual needs. How do they respond to others, rather than how do they dominate or be better than others?
Levi had a birthday party on Friday with some friends of his from Watertown. One of these enterprising young boys had a lawn mowing business, and had bought his own weed whacker. I think I am going to hire him for First Parish. He had brought his own money to the party, and purchased his own game room tokens. At the end of the party he had many tokens left. We talked about saving them or giving them to other kids at the party, but he said, no, I just want to give them to somebody, and so he just went up to a stranger in the game room, and handed him a cup of tokens. It was moving to see his indiscriminate kindness. I think with our drive for success, sometimes we forget that success can be measured in whether our kids are nice and not mean, whether they are giving, and not selfish, whether they listen to others. Success is found in the quality of our relationships. Thoreau realized this when he emulated native culture that there is a cycle to gift giving. The fish we take from the river is not merely consumed, but we give back to the river, or to others what we have been given, and we continue the cycle. In our drive for success we have often failed to keep a cycle of giving going. It is simple to just take, but real success is founded when we teach our children that you don’t just take what you can get for your own success or edification, but rather that what you take is a gift from someone or from nature, and it is up to you, to have real success, to give it back, and keep the spirit alive of gratitude, of relationship, of continuity, and of blessings for a life that has been given by those who came before.
Closing Words - from Henry David Thoreau
I have learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.
"A Faith to Live By" a sermon by Mark W. Harris - September 17, 2006
“A Faith to Live By” Mark W. Harris
September 17, 2006 - First Parish of Watertown
Opening Words - from Donald Robinson
Know one place well,
And from the heart of that one place, Let your wisdom grow strong to take in the world.
Know well the grasses and trees.
Know well the brooks and hills.
Know well the heart of some single spot on this little planet earth,
And you shall be wise to comprehend all the stars in heaven.
A heaping together of many little things cannot bring wisdom.
Rather wisdom is the growing big of one small thing.
Who has traveled far on the earth and reckoned the distances of the stars
May not be wise as he who has lived fully,
Though his travels be bounded by the mountains about his home.
Know one place well.
And love that place, love wholly.
And you shall be wise to comprehend all the stars.
Sermon
On Tuesday Andrea and I went to see Whistler’s Mother, not the person, but rather the painting, which for a few short months has resided at the Museum of Fine Arts as part of an exhibit called “Americans in Paris.” As a historian of all things Americana, I have always wanted to see this painting, because it is perhaps the most famous American work of art, and it resides in Paris most of the time at the Louvre, and I was not certain when I would ever make it to Paris. In the 19th century Paris was the center of the Art world. Anyone who aspired to be an artist went there to study, paint, meet, and absorb the artistic atmosphere. As we wandered through the rooms of art works, we came upon Arrangement in Gray and Black, the official name for this maternal portrait. Andrea noticed how Calvinist she looked. We gazed upon a stern visage with a chin and nose that would do the wicked witch of the west proud. This was the stuff that Puritanism is made of - drab colors and a personality that lacks humor and extols endless work. We noticed that her feet were elevated upon this little stool, which we likened to a prayer stool. The descriptive material about the painting confirmed this. Apparently Mrs. Whistler spent the entire time posing for this portrait in prayer. Afterwards she said that she was invoking a Mother’s unceasing prayer that her child would succeed at this artistic career. Probably lacking trust that this irrational, bohemian choice of lifestyle would lead James anywhere, she resorted to the one avenue of hope she had, “unceasing prayer.” Since she did not have faith in his skills or work ethic, she felt that appealing to God directly might bring her son acclaim.
I suppose that many mother’s who had sons or daughters who aspired to be artists would resort to prayer for any hope of success. This is a career choice fraught with the danger of failure, or at least a much less certain avenue to success than insurance sales, for instance. Trust and certainty are key words when it comes to the religious faith we espouse. A new book on liberal theology characterizes Unitarian Universalism as a “Faith Without Certainty.” This is the faith that historically has joked that it believes in one God at the most. It seems uncertain about prayer, Jesus and life after death. Yet it is not so much that we are uncertain, but that those who adopt a liberal faith do not want dogmatic truth forced upon them from a hierarchal authority. We want to be able to express our doubts and our questions about religious subjects for which there is no infallible answer. Emerson expresses it well in the quote from our Wayside Pulpit, “The faith that stands on authority is not faith.” Of course what he means is that if you have to have authoritative truth in religious matters, if you need to know all the answers about God and life after death, then it is impossible for you to have faith. Faith means a trust in that which cannot be known, a trust that other people and the universe give meaning and purpose to life, and that you must give yourself over to that trust.
This summer my son Dana was asked to read Greek Myths and Mythology for part of his summer reading assignments. I think this was a refresher course for both Andrea and me, as Zeus, Persephone, Demeter and all the tales came back to consciousness. Among these was the story of Orpheus, who played wonderful music, and was in love with the enchanting Euridice. She was killed by a snake and taken down in to the underworld. In his grief, Orpheus sought her out. Even the pitiless underworld listened to his music. Finally, he met Hades face to face and struck a deal to win her freedom whereby he could not gaze upon Euridice until they reached the surface. It was a long trip, and he began to be distrustful that those really were Euridice’s footsteps he heard behind him. Finally, he could not bear it any longer, and turned to gaze, only to find Hades now leading her back to the underworld because Orpheus had violated the agreement. He lost her forever, the story tells, through lack of faith. This looking back reminds me of the famous Biblical story of Lot’s wife, who looks back on Sodom and becomes a pillar of salt. In our grief, in our fear, we feel we must make sure, that things are going to be all right, and we overcompensate or refuse to move on, and therefore cannot trust the dawning future.
During the last week there have been a number of ruminations on the effects of the 9/11 attacks five years hence. How was people’s faith effected by this horrible tragedy perpetrated by religious fanatics who believed they were following the dictates of their faith to destroy satan, and thereby win an instant reward in heaven? Many people have written how any of the world’s great faiths can be twisted or perverted to achieve an inglorious end. Most of the clergy quoted in Thursday’s paper said that there was an upsurge in church attendance after 9/11, but that life soon went back to normal. Yet clearly there is less faith that we live in a safe world, and more traditional churches reported that now when people fly, they are more likely to request prayers for a safe trip. They ask the congregation to pray for “tender mercies” that all will be well. The faith of all peoples has been shaken in recent years. We are more likely to believe that things are coming apart, and that the center will not hold. Yet at the same time there is a renewed interest in faith. We want to feel a sense of security when there is such a pervading sadness.
What will give us faith? In her recent book, Plan b, Annie Lamott quotes another writer who says that we are Easter people living in a Good Friday world. Lamott says she doesn’t have the right personality for Good Friday, for the crucifixion. She wants the picture that the children in her Sunday School drew of a resurrection vision - an Easter Bunny outside the tomb; everlasting life and a basket full of chocolates. She believes in dramatic evidence of rebirth despite evidence to the contrary. The human condition seems dire, but suddenly there is hope.
This sounds like wishful thinking though. Even if you say you have the Easter personality most of us have to deal with Good Friday. In the novel Jamesland, one of the chief characters, Pete is a chef whose restaurant has failed. One day he drives by a Baptist church “whose marquee proclaimed,” Faith is Always Rewarded If It’s Not Rewarded, It’s Not Faith!” Baptists seem to think of tangible rewards; heaven will follow from loving Jesus, if you believe. But what if you don’t believe in that way? Pete asks, what does he have faith in? Is it the pitch and slosh of events? The ascension of the soul? Or, for that matter, it’s descent. Finally, Pete tells his therapist that he is ready to give-up his mental patient personna. Then they begin discussing the possibility of him having dates with women. He says no one will date him because he is a mental patient. She then points out that he uses his personna of being a mental patient, “to conveniently avoid every risk in life.” He can’t do it because . . . He has no faith in himself, and he never will, because he keeps himself trapped there. The underlying question of Jamesland is, how do people live in the world? This is the question of faith for a Unitarian Universalist, too.
It is this question of living rather than believing that underscores our faith. While God and Jesus, and assuredness of things not seen under gird traditional faith, I think we rightfully understand that it takes not ascribing to creeds or belief structures to prove faith, but a much deeper willingness to live our faith rather than simply proclaim it. People sometimes joke that our liberal faith is easy because there is nothing specific we can ask people to ascribe to. We say traditional faith means believing in things that ain’t so, and our faith in reason means we are not going to have faith in a supernatural that simply does not exist in our universe. Yet faith for us is much more than rejecting traditional beliefs, or believing we must deconstruct every scripture to fictional literature. I would liken our liberal notion of faith to our belief about marriage, which we borrow from the Puritans. We say marriage is not something ordained by God, but rather a compact between two people. Yesterday in the wedding homily, I said, as I have countless times before, “Marriage is a pledge of faith.” Thus a faith pledge, like a lasting marriage takes time and effort, it means we must trust other humans in all their folly, and it means we truly believe it is in our hands to make a lasting commitment to build something better between humans.
It takes time. One thing that distinguished liberals from revivalists in the early days of the development of liberal religion was that our faith was not grounded in an instant conversion to truth. Instead truth was discovered by a slow, educational process, where we grew into our faith. We learned about different approaches to truth, and found the one that worked best for us in the context of our religious communities. The slow development of faith reminds me of what it is like to refinish wood. Years ago I enjoyed working on old chairs and tables and trunks. The rhythmic motion of sanding again and again with higher grades of paper, the steel wool over the surface using finer and finer strands, the coats of polyurethane. It take time and effort to bring out the deeper and most beautiful qualities of wood. The grain gets richer and richer the more time and effort you put into it. So time gives a depth to the relationship in a marriage that comes out only after decades of involvement and exploration and discovery of truths found in the amount of time you have spent with the other person.
It takes trust. I never think of myself as much of an artist. I always say I cannot draw or do anything creative. This summer when the art room was open at Ferry Beach I went there thinking I could assist the boys, but never thinking I would do my own project. Finally, I quickly pieced together some wood scraps to create an owl. The problem is you have to let go and trust that you have a gift that you can bring to any project you undertake. I may have told you the story of an art class I took in seminary years ago. We were given the task of creating a group sculpture, but we never discussed what the project would be or how we would form the giant piece of wood. In the end we created a very sensual human figure that like the furniture I would later work with was shaped by hours of sanding and finishing. But before we reached that stage, we had to produce the sculpture itself. The teacher told us to get to know the wood, and that whatever shape or figure we were going to create would evolve or appear out of the wood. Rather than following a preconceived notion of what we would create out of the wood, he was implying that the figure would appear almost magically if we would only trust our hands and hearts to discover the pattern and shape that was already latent in the wood. Somehow the trust we had in each other and in our creative feel produced an amazingly beautiful work of art that seemed to just occur spontaneously. Of course we didn’t try to control the carving in any way, or force the others to conform to a plan. What took shape is what took shape. We trusted the process. In Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh writes, “The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach--waiting for a gift from the sea.”
Of course it is hard to trust a universe when waves or hurricanes crash down upon you and destroy your life. It is hard to trust when human selfishness and cultures of violence bring about mass destruction of life. What can we have faith in that will bring about the better life we all long for? For a long time liberals believed in progress; that humans had the technological and scientific ability to create answers to all human problems. In a way science was often a substitute for faith for many liberals. Sometimes this has degenerated into a kind of scientism. Heaven for these believers is that we will know all the answers through science. Scientism, the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical, is a superstition, one of the dominant superstitions of our day. Every aspect of human existence is understood by biological, technological or economic ways. Failures of science were recognized by the Universalist Clarence Russell Skinner in 1947. “Our culture has trusted too much in facts. It has let science go where it will, serving heathen gods. But we are suffering for our sins. We are enslaved in an age of enlightenment because our enlightenment is not total. We are one-eyed philosophers and have lost the ability to see more than one thing at a time.” He concluded that “truth must be righteous. It must serve the good and not the evil. It must seek the Kingdom of Ends. It must serve moral law.” We learned that the human mind does not have the answer to everything and that seekers after truth should be more humble. In our pride about human intelligence, we often fail to see that reason is a faith position. G. K Chesterton once wrote, “reason itself is a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.” So even when we say we count on reason, it is a matter of unknowable trust, a matter of faith in the unknown. What makes us so sure that what we call real is truly real. Living is all trust, all risk, all our adventures, forays into the unknown
So in life, and in marriage faith grows when we give time to it, discovering deep knowledge of what is right in front of us here and now. It means we come to know another, something about a detail in this world, really well. There is an intimacy that we only discover with giving time to another person, place or thing. And out of that knowledge that has resulted from time, we develop trust. This person, these people are my people, and I can count on them. Faith grows when we trust life and each other, that what remains undiscovered about the universe and each other offers endless exploration and delight, and we can risk discovery because we trust that other we have given our time to. But in our faith development, we must aware of one of the great danger of our liberal faith; not to run off to the next thing. In the reading from Gilead, John Ames, the minister says we see that trying to build proofs about God or the nature of existence are fruitless. It is like building a ladder to the moon. He says Christianity is a life, and not a doctrine. We might say faith is a life, and not a belief. And in that life the doubts and questions must not be the fashion of the moment, the liberal plague. Make them your own questions. Use your mind to build your faith, but be humble enough to know that we do not know. We must embrace a mystery. This is the final leg of faith development in our liberal way - time, trust, and ultimately commitment.
Commitment means we give this endeavor our whole heart. Giving time prepares us to make a commitment. Trust means the willingness is there, and devoting ourselves to fulfilling our human destiny to love another, to pledge our faith to one another to build a community of peace and good will. Wendell Barry says that in a commitment like a marriage, as we join ourselves to each other, we join ourselves to the unknown. We cannot make the relationship go where we think think it ought to or want it to. We do not know the unpredictable road ahead, we only know we must commit ourselves to an open, honest and loving path. With commitment we ask ourselves what are our expectations of ourselves and others as human beings. Faith tells me that despite the violence and selfishness of the world, I can give time to know others intimately and find love, and I can trust others because they have loved me, and I them, and I can make a commitment in community to be part of something larger and more wonderful than I can ever be alone. I have seen that community right here. So in my own community, in my own marriage, in my own relationships, I can build heaven on earth. It can be done. This is what gives me faith.
Faith is built from what you know close at hand. Anything further away is too scary. I have long admired the rather odd utopian sect called the Shakers. They believed, like Emerson, that something of the divine was in everything, an emblem of the divine in that chair or this box. Here is a box that is similar to what they made. They gave time and commitment and devotion to doing things well. They trusted the wood they used to bend to the shape it needed to be to fill the human need for useful objects. Much of what they classified as spiritual was what they grew or built or found close at hand. Here in this place and at this time with these people we must come to know all we can of the divine. It is the one chance we have. This is our opportunity to build marriages, relationships and communities of love and commitment. That is what you must throw your faith into, having the highest expectation of yourself to love others, and build a just community. In this box there is a bit of perfection. May this room be the cradle of all dreams to build a faith community founded upon love. Everything we could hope for is right before our eyes. As Whitman wrote,
Will you seek afar off?
You surely come back at last.
In things best known to you, finding the best or as good as the best,
In folks nearest to you finding also the sweetest and strongest and lovingest,
Happiness not in another place, but this place . . . not for another hour, but this hour.
Closing Words - from T. S. Eliot
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
September 17, 2006 - First Parish of Watertown
Opening Words - from Donald Robinson
Know one place well,
And from the heart of that one place, Let your wisdom grow strong to take in the world.
Know well the grasses and trees.
Know well the brooks and hills.
Know well the heart of some single spot on this little planet earth,
And you shall be wise to comprehend all the stars in heaven.
A heaping together of many little things cannot bring wisdom.
Rather wisdom is the growing big of one small thing.
Who has traveled far on the earth and reckoned the distances of the stars
May not be wise as he who has lived fully,
Though his travels be bounded by the mountains about his home.
Know one place well.
And love that place, love wholly.
And you shall be wise to comprehend all the stars.
Sermon
On Tuesday Andrea and I went to see Whistler’s Mother, not the person, but rather the painting, which for a few short months has resided at the Museum of Fine Arts as part of an exhibit called “Americans in Paris.” As a historian of all things Americana, I have always wanted to see this painting, because it is perhaps the most famous American work of art, and it resides in Paris most of the time at the Louvre, and I was not certain when I would ever make it to Paris. In the 19th century Paris was the center of the Art world. Anyone who aspired to be an artist went there to study, paint, meet, and absorb the artistic atmosphere. As we wandered through the rooms of art works, we came upon Arrangement in Gray and Black, the official name for this maternal portrait. Andrea noticed how Calvinist she looked. We gazed upon a stern visage with a chin and nose that would do the wicked witch of the west proud. This was the stuff that Puritanism is made of - drab colors and a personality that lacks humor and extols endless work. We noticed that her feet were elevated upon this little stool, which we likened to a prayer stool. The descriptive material about the painting confirmed this. Apparently Mrs. Whistler spent the entire time posing for this portrait in prayer. Afterwards she said that she was invoking a Mother’s unceasing prayer that her child would succeed at this artistic career. Probably lacking trust that this irrational, bohemian choice of lifestyle would lead James anywhere, she resorted to the one avenue of hope she had, “unceasing prayer.” Since she did not have faith in his skills or work ethic, she felt that appealing to God directly might bring her son acclaim.
I suppose that many mother’s who had sons or daughters who aspired to be artists would resort to prayer for any hope of success. This is a career choice fraught with the danger of failure, or at least a much less certain avenue to success than insurance sales, for instance. Trust and certainty are key words when it comes to the religious faith we espouse. A new book on liberal theology characterizes Unitarian Universalism as a “Faith Without Certainty.” This is the faith that historically has joked that it believes in one God at the most. It seems uncertain about prayer, Jesus and life after death. Yet it is not so much that we are uncertain, but that those who adopt a liberal faith do not want dogmatic truth forced upon them from a hierarchal authority. We want to be able to express our doubts and our questions about religious subjects for which there is no infallible answer. Emerson expresses it well in the quote from our Wayside Pulpit, “The faith that stands on authority is not faith.” Of course what he means is that if you have to have authoritative truth in religious matters, if you need to know all the answers about God and life after death, then it is impossible for you to have faith. Faith means a trust in that which cannot be known, a trust that other people and the universe give meaning and purpose to life, and that you must give yourself over to that trust.
This summer my son Dana was asked to read Greek Myths and Mythology for part of his summer reading assignments. I think this was a refresher course for both Andrea and me, as Zeus, Persephone, Demeter and all the tales came back to consciousness. Among these was the story of Orpheus, who played wonderful music, and was in love with the enchanting Euridice. She was killed by a snake and taken down in to the underworld. In his grief, Orpheus sought her out. Even the pitiless underworld listened to his music. Finally, he met Hades face to face and struck a deal to win her freedom whereby he could not gaze upon Euridice until they reached the surface. It was a long trip, and he began to be distrustful that those really were Euridice’s footsteps he heard behind him. Finally, he could not bear it any longer, and turned to gaze, only to find Hades now leading her back to the underworld because Orpheus had violated the agreement. He lost her forever, the story tells, through lack of faith. This looking back reminds me of the famous Biblical story of Lot’s wife, who looks back on Sodom and becomes a pillar of salt. In our grief, in our fear, we feel we must make sure, that things are going to be all right, and we overcompensate or refuse to move on, and therefore cannot trust the dawning future.
During the last week there have been a number of ruminations on the effects of the 9/11 attacks five years hence. How was people’s faith effected by this horrible tragedy perpetrated by religious fanatics who believed they were following the dictates of their faith to destroy satan, and thereby win an instant reward in heaven? Many people have written how any of the world’s great faiths can be twisted or perverted to achieve an inglorious end. Most of the clergy quoted in Thursday’s paper said that there was an upsurge in church attendance after 9/11, but that life soon went back to normal. Yet clearly there is less faith that we live in a safe world, and more traditional churches reported that now when people fly, they are more likely to request prayers for a safe trip. They ask the congregation to pray for “tender mercies” that all will be well. The faith of all peoples has been shaken in recent years. We are more likely to believe that things are coming apart, and that the center will not hold. Yet at the same time there is a renewed interest in faith. We want to feel a sense of security when there is such a pervading sadness.
What will give us faith? In her recent book, Plan b, Annie Lamott quotes another writer who says that we are Easter people living in a Good Friday world. Lamott says she doesn’t have the right personality for Good Friday, for the crucifixion. She wants the picture that the children in her Sunday School drew of a resurrection vision - an Easter Bunny outside the tomb; everlasting life and a basket full of chocolates. She believes in dramatic evidence of rebirth despite evidence to the contrary. The human condition seems dire, but suddenly there is hope.
This sounds like wishful thinking though. Even if you say you have the Easter personality most of us have to deal with Good Friday. In the novel Jamesland, one of the chief characters, Pete is a chef whose restaurant has failed. One day he drives by a Baptist church “whose marquee proclaimed,” Faith is Always Rewarded If It’s Not Rewarded, It’s Not Faith!” Baptists seem to think of tangible rewards; heaven will follow from loving Jesus, if you believe. But what if you don’t believe in that way? Pete asks, what does he have faith in? Is it the pitch and slosh of events? The ascension of the soul? Or, for that matter, it’s descent. Finally, Pete tells his therapist that he is ready to give-up his mental patient personna. Then they begin discussing the possibility of him having dates with women. He says no one will date him because he is a mental patient. She then points out that he uses his personna of being a mental patient, “to conveniently avoid every risk in life.” He can’t do it because . . . He has no faith in himself, and he never will, because he keeps himself trapped there. The underlying question of Jamesland is, how do people live in the world? This is the question of faith for a Unitarian Universalist, too.
It is this question of living rather than believing that underscores our faith. While God and Jesus, and assuredness of things not seen under gird traditional faith, I think we rightfully understand that it takes not ascribing to creeds or belief structures to prove faith, but a much deeper willingness to live our faith rather than simply proclaim it. People sometimes joke that our liberal faith is easy because there is nothing specific we can ask people to ascribe to. We say traditional faith means believing in things that ain’t so, and our faith in reason means we are not going to have faith in a supernatural that simply does not exist in our universe. Yet faith for us is much more than rejecting traditional beliefs, or believing we must deconstruct every scripture to fictional literature. I would liken our liberal notion of faith to our belief about marriage, which we borrow from the Puritans. We say marriage is not something ordained by God, but rather a compact between two people. Yesterday in the wedding homily, I said, as I have countless times before, “Marriage is a pledge of faith.” Thus a faith pledge, like a lasting marriage takes time and effort, it means we must trust other humans in all their folly, and it means we truly believe it is in our hands to make a lasting commitment to build something better between humans.
It takes time. One thing that distinguished liberals from revivalists in the early days of the development of liberal religion was that our faith was not grounded in an instant conversion to truth. Instead truth was discovered by a slow, educational process, where we grew into our faith. We learned about different approaches to truth, and found the one that worked best for us in the context of our religious communities. The slow development of faith reminds me of what it is like to refinish wood. Years ago I enjoyed working on old chairs and tables and trunks. The rhythmic motion of sanding again and again with higher grades of paper, the steel wool over the surface using finer and finer strands, the coats of polyurethane. It take time and effort to bring out the deeper and most beautiful qualities of wood. The grain gets richer and richer the more time and effort you put into it. So time gives a depth to the relationship in a marriage that comes out only after decades of involvement and exploration and discovery of truths found in the amount of time you have spent with the other person.
It takes trust. I never think of myself as much of an artist. I always say I cannot draw or do anything creative. This summer when the art room was open at Ferry Beach I went there thinking I could assist the boys, but never thinking I would do my own project. Finally, I quickly pieced together some wood scraps to create an owl. The problem is you have to let go and trust that you have a gift that you can bring to any project you undertake. I may have told you the story of an art class I took in seminary years ago. We were given the task of creating a group sculpture, but we never discussed what the project would be or how we would form the giant piece of wood. In the end we created a very sensual human figure that like the furniture I would later work with was shaped by hours of sanding and finishing. But before we reached that stage, we had to produce the sculpture itself. The teacher told us to get to know the wood, and that whatever shape or figure we were going to create would evolve or appear out of the wood. Rather than following a preconceived notion of what we would create out of the wood, he was implying that the figure would appear almost magically if we would only trust our hands and hearts to discover the pattern and shape that was already latent in the wood. Somehow the trust we had in each other and in our creative feel produced an amazingly beautiful work of art that seemed to just occur spontaneously. Of course we didn’t try to control the carving in any way, or force the others to conform to a plan. What took shape is what took shape. We trusted the process. In Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh writes, “The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach--waiting for a gift from the sea.”
Of course it is hard to trust a universe when waves or hurricanes crash down upon you and destroy your life. It is hard to trust when human selfishness and cultures of violence bring about mass destruction of life. What can we have faith in that will bring about the better life we all long for? For a long time liberals believed in progress; that humans had the technological and scientific ability to create answers to all human problems. In a way science was often a substitute for faith for many liberals. Sometimes this has degenerated into a kind of scientism. Heaven for these believers is that we will know all the answers through science. Scientism, the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical, is a superstition, one of the dominant superstitions of our day. Every aspect of human existence is understood by biological, technological or economic ways. Failures of science were recognized by the Universalist Clarence Russell Skinner in 1947. “Our culture has trusted too much in facts. It has let science go where it will, serving heathen gods. But we are suffering for our sins. We are enslaved in an age of enlightenment because our enlightenment is not total. We are one-eyed philosophers and have lost the ability to see more than one thing at a time.” He concluded that “truth must be righteous. It must serve the good and not the evil. It must seek the Kingdom of Ends. It must serve moral law.” We learned that the human mind does not have the answer to everything and that seekers after truth should be more humble. In our pride about human intelligence, we often fail to see that reason is a faith position. G. K Chesterton once wrote, “reason itself is a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.” So even when we say we count on reason, it is a matter of unknowable trust, a matter of faith in the unknown. What makes us so sure that what we call real is truly real. Living is all trust, all risk, all our adventures, forays into the unknown
So in life, and in marriage faith grows when we give time to it, discovering deep knowledge of what is right in front of us here and now. It means we come to know another, something about a detail in this world, really well. There is an intimacy that we only discover with giving time to another person, place or thing. And out of that knowledge that has resulted from time, we develop trust. This person, these people are my people, and I can count on them. Faith grows when we trust life and each other, that what remains undiscovered about the universe and each other offers endless exploration and delight, and we can risk discovery because we trust that other we have given our time to. But in our faith development, we must aware of one of the great danger of our liberal faith; not to run off to the next thing. In the reading from Gilead, John Ames, the minister says we see that trying to build proofs about God or the nature of existence are fruitless. It is like building a ladder to the moon. He says Christianity is a life, and not a doctrine. We might say faith is a life, and not a belief. And in that life the doubts and questions must not be the fashion of the moment, the liberal plague. Make them your own questions. Use your mind to build your faith, but be humble enough to know that we do not know. We must embrace a mystery. This is the final leg of faith development in our liberal way - time, trust, and ultimately commitment.
Commitment means we give this endeavor our whole heart. Giving time prepares us to make a commitment. Trust means the willingness is there, and devoting ourselves to fulfilling our human destiny to love another, to pledge our faith to one another to build a community of peace and good will. Wendell Barry says that in a commitment like a marriage, as we join ourselves to each other, we join ourselves to the unknown. We cannot make the relationship go where we think think it ought to or want it to. We do not know the unpredictable road ahead, we only know we must commit ourselves to an open, honest and loving path. With commitment we ask ourselves what are our expectations of ourselves and others as human beings. Faith tells me that despite the violence and selfishness of the world, I can give time to know others intimately and find love, and I can trust others because they have loved me, and I them, and I can make a commitment in community to be part of something larger and more wonderful than I can ever be alone. I have seen that community right here. So in my own community, in my own marriage, in my own relationships, I can build heaven on earth. It can be done. This is what gives me faith.
Faith is built from what you know close at hand. Anything further away is too scary. I have long admired the rather odd utopian sect called the Shakers. They believed, like Emerson, that something of the divine was in everything, an emblem of the divine in that chair or this box. Here is a box that is similar to what they made. They gave time and commitment and devotion to doing things well. They trusted the wood they used to bend to the shape it needed to be to fill the human need for useful objects. Much of what they classified as spiritual was what they grew or built or found close at hand. Here in this place and at this time with these people we must come to know all we can of the divine. It is the one chance we have. This is our opportunity to build marriages, relationships and communities of love and commitment. That is what you must throw your faith into, having the highest expectation of yourself to love others, and build a just community. In this box there is a bit of perfection. May this room be the cradle of all dreams to build a faith community founded upon love. Everything we could hope for is right before our eyes. As Whitman wrote,
Will you seek afar off?
You surely come back at last.
In things best known to you, finding the best or as good as the best,
In folks nearest to you finding also the sweetest and strongest and lovingest,
Happiness not in another place, but this place . . . not for another hour, but this hour.
Closing Words - from T. S. Eliot
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.