"Live as if Your Life Depended Upon It"
The sermon idea – “Live As If Your Life Depended Upon It –” is one of those things I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about and jotted down on a pad next to the bed so I wouldn’t forget it.
Perhaps some of you do that, too. Unfortunately, I find most of those dead-of-the-night thoughts fairly ridiculous when I look at them the next day. They seem absolutely marvelous in the dark but usually I look the next day and wonder, “I wrote that down! What in the world made me think there was anything worth remembering in that?”
Admittedly, the theme of this day has its drawbacks. It is platitudinous. "Certainly," we think, “live now, live today, live fully because this is the only chance we get, the only world we have, the only life we shall live.”
Having said that, the platitudinous imperative can then be forgotten, as will likely be the case today and we will go on living the way we have with few serious attempts to change.
One would suppose that any human life, though, could bear self-examination and that some changes, small or large, might be in order for many of us. But one of the most powerful realities both in social and individual life is the power of the status quo. It is hard to change – one resists change – one does not want to change even though he may know his life depends on it.
All of us have heard of people who were told to stop smoking forthwith – that if they did not they would suffer increasing debilitation and die – yet they continued to smoke and suffered accordingly.
Why is it, we may wonder, so many know what to do to act in their own interest but do not and will not do it?
Such thoughts I had that night, realizing that I – like so many others – choose to remain in the trap by refusing to get out of it.
Live as if your life depended upon it.
Today, too many people seem to be dying of ennui – the blankness of no meaning in life. Ennui, the dictionary calls it, “weariness and dissatisfaction resulting from inactivity and lack of interest.” People are dying of boredom, existing, not living.
As night thoughts will play around with words like ennui, I began to see that many physically comfortable Americans are dying from another kind of on-ue, this time spelled not E-N-N-U-I but O-N-U-E: ON – Over-nutrition and UE – Under-exercise: stuffing and settling!
What a painful idea that was as I thought about how much I like to overeat and how little exercise I get during the winter months. Reading one of the popular magazines the other day in an article about “Candidates for Coronaries,” some of the blame for the epidemic proportions of heart disease and death therefrom, I find, is leveled at things like overweight (statistically at least) though one’s chances for survival of a heart attack are higher if he is a regular exerciser.
All of this merely to give an example of what I mean when I say we know we should live as if our lives depended upon it – but for those of us who need them, will our resolutions to eat less and exercise more really take place? Did it ever happen to you? Read an article like that, diet like mad for four days then right back to the trough!
After awhile some of us may find we can no longer cut the mustard because we could not cut out the mustard along with the cheese, rolls, butter, and fat of the bacon. Perhaps we have heard so much about diet we are sick of it, it’s not in good taste anyway, and we are upset too at the effectiveness with which the Cancer Society gets across its message on those anti-cigarette commercials on TV. Believe me, I am not making some health fundamentalist’s appeal for sainthood, what kettle this, to call the pot black. I merely suggest that living the way we live we feel the way we live and we die the way we live. Though I know there will be some of us who say – "What a wonderful way to die–" on a full stomach.
But think – living the way we live - results in feeling the way we feel – and living the way we live – we die the way we live.
Now, since I have already placed myself in the category of those preachers who have quit preaching and gone to meddling, I have suggested, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Though I may fool you and myself by taking this more to heart. Let me make matters worse by talking about our society.
One wonders if, as a people, we are living as if our lives depended upon it. Consider the population explosion here and abroad and attendant problems of poverty. William Vogt has said that, “One billion people, a third of the world’s population, have standards of living below pet dogs and cats in the United States.”
And we Planned Parenthood people tend to quote another one: “Whatever your cause, it is a lost cause unless we check the population explosion.” The world population reached one billion by 1850, after, perhaps two million years of human life. The next billion people were added in only the next 75 years. From that time, the population will have doubled to four billion by 1980 and may reach six billion 20 years later in 2000. One-fifth of all the people who ever lived are alive today. And megalopolis is going to squash us together like Harlem, only way more so, and violence in the cities will increase.
And then there is the bomb, if we would consider another mammoth threat.
But I would like to bring to your attention some thoughts from Carl Rogers, passed on to me by one of our family members, in an article on “Interpersonal Relationships – U.S.A. 2000.” He thinks, as tough as it may be, we will solve the population thing.
Rogers believes that by the year 2000 infertility will be standard and present practices will be reversed – that is, one will be rendered infertile temporarily at puberty and will have to make careful decisions and apply to get permission to have a baby later on.
He believes, as great as they are, the problems of the population explosion and the hydrogen bomb do not pose as large a threat as possibilities surrounding this question:
“How much change (can) the human being accept, absorb, and assimilate, and at what rate can he take it?”
Rogers sees our condition as desperate and frightening and he wonders how long the people can go on refusing to take action that is clearly in their own interest. How long, for example, will the people refuse to face up to the problem of the urban ghettos?
We are not living as if our lives depended upon it but they do all the same.
Recognizing the problems and the possibility that it may be too late to stop warfare on our own streets, Dr. Rogers still has hope. He bases such optimism as he can muster on two things:
1) the ability of western democracies, even at the last cliff-hanging moment, to act appropriately when their survival is threatened.
2) and the other field of hope, he thinks, is the field of interpersonal relationships.
Rogers has noticed in one-to-one and in therapeutic relationships, intensive encounter groups, and in organizations that the experience of change, growth and fulfillment in people, though sometimes painful, magnetically attracts them and they want more when they get a taste of it.
Our hope is in people who love people – and people who will talk with people – but it won’t do to love them from a distance. People have to get together in a meaningful way before they are smashed together in a destructive way.
Small groups of intimate sharing are spreading over the country. Mistakes will be made in and with some of those encounter groups but the small interpersonal exchange is happening and needs to happen massively if people are to experience personal enrichment in the future as urban crowding and generation gaps and other people gaps become more of a problem.
Rogers has faith that “we shall discover that security resides not in hiding oneself but in being more fully known, and consequently in coming to know the others more fully.”
To live as though our lives depended upon it will mean increasingly to live with more real intimacy and with ability to communicate with others or alienation will put an end to what we have been calling life.
It is an old idea – really a religious idea – learn to love life or perish, but there are new ways of doing and saying that today. Learn to respect each other, but also be open and honest with each other, share the caring, reveal the way you feel in an accepting group, learn to love and to respect by doing. It is not enough to listen to sermons about this. It is not enough to think one’s thoughts about it. One has to do something about it with others.
Think of how difficult it is to do this just within a church our size filled with more or less like-minded people. But, it must become broader than our own internally caring community or we become an island of celebration and comfort in a sea of human need and conflict. We cannot shut out or forget about, and must not, the urban crisis.
Perhaps some of you feel sometimes – I wish there were one place I could go and hear something affirmative and not always be hit with how upsetting the world is (church maybe).
I am reminded of one of my colleagues who, when he was a student for the ministry some years back, found himself daily surrounded by talk about the fad of that day. At that time it was "existentialism.” Everybody and his pet intellectual was talking about existentialism, writing books about the absurdity of life, expounding existentialist philosophy while denying that one was, himself, an existentialist.
But if you couldn’t talk existentialism, you just weren’t with it in the theological school a decade ago, indeed you could not aspire to be cracked and crowned an egghead anywhere if you didn’t know the lingo.
And this young man said (in a seminar one day) to another of the students who had existentialized every day and every week in every way all over the place, “If you say existentialism once more I’ll hit you with a wet towel!” Today, we witness a fling at what we may call “pop” existentialism in the young, but the thing that's really been in is “the badness of everything and the revolution to come.”
And some people may be approaching saturation and the feeling, “If I hear about urban problems, confrontations, demonstrations, and white racism much more I’m going to swat somebody or resign from hearing and speaking.”
Of course, it may just be possible, if we feel that way, somebody is finally reaching us and we are vastly tempted to change our minds and that temptation is too threatening to bear because, if we change our minds, we may have to change our habits. Whether this is so or not, I have sensed a great desire in people for some peace.
What about racism? Is it a mask? Trouble with racism is the word game leaves liberals paralyzed in guilt – and arch-conservatives proud to be racists.
A deeper question to ask some of us today is not the question,"What about your white racism?" a deeper question may be "What about white emptiness that causes people to react or respond inappropriately to power demands, legitimate or otherwise?”If we can do something about white emptiness, we can do something about white racism.
Some people want more power and Blacks, especially
today, deserve to have much more of it. But some people desperately
need and more basically need self-empowerment, who now find
themselves empty.
I agree with Rogers, there is a craving for and there is something magnetic about personal enrichment through genuine interpersonal relationships. Something called soul, variously defined, and the relationships it involves, seems to be filling that need for part of our population ... for a time anyway.
But what are perhaps the majority of whites to do about their white emptiness – the lack of white soul – the demise of a motivating and sustaining personal religion when the need of relating to the mystery it represents grows greater every day. I do not suggest a return to the old-time religion.
Perhaps the prophets of the new faith are apt to turn out to be men like Abraham Maslow, Erick Fromm, and Carl Rogers, all of whom believe institutional religion is doomed.
Yet, at the moment they say that: Maslow also uses religious terminology to describe life’s highest moments – its peak experiences – and Fromm draws most heavily for inspiration from the eighth century Hebrew prophets and Rogers says though the God of the old theology, the “God of authoritative answers will be not only dead but buried” by the year 2000, the concerns that have been the basis of religion will be greater than ever. We will see a greater appreciation of mystery as our knowledge increases (just as theoretical physicists now marvel at the true mystery of what they have discovered).”
I do not doubt that institutional religion as it has been will continue to change but it will do so in a religion like ours only to be expressed again in new forms, new devotions, and new expressions of a happier relation of man to man. It will, or indeed it will die.
Today formal religion suffers from inability to meet the needs of people in their emptiness or to help them help themselves to fill that spiritual void in a world where the ax has already cut the roots of the spirit.
But I see hopeful signs of a change to new meaning.
In our denomination, while we have suffered polarization and bitterness over social action strategy, we are also on the verge of new awareness and acceptance – one of another – I believe we are. I see a moving forward to a deeply felt involvement in something where, at the moment, the dynamics are incredibly sensitive and tender. I do not know just how it will go, but there is a growing surge among Unitarians to affirm and to have something affirmed.
Many of us are sick, heartsick, and saturated with the negativism we have suffered for several decades now. It is not just the urban crisis nor is it youth. It is Unitarian negativism and its emptiness that helped bring about some of our emptiness.
Time was when the way to bring in hordes of new members was to attack orthodoxy week by week, to use our scholarship to say how very foolish and superstitious were those who had not yet seen the light.
That kind of effort is revealed as pretty empty these days.
Now we want something to affirm. I believe we are tired of critiques week after week. We have had enough criticism, have dished it out (that is) in the past 30 years certainly to carry us through the next 30 or so to the year 2000.
I heard someone say the other day, we are open and tolerant and accept everybody into our fellowship, everybody, that is, except that Jewish boy, Jesus of Nazareth. Still hung up on keeping Christ out of church except at Christmas!
But, now I see fragile and I believe real signs of movement and indeed worship wherein increasing numbers of Unitarians reach for their affirmations. Not Christian, not anti-Christian. Something new and not yet defined.
Examples: The president of Starr King School with the ministry, Robert Kimball, spent a year in India before becoming president of the school. Br. Kimball, by the way, has been a leading Tillich scholar and is executor of Tillich’s will with respect to hierarchy papers.
Kimball told me last week he never really had much use for theism, the “God-thing” did not do much for him but he found, half with amusement , half with relaxation, that he could see more real sense in polytheism when he was in India and since. I have not yet pursued with him the universal forces he would identify as the gods or the near ultimates that impinge upon men. Suffice it for now to say he relaxed – and become more effective religiously – while in India and has brought back this caring and (paradoxically) relaxed religious attitude to his work with students for our ministry.
Example: “At Starr King, for the past six years,” said Kimball, “they hardly every had a worship service or chapel, as they call it. This year they have chapel daily, sometimes more than once in a day, not because he has asked for it but because the students want it, want to same something, express something, affirm something.”
Example: Meeting with the Meadville theological students a few months ago I was surprised that only one student still held his ground (as the students of a few years back invariably did), for a hard-hitting, bombshell-political activist stance for the Unitarian ministry.
Like it or not, the other students, who, while they all work a quarter in the ghetto and all call for change in society, and are sickened by the injustices they have seen, having seen, and continuing to work, the other men are moving about more in the area of worship, of dealing there with feelings, problems of individual alienation and sickness and death, and the meaning of life, interpersonal relationships. Something is happening.
Example: In our own church school one of the major emphases of the program, growing in importance and in the involvement of a larger leadership group is worship.
Example: Not very long ago our own LRY rarely had worship services. Now they have them regularly and they are wonderful, sensitive, some are brilliant. I do not mean old forum, I do not mean reading responsible readings, I mean original words and poems, music that is contemporary, lighting effects, real emotions, and expressions of beauty.
Something with incredibly fragile but extremely important religious subtlety is taking place.
Example: I told you earlier about the Joseph Priestley ministers to whom I delivered a paper some months ago including the affirmation of God in new ways since the old ways and definitions are dead ... and where the men said: “Five years ago we could not have talked about this or about God. We would have been embarrassed ... but today we talk about it.”
One man visiting from Connecticut, said, “The men in up there tell each other they have a yearning, a kind of anguish over the loss of something they once had.”
Something is happening in Unitarianism and while we argue at General Assemblies – pump adrenaline and work both openly and secretly with all our minds and tortured insights to do what conscience dictates, and we try to find ourselves best serving humanity, something else is happening at the same time.
The search for an affirmation.
One thing could happen to us that I do not believe will happen. We could merely return to what we used to call “The Everlasting Arms.”
I do not think that is the future of our search for affirmation. It’s the wrong affirmation. I do not think we will return to a pietism that says, “Just lie back and let Cosmic Big Daddy to it.”
But we will move to a new kind of piety, a new appreciation of mystery, a new love of something in us evoked by the religious impulse. I do not know quite how it will turn out, this new delicate thrust for meaning and beauty, but it comes like the synthesis of Hegel. We move because we must!
We have had the thesis, old humanism or anti-orthodoxy. ...
We have been living in the antithesis, the shock waves surging against our old liberalism and the failure of that liberalism to meet human emptiness and on the social scene, white emptiness and all that has meant of guilt and self-flagellation. ... Now we move toward synthesis, a new communication and a new worship, man, and mystery together.
Learn to love or perish.
Learn to communicate or die.
Come to affirmation or the world falls down the tragic years and breaks the spine of humanity.
O god:
Damned by the arrogance of two ages;
The age of false pride,
And the age of the cop-out:
We lay thee to rest in the bed of your own ashes,
And look up to wonder at what flies from the coals.
Amen.
