a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday February 29th, 2004
Opening Words:
“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan, 'Press on,' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” --Calvin Coolidge
*****
Five Sundays in a February is a rarity: it only happens once every twenty-eight years, which means that this is the first time it has ever taken place in the time I’ve been a minister. The last time it happened was in 1976 -- I was a nineteen-year-old sophomore at the University of Washington, living in the closest thing to a garrett I could afford -- an ancient dorm room in Hansee Hall that was, literally, smaller than a lot of walk-in closets I’ve seen -- and working day and night on a manuscript that I was certain would win me fame, fortune, and literary immortality: a one-act play with the working title “Faust: the Musical.” And it won’t happen again until 2032, at which point I will be 75 and hopefully retired...although perhaps still available to fill a pulpit now and then for a colleague confronting an extra Sunday, and thus supplement whatever meager Social Security benefits may still be available to those of us who have the good fortune to live so long.
I’ve actually been thinking quite a bit about Time this past week. Like many of you, I imagine, I grew up thinking of time as something that could be neatly divided into three discrete components: Past, Present, and Future -- What Was, What Is, What Yet Shall Be. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to see that Time is not nearly so tidy as once I thought. Take the Past, for instance. As a historian I quickly learned that because human memory is imperfect, and even the most meticulous records likewise contain selective inclusions and omissions, our recollection of “What Was” never truly represents “What REALLY Was” -- it’s always some combination of “if memory serves” and “what might have been,” as hindsight and human imagination combine to filter out regrets and uncomfortable details, minimize embarrassment, emphasize the pleasant and admirable, or sometimes cling to feelings of anger and resentment, even exaggerating their importance as they fester, over time, within a bitter heart. We know that the Past has happened, and that it has made us what we are today...that it can’t be changed, that it is gone forever, that it is useless (even dangerous!) to dwell there for too long...and yet, what passes for history is often simply an imaginary re-creation of a time that never was, on which (often times) not even those who were there can agree on all the details.
Likewise, those who complain about “revisionist history” are often really saying “that’s not how I remember it” or “that’s not what I was told.” But the truth of the matter is that all GOOD history is to some degree revisionist, as time and distance give us a better perspective on the past, allowing us to “look again” at the evidence -- to gather together and RE-vision divergent experiences and recollections, and reconcile them based on our superior hindsight and knowledge of “what happened next.” Just as the news is the first draft of history, history is in turn the final draft of the news. And as any writer knows, the difference between a terrible first draft and a superb final draft is revision.
Of course, predicting the Future is even worse. What Yet Shall Be sounds so determined, so fatalistic. The Future embodies our Destiny, which cannot be predicted or controlled. And yet the Future inevitably contains within it both a wide range of possibilities and an element of choice: we can always imagine an entire panoply of possible alternatives (some of which are always more realistic than others, of course), but at most we can only choose to pursue a relative handful, and the choices that we make shape and limit the range of future, Future Possibilities, while at the same time revealing unforeseen new ones. As with the Past, we experience the Future as an amalgam of imagination and decision -- a dynamic combination of dreams and plans by which we hope to make our aspirations real.
Which brings us at last to the Present. Is “here and now” merely something which lingers for a moment and then passes in an instant, or is there more to it than that? And why do we have such a hard time living in the present moment; why do we spend so much of our lives, our mental and emotional energy, reminiscing about what has gone before, or trying to anticipate what will happen next? And this is not to discount either the pleasure or the importance of nostalgic daydreaming about “better days” both behind and before us. But do we even have a word to describe someone who lives their entire life completely focused on the here and now, on “What Is” in the present moment? I sure can’t think of one. If anything, what images I do have are pejorative: a person who never thinks about the past or the future, but who only “lives for the moment,” is generally considered stupid and short-sighted, or at best somehow lacking in vision and perspective. And yet, you would think that “living in the moment” would be a positive thing, since this moment is all we can really count on in life, it’s right here in front of us, and once it is gone it is gone forever, and will never come again.
The word “tenacious” means, literally, to hold tightly, but in common usage it is often simply a euphemistic synonym for “stubborn.” During the waning years of my marriage, this was a frequent topic of discussion in our household: whether it was the tenacity of our mutual love that was holding us together, or our respective individual stubbornness that was driving us apart. I’m not sure whether we ever really arrived at a satisfactory answer to that question, but in the process we did discover that there are at least two different styles of stubborn, which I came to think of as “bull-headed” and “pig-headed.” Bull-headed is relatively straight-forward. When a bull sees red, he puts his head down and charges, and whenever this happens it’s a pretty good idea not to be standing in his way. Pig-headed is a lot more subtle. When a pig smells a truffle, she will go to great effort to root that truffle out, but if for some reason her initial efforts are frustrated, she’ll try another way, and then another, and another, until she finally wins her prize. Both critters are persistent, but pigs are also patient, and this provides a special resilience to their stubbornness. And just so no one is left confused by the pronouns, I was the pig-headed one in my household (which, I’m sorry to say, often make my partner see red).
And then, just to round out the barnyard, there is always your good old-fashioned Missouri Mule, who simply digs in his feet and refuses to budge whenever he encounters something that doesn’t suit him. The mule, of course, is the poster-animal of stubbornness, but tenacity (it seems to me) entails quite a bit more than simply digging in one’s heels. Patience, Persistence, Resilience -- not just a refusal to give in or let go, but also a refusal to give up...a sense of direction and purpose which one retains even in the face of obstacles and adversity. It’s the attitude of a survivor, who stubbornly clings to both life and hope even as those around them lose first one and then the other. It’s the attitude of success, which is persistent enough to build upon its failures...not by stubbornly attempting the same thing again and again, in the vain hope of a different result, but rather by patiently learning from mistakes and moving forward along a new path, never losing sight of the ultimate goal, never losing confidence that it will someday be achieved.
Tenacity is also differentiated from mere stubbornness by its Vision. The stubborn personality often refuses to give in simply for the sake of not giving in, but the tenacious personality always has a goal in mind. It knows when to let go in order to get something back, and it recognizes when its own inflexibility is getting in the way. Stubbornness is about pride; Tenacity is about Purpose. Stubbornness is a contest of wills; but a tenacious competitor can appreciate a tenacious opponent, and both potentially grow stronger through their struggle together. Stubbornness is a character flaw, blind to its own shortcomings, and thus ultimately self-destructive. But Tenacity is a virtue, which builds character by empowering an individual to overcome both personal frustration and personal discouragement, in addition to whatever external obstacles they may face, in order to achieve a worthy goal.
“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan, 'Press on,' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” For someone with a reputation of being a man of few words, Silent Cal sure said a mouthful when he said all that. And the great irony, of course, is that the Coolidge administration is probably best remembered by historians for doing nothing, for having NOT been the terribly corrupt Harding administration which preceded it (quite likely the worst administration in U.S. history, with the possible exception of Ulysses S. Grant’s) or the Hoover administration which followed, and ushered in the Great Depression. While occupying the White House, Coolidge averaged about 11 hours of sleep a day: rising late, retiring early, and napping for up to four hours every afternoon, a habit which inspired H.L. Mencken to write “Nero fiddled while Rome burned, but Coolidge only snores.” Much of the rest of his day he spent sitting in a rocking chair on the White House porch, smoking cigars and trying not to encourage those who came to speak with him to overstay their welcome by showing any sign of interest in what they had to say. When Groucho Marx spotted Coolidge one evening in the audience at a performance of the Marx Brother’s vaudeville show “Animal Crackers,” he reportedly cried out “Isn’t it past your bedtime, Calvin?” And when Dorothy Parker heard the news of his death, in 1933, she is said to have remarked “How can they tell?” For his own part, Coolidge is known to have quipped that all this shut-eye was in the national interest, since while he was sleeping it was impossible for him to initiate anything new. In Coolidge’s view, “the chief business of the American people IS business,” and the business of government was to stay out of their way.
Equally ironic is the fact that it was Coolidge’s energetic successor, an orphaned, self-made millionaire technocrat whom Coolidge sometimes refered to as “the Wundah Boy,” who ended up lending his name to the shantytowns that sprang up in the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash, and the 25% unemployment which followed that, and whose reputation has been tenaciously linked with the Great Depression ever since. Herbert Hoover tried everything he could think of to turn the economy around; unfortunately, his mind ran more to optimistic platitudes and a stubborn ideological preference for encouraging private, local inititives than it did effective federal intervention and direct public relief. Herbert Hoover believed that the Great Depression was the result of global economic forces beyond his effective control, and that like a hurricane or some other Act of God, individuals needed to rely upon their own resourcefulness to weather the storm until it passed. “Every time we find solutions outside of government,” he told an audience of struggling farmers, “we have not only strengthened character, but we have preserved our sense of real self-government.” But when voters went to the polls in 1932, they turned him out in a landslide, and supported instead a candidate who insisted that “the country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”
Patience. Persistence. Resilience. Vision. More than talent, more than genius, more even than education, these are the qualities which empower individuals to “press on” in a determined way, and thus eventually overcome whatever obstacles stand between them and their desired goal. And these same qualities can also be found in tenacious institutions, or a tenatious society, where individuals come together to work towards shared and common goals. In his “Maritime History of Massachusetts,” Samuel Eliot Morison described New Englanders as “a tough but nervous, tenacious but restless race...materially ambitious, yet prone to introspection, and subject to waves of religious emotion...a race whose typical member is eternally torn between a passion for righteousness and a desire to get on in the world.” And this same “restless tenacity” is what animates our aspirations as well as our ambitions -- that introspective, at times passionately emotional, religious desire for righteousness which we “hold tightly” in our hands and in our hearts, and which ultimately gives our lives a larger meaning....
Sunday, February 29, 2004
Sunday, February 22, 2004
ABUNDANCE!
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday February 22th, 2004
OPENING WORDS: “Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.” -- Hosea Ballou
I’ve decided that I could get used to this concept of the one-word sermon title. It’s so succinct, so efficient -- and yet so richly evocative as well. Joy! Love! And now Abundance! -- a word which means, literally, “overflowing,” thus making it a perfect compliment to these other topics of recent weeks. Abundant Love. Abundant Joy. Abundant blessings of all sorts: the word simply overflows with connotations of wealth and prosperity, freedom, success and happiness. It’s a word which positively inspires generosity and creativity; and then there’s always that lovely scriptural reference to John 10:10 -- “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I come that they may have life, and have life more abundantly.” Not “Eternal Life” in the sense of a life-span which lasts forever. But “Abundant Life” -- a life-force which overflows with the Spirit of the Divine, a life-style which is emersed in a consciousness of ultimate meaning and value.
The opposite of abundance might be thought of as scarcity, or deficiency, in which the blessings of life are reduced to a trickle. Poverty and Privation. Hunger, Uncertainty, Fear. I suppose it’s possible to have all these things in abundance as well -- our lives can overflow with the bad as well as with the good, although there is certainly abundant irony in that. And yet, often abundance is in the eye of the beholder...what appears abundant to one may seem barely sufficient, or even inadequate, to another, and how do we determine whose perceptions are correct? In his second Inaugural address in 1937, as America struggled to escape the privations of the Great Depression through a series of controversial federal policies known as the “New Deal,” FDR remarked that “the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” Sixty-seven years (and eleven Presidential administrations) later, we seem to have forgotten this fundamental criterion of the worthiness of a society. Has our nation changed so much in just two generations, that we have metaphorically gained the whole world, and lost our own souls? Have we somehow allowed our relative material abundance to distract us from more essential spiritual values of generosity and compassion?
You know, I’ve often had to wonder how it is that such an unrepentant, dyed-in-the-wool Socialist like myself has found himself serving, and serving quite happily and successfully, in such affluent communities as Midland Texas, and Nantucket Island, and now here in Carlisle. I think part of it has to do with the fact that, although I’ve never really had much money myself, I grew up in a fairly affluent household, in a fairly affluent neighborhood, and thus saw close up (and at a very impressionable age) what that was like, along with the abundant psychological pressures that often emerge from wrestling with the temptation of confusing one’s self-worth with one’s net worth. And I think part of it has to do with the fact that I try never to take myself too seriously, which gives others permission not to take me too seriously either, but rather just seriously enough that perhaps they receive some fresh insight into their own lives from looking at life itself from a slightly different perspective.
We Americans like to think that we live in a class-less society. We don’t, really, but since our forebearers once fought a revolution based on the self-evident truths that all white, male property-owners of a certain age were created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, it still gives us comfort to pretend that we do. And one of the consequences of this is that no matter how much (or really, how little) money we may have, we still typically feel like we’re “Middle-Class.” Even Bill Gates (who is certainly smart enough to know better), still basically feels like a very, very, very, very well-to-do Middle Class American. But for the rest of us, this same cultural phenomenon often means that we tend to assume that how we live is “normal,” -- while at the same time privately feeling that anyone who has considerably more than we do is somehow “extravagant,” and wondering how anyone else can get by on anything less. These assumptions don’t generally rise to the level of conscious thought; if we stopped to think about it we would know, intellectually at least, that they weren’t exactly true. But typically we don’t think about it, unless something dramatically changes -- unless we lose our job, or are in danger of losing our job; or (which is sometimes even worse) we receive a sudden financial windfall, like winning the lottery. Our comfortable notions of “appropriate abundance” become disrupted, and we are compelled to recalculate our entire relationship to the material world.
Tied in with all of this is something we sometimes like to call the “Protestant Work Ethic.” This term is derived from the writings of a German Sociologist of Religion named Max Weber, who lived and worked about a hundred years ago. Weber was trying to understand why Western Civilization was the way it was, and he basically ended up blaming it all on Puritan angst. Medieval economists (who were basically monks) understood that Personal Industry combined with Frugality (two good “religious” virtues) would eventually create wealth. But they also understood that Wealth often led to laziness and self-indulgence, which in turn often led to dissolute Poverty...and so they encouraged those who would listen to avoid this problem by continuing to work hard and spend little, and contributing their excess wealth to the less fortunate in the form Christian Charity, which would help you get to heaven. But John Calvin believed that the ultimate fate of any particular individual’s immortal soul had all been determined by God before the beginning of time; it was all predestined, and so (according to Weber) this resulted in a situation where Protestant Christians transformed the spiritual “other-worldly asceticism” of the monastery into the “Worldly Asceticism” embodied in the Spirit of Capitalism, in which industry and frugality continued to remain virtues, but accumulated wealth was reinvested in expanding the enterprise, since Charity was now irrelevant to one’s salvation, while success was considered a tangible sign of God’s pre-determined favor. The wealthier you became, the more it meant God loved you. Or at least that’s how Max Weber saw it.
There are plenty of problems with Weber’s sociology, but the great irony is that because his ideas were so innovative and popular at the time they were first published, in many ways they have become self-fulfilling. In large part this was due to the fact that they provided a theological justification for yet another philosophy, known as Social Darwinism, which was already popular at the time Weber was writing. As you might guess, the Social Darwinists believed that human civilization was essentially a struggle for “survival of the fittest” -- society is divided into “winners” and “losers,” both the rich and the poor get what they deserve, and any attempt to ameliorate the suffering of the latter only makes civilization itself less strong. Social Darwinism is a self-serving philosophy which worships both power and privilege, while essentially renouncing the fundamental principles of compassionate ethical conduct commonly shared among all of the world’s great religions. Yet because it sounds “scientific,” and because of Weber’s observation that within some sects of Protestant Christianity wealth was historically considered a sign of God’s favor, it has proved surprisingly resilient, especially among those who have accumulated some degree of wealth, and who want to believe that they are among God’s favorites.
And even those of use who explicitly reject these values and assumptions sometimes still have to deal with their implicit consequences. In my experience, this problem shows up most directly when we enter into the process of trying to figure out for ourselves the precise relationship between work and lifestyle that we believe will produce for us the greatest level of personal fulfillment. It’s a task we typically first confront when we are young and making decisions about our careers, but in many ways it remains a challenge all our lives, as we continue to grow and learn about what truly makes us feel happy and fulfilled. I personally believe, for example, that frugality is still a very satisfying lifestyle choice. I understand that contemporary American society is mostly based on “consumption,” and the notion that somehow acquiring more stuff will provide us with happiness...and at times I still even buy into that...although I try not to take it too seriously. But you can all probably tell just by the way I dress all week long: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.” -- I have a whole closet full of stuff like that.
My main problem comes on the other end: trying to figure out where the line is between frugality and parsimony. I don’t mind living cheaply, and I certainly want to feel like I’m getting my money’s worth, but I sure don’t want to be thought of as a cheapskate, either in the way that I treat myself or in my interactions with others. And this brings me to the second part of the equation, which is the realization that generosity is not only an act of charity, of “Love” -- it is also an act of Creativity...a way in which we put our life-energy to work in the world in order to change it for the better. When we allow our Creativity to overflow...when we live life abundantly, sharing our industry with others, good things happen. And this, more than any other thing that we can do, is what gives live meaning.
I want to leave you with just three more brief observations which you can take home with you and ponder over the next few days or weeks, and then maybe when you get a chance you can tell me what you think. And the first of these is the insight that you can almost always get by on a lot less than you think, and that it’s a lot better to figure this out BEFORE you actually have to do it. I have a colleague out on the West Coast who is encouraging folks, as a Lenten discipline, to try to live for six weeks on the minimum wage for their area. I mean, think about that for a moment. Even if we took the mortgage off the table, and ignored things like our pensions and our health insurance, how many of us could actually “get by” on $6.75 an hour, or $270 a week...before taxes? And yet there are lots of people in this country who are trying to get by on this, or even less....and the realization that if you had to you could too is actually rather liberating....which is not at all to minimize the hardship of those who are trying to do it for real. Thoreau said it as well as anyone: “if you are restricted in your range by poverty...you are but confined to the most significant and vital experiences.... It is life near the bone where it is sweetest. You are defended from being a trifler.”
This brings me to the second observation, which is that the Best things in Life truly are free. “Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only,” Thoreau wrote. “Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul....” And this is not to suggest that because the best things are free, we don’t need money at all. But remember never to let the scramble for money distract you from enjoying the things that money just can’t buy. Because if you do, you are getting ripped off. You are cheating yourself of the World’s most abundant treasures, the things which ultimately make life worth living.
And finally, don’t forget the principle of Noblesse Oblige -- “to those to whom much is given, much is expected.” This simple idea is what truly ties together all of the activities of a meaningful and fulfilling life. When life has treated you to abundant blessings, pass them on. And if life isn’t treating you so well at the moment, don’t be too proud or stubborn to accept and enjoy the shared abundance of others. Because when we let it be what it truly is, Abundance Overflows. It can’t be contained, it can’t be hoarded, it can’t be bottled and sold in stores, or even saved for a rainy day. But the good news is, there’s more where that came from. And that knowledge is what gives us life, and gives us life more abundantly.
READING: from Walden by Henry David Thoreau
“Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society....We are often reminded that if there were bestowed on us the wealth of Croesus, our aims must still be the same, and our means essentially the same. Moreover, if you are restricted in your range by poverty, if you cannot buy books and newspapers, for instance, you are but confined to the most significant and vital experiences; you are compelled to deal with the material which yields the most sugar and the most starch. It is life near the bone where it is sweetest. You are defended from being a trifler. No [one] loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher. Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul....
“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth....”
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday February 22th, 2004
OPENING WORDS: “Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.” -- Hosea Ballou
I’ve decided that I could get used to this concept of the one-word sermon title. It’s so succinct, so efficient -- and yet so richly evocative as well. Joy! Love! And now Abundance! -- a word which means, literally, “overflowing,” thus making it a perfect compliment to these other topics of recent weeks. Abundant Love. Abundant Joy. Abundant blessings of all sorts: the word simply overflows with connotations of wealth and prosperity, freedom, success and happiness. It’s a word which positively inspires generosity and creativity; and then there’s always that lovely scriptural reference to John 10:10 -- “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I come that they may have life, and have life more abundantly.” Not “Eternal Life” in the sense of a life-span which lasts forever. But “Abundant Life” -- a life-force which overflows with the Spirit of the Divine, a life-style which is emersed in a consciousness of ultimate meaning and value.
The opposite of abundance might be thought of as scarcity, or deficiency, in which the blessings of life are reduced to a trickle. Poverty and Privation. Hunger, Uncertainty, Fear. I suppose it’s possible to have all these things in abundance as well -- our lives can overflow with the bad as well as with the good, although there is certainly abundant irony in that. And yet, often abundance is in the eye of the beholder...what appears abundant to one may seem barely sufficient, or even inadequate, to another, and how do we determine whose perceptions are correct? In his second Inaugural address in 1937, as America struggled to escape the privations of the Great Depression through a series of controversial federal policies known as the “New Deal,” FDR remarked that “the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” Sixty-seven years (and eleven Presidential administrations) later, we seem to have forgotten this fundamental criterion of the worthiness of a society. Has our nation changed so much in just two generations, that we have metaphorically gained the whole world, and lost our own souls? Have we somehow allowed our relative material abundance to distract us from more essential spiritual values of generosity and compassion?
You know, I’ve often had to wonder how it is that such an unrepentant, dyed-in-the-wool Socialist like myself has found himself serving, and serving quite happily and successfully, in such affluent communities as Midland Texas, and Nantucket Island, and now here in Carlisle. I think part of it has to do with the fact that, although I’ve never really had much money myself, I grew up in a fairly affluent household, in a fairly affluent neighborhood, and thus saw close up (and at a very impressionable age) what that was like, along with the abundant psychological pressures that often emerge from wrestling with the temptation of confusing one’s self-worth with one’s net worth. And I think part of it has to do with the fact that I try never to take myself too seriously, which gives others permission not to take me too seriously either, but rather just seriously enough that perhaps they receive some fresh insight into their own lives from looking at life itself from a slightly different perspective.
We Americans like to think that we live in a class-less society. We don’t, really, but since our forebearers once fought a revolution based on the self-evident truths that all white, male property-owners of a certain age were created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, it still gives us comfort to pretend that we do. And one of the consequences of this is that no matter how much (or really, how little) money we may have, we still typically feel like we’re “Middle-Class.” Even Bill Gates (who is certainly smart enough to know better), still basically feels like a very, very, very, very well-to-do Middle Class American. But for the rest of us, this same cultural phenomenon often means that we tend to assume that how we live is “normal,” -- while at the same time privately feeling that anyone who has considerably more than we do is somehow “extravagant,” and wondering how anyone else can get by on anything less. These assumptions don’t generally rise to the level of conscious thought; if we stopped to think about it we would know, intellectually at least, that they weren’t exactly true. But typically we don’t think about it, unless something dramatically changes -- unless we lose our job, or are in danger of losing our job; or (which is sometimes even worse) we receive a sudden financial windfall, like winning the lottery. Our comfortable notions of “appropriate abundance” become disrupted, and we are compelled to recalculate our entire relationship to the material world.
Tied in with all of this is something we sometimes like to call the “Protestant Work Ethic.” This term is derived from the writings of a German Sociologist of Religion named Max Weber, who lived and worked about a hundred years ago. Weber was trying to understand why Western Civilization was the way it was, and he basically ended up blaming it all on Puritan angst. Medieval economists (who were basically monks) understood that Personal Industry combined with Frugality (two good “religious” virtues) would eventually create wealth. But they also understood that Wealth often led to laziness and self-indulgence, which in turn often led to dissolute Poverty...and so they encouraged those who would listen to avoid this problem by continuing to work hard and spend little, and contributing their excess wealth to the less fortunate in the form Christian Charity, which would help you get to heaven. But John Calvin believed that the ultimate fate of any particular individual’s immortal soul had all been determined by God before the beginning of time; it was all predestined, and so (according to Weber) this resulted in a situation where Protestant Christians transformed the spiritual “other-worldly asceticism” of the monastery into the “Worldly Asceticism” embodied in the Spirit of Capitalism, in which industry and frugality continued to remain virtues, but accumulated wealth was reinvested in expanding the enterprise, since Charity was now irrelevant to one’s salvation, while success was considered a tangible sign of God’s pre-determined favor. The wealthier you became, the more it meant God loved you. Or at least that’s how Max Weber saw it.
There are plenty of problems with Weber’s sociology, but the great irony is that because his ideas were so innovative and popular at the time they were first published, in many ways they have become self-fulfilling. In large part this was due to the fact that they provided a theological justification for yet another philosophy, known as Social Darwinism, which was already popular at the time Weber was writing. As you might guess, the Social Darwinists believed that human civilization was essentially a struggle for “survival of the fittest” -- society is divided into “winners” and “losers,” both the rich and the poor get what they deserve, and any attempt to ameliorate the suffering of the latter only makes civilization itself less strong. Social Darwinism is a self-serving philosophy which worships both power and privilege, while essentially renouncing the fundamental principles of compassionate ethical conduct commonly shared among all of the world’s great religions. Yet because it sounds “scientific,” and because of Weber’s observation that within some sects of Protestant Christianity wealth was historically considered a sign of God’s favor, it has proved surprisingly resilient, especially among those who have accumulated some degree of wealth, and who want to believe that they are among God’s favorites.
And even those of use who explicitly reject these values and assumptions sometimes still have to deal with their implicit consequences. In my experience, this problem shows up most directly when we enter into the process of trying to figure out for ourselves the precise relationship between work and lifestyle that we believe will produce for us the greatest level of personal fulfillment. It’s a task we typically first confront when we are young and making decisions about our careers, but in many ways it remains a challenge all our lives, as we continue to grow and learn about what truly makes us feel happy and fulfilled. I personally believe, for example, that frugality is still a very satisfying lifestyle choice. I understand that contemporary American society is mostly based on “consumption,” and the notion that somehow acquiring more stuff will provide us with happiness...and at times I still even buy into that...although I try not to take it too seriously. But you can all probably tell just by the way I dress all week long: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.” -- I have a whole closet full of stuff like that.
My main problem comes on the other end: trying to figure out where the line is between frugality and parsimony. I don’t mind living cheaply, and I certainly want to feel like I’m getting my money’s worth, but I sure don’t want to be thought of as a cheapskate, either in the way that I treat myself or in my interactions with others. And this brings me to the second part of the equation, which is the realization that generosity is not only an act of charity, of “Love” -- it is also an act of Creativity...a way in which we put our life-energy to work in the world in order to change it for the better. When we allow our Creativity to overflow...when we live life abundantly, sharing our industry with others, good things happen. And this, more than any other thing that we can do, is what gives live meaning.
I want to leave you with just three more brief observations which you can take home with you and ponder over the next few days or weeks, and then maybe when you get a chance you can tell me what you think. And the first of these is the insight that you can almost always get by on a lot less than you think, and that it’s a lot better to figure this out BEFORE you actually have to do it. I have a colleague out on the West Coast who is encouraging folks, as a Lenten discipline, to try to live for six weeks on the minimum wage for their area. I mean, think about that for a moment. Even if we took the mortgage off the table, and ignored things like our pensions and our health insurance, how many of us could actually “get by” on $6.75 an hour, or $270 a week...before taxes? And yet there are lots of people in this country who are trying to get by on this, or even less....and the realization that if you had to you could too is actually rather liberating....which is not at all to minimize the hardship of those who are trying to do it for real. Thoreau said it as well as anyone: “if you are restricted in your range by poverty...you are but confined to the most significant and vital experiences.... It is life near the bone where it is sweetest. You are defended from being a trifler.”
This brings me to the second observation, which is that the Best things in Life truly are free. “Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only,” Thoreau wrote. “Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul....” And this is not to suggest that because the best things are free, we don’t need money at all. But remember never to let the scramble for money distract you from enjoying the things that money just can’t buy. Because if you do, you are getting ripped off. You are cheating yourself of the World’s most abundant treasures, the things which ultimately make life worth living.
And finally, don’t forget the principle of Noblesse Oblige -- “to those to whom much is given, much is expected.” This simple idea is what truly ties together all of the activities of a meaningful and fulfilling life. When life has treated you to abundant blessings, pass them on. And if life isn’t treating you so well at the moment, don’t be too proud or stubborn to accept and enjoy the shared abundance of others. Because when we let it be what it truly is, Abundance Overflows. It can’t be contained, it can’t be hoarded, it can’t be bottled and sold in stores, or even saved for a rainy day. But the good news is, there’s more where that came from. And that knowledge is what gives us life, and gives us life more abundantly.
READING: from Walden by Henry David Thoreau
“Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society....We are often reminded that if there were bestowed on us the wealth of Croesus, our aims must still be the same, and our means essentially the same. Moreover, if you are restricted in your range by poverty, if you cannot buy books and newspapers, for instance, you are but confined to the most significant and vital experiences; you are compelled to deal with the material which yields the most sugar and the most starch. It is life near the bone where it is sweetest. You are defended from being a trifler. No [one] loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher. Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul....
“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth....”
Sunday, February 15, 2004
LOVE!
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday February 15, 2004
[extemporaneous introduction]
You know, there’s been so much written and said about the subject of Love that sometimes it seems impossible to come up with a fresh approach to the topic. We see it everywhere, talk about it constantly, but do we ever truly understand it? that is, see love as love truly is, rather than simply being swept away head-over-heels by its irresistible power, often when we least expect it...as so many of us have in our lives (and maybe even hope to again). There are so many truisms, so many fantasies and clichés, yet Love the Cliché will lose out to Love the Irresistible Power every time. And even in the fairy tale, it's rarely "happily ever after." No wonder Shakespeare cautions us to "speak low, if you speak love." Clichés do not become clichés by accident, of course; behind each cliché there is a fragment of a larger truth which mere words simply cannot express with the same intensity and freshness as the experience itself. And yet we inevitably struggle to find those words, as if, by giving a name to what we feel, we might just gain a little control over the experience, just as the Miller's daughter gained control of Rumpelstiltskin in that classic fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm.
What is true of Romance is also, in many ways, true of Religion as well. For example, every Sunday morning here at the First Religious Society we stand up and declare proudly that "Love is the Doctrine of this Church." But what do we really mean when we say this? Typically, when I think of Love in a Religious context, my mind is almost immediately drawn to Paul’s famous description in 1st Corinthians 13: "Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on is own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends." Or I’m reminded of the one Great Commandment of both the Gospels and the Hebrew Bible: to love the Lord our God with all our heart, and all our soul, and all our strength, and all our mind, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Or I may even be tempted to try to make sense of the Scriptural admonition to love my enemies, to "do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you"-- perhaps one of the more troubling and problematic edicts of Christian Ethics. And yet, there it is. "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.... " "Greater Love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends..." What are we to make of statements like this, in a world where some people are willing to blow themselves up simply to take the lives of a few of their enemies, all in the perceived service of God? And does this somehow in turn justify pre-emptive violence based on fear and suspicion: doing unto others BEFORE they get a chance to do it unto you? Or does Love teach us a better way?
In his famous sermon on "Loving Your Enemies," Martin Luther King Jr. attempted to make sense of these Biblical injunctions by talking about the three different words for love in Ancient Greek: eros, philia, and agape, observing that in each instance it is agape which is elevated to the staring role. King described agape as an "understanding and creative, redemptive goodwill for all" -- a love that empowers us to dwell together in peace. He continued by saying: "An overflowing love which seeks nothing in return, agape is the love of God operating in the human heart. At this level, we love [others] not because we like them, nor because their ways appeal to us, nor even because they possess some type of divine spark; we love [them] because God loves them. At this level, we love the person who does an evil deed, although we hate the deed that [they do]."
Empathy, Compassion, Divine Forgiveness...this is the level at which agape functions. Yet it's often seemed to me that agape love is highly overrated, while eros and philia have gotten something of a bum rap. In the lives of all but the truly saintly, agape rapidly becomes distant and abstract: it lacks the intensity, the immediacy, of the other two types of love. How can we have compassion if passion itself is missing? Where is empathy without a glimmer of understanding?
Erotic love is passionate by nature: intense, immediate, powerful and often irrational. Erotic love frequently manifests itself as the painful hunger to possess, fully and completely, another individual, and to be possessed by them in turn: a union, a mutual joining, a desire to become whole and fulfilled in partnership with someone whose absence makes us suffer, and leaves us feeling fragmented and incomplete, empty and alone. This momentary satisfaction is an illusion, of course: a temporary fusion too intense to be prolonged indefinitely. And yet we crave it with an intensity beyond all other appetites. In the Symposium, Plato has Socrates use the word eros to describe the philosopher's passionate desire for wisdom: a craving, a hunger for the knowledge that will complete us and make us whole, make us one with the truth. When we "seek the truth in love," our search must be a passionate search, our desire for truth something which takes possession of us and drives out all the easy answers and facile explanations: irrational to the extent that it scorns mere rationalization, and satisfied only by a complete and utter union with "The True," however ephemeral it may at first appear.
Philia, on the other hand, is a far more rational form of love. The word is frequently translated as "friendship," but this really doesn't do it justice. Philia is a form of love which grows out of our ability to recognize differences of opinion, of preference, of whatever, and still honor that person's integrity and worth, whether we agree with them or not; or indeed, whether we even like them or not. It's the love which enables us to survive our disagreements, and the ebb and flow of our passions, and ultimately to affirm the power of our common humanity: not God's love "operating in the human heart," but an essentially human love born of our ability to perceive and understand our connectedness, and mutual interdependence, with one another as human beings. And the basis of this friendship, this philia, is not so much Affection as it is Respect.
I think the most articulate description of this I’ve ever heard was Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s Ware Lecture "Love Is Too Strong a Word," which he delivered at the UUA General Assembly in Rochester, New York way back in 1986. (I can’t begin to tell you how hard I had to search to find this again, so I’m going to quote it at some length). But essentially, that evening Vonnegut said to the assembled Unitarian-Universalists (myself included):
***
I will tell you what my theory is: The Christian preachers exhort their listeners to love one another, and to love their neighbors and so on. Love is simply too strong a word to be much use in ordinary, day-to-day relationships. Love is for Romeo and Juliet.
I'm to love my neighbor? How can I do that when I'm not even speaking to my wife and kids today? My wife said to me the other day, after a knock-down, drag-out fight about interior decoration, "I don't love you any more." And I said to her, "So what else is new?" She really didn't love me then, which was perfectly normal. She will love me some other time -- I think, I hope. It's possible.
If she had wanted to terminate the marriage, to carry it past the point of no return, she would have had to say "I don't respect you any more." Now -- that would be terminal.
One of the many unnecessary American catastrophes going on right now...is all the people who are getting divorced because they don't love each other any more. That is like trading in a car when the ashtrays are full. When you don't respect your mate anymore -- that's when the transmission is shot and there's a crack in the engine block.
I like to think that Jesus said in Aramaic, "Ye shall respect one another." That would be a sign to me that he really wanted to help us here on earth, and not just in the afterlife. Then again, he had no way of knowing what ludicrously high standards Hollywood was going to set for love....
And look at the spectrum of emotions we automatically think of when we hear the word "love." If you can't love your neighbors, then you can at least like them. If you can't like them, you can at least not give a damn about them. If you can't ignore them, then you have to hate them, right? You've exhausted all the other possibilities. That's a quick trip to hate, isn't it? And it starts with love. It is such a logical trip, like the one from "white hot" to "ice-cold" with "red hot, hot, warm, tepid, room temperature, cool, chilly, and freezing" in between. The spectrum of emotions suggested by the word "love" again: "love," and then "like," and then "don't give a damn about," and then "hate."
That is my explanation of why hatred is so common in that part of the world dominated by Christianity. There are all these people who have been told to do their best at loving. They fail, most of them. And why wouldn't they fail, since loving is extremely difficult. Most of these people are also failures at pole vaulting and performers on the flying trapeze. And when they fail to love day after day, come one, come all, the logic of the language leads them to the seemingly inevitable conclusion that they must hate instead. The step beyond hating, of course, is killing in imaginary self-defense.
"Ye shall respect one another." Now there is something almost anybody in reasonable mental health can do day after day, year in and year out, come one, come all, to everyone's clear benefit. "Respect" does not imply a spectrum of alternatives, some of them very dangerous. "Respect" is like a light switch. It is either on or off. And if we are no longer able to respect someone, we don't feel like killing him or her. Our response is restrained. We simply want to make him or her feel like something the cat drug in.
Compare making somebody feel like something the cat drug in with Armageddon or World War Three....
***
God’s overflowing love operating in the human heart. The passionate desire to be United-And-Made-One with That-Which-Makes-One-Complete. And Respect for one’s neighbor, (and even for one’s enemy) based on a more fundamental sense of self-respect, whether you “love” that other person or not.
Love manifests itself in our lives, and through our lives, in as many different ways as life itself. God is Love. Love makes the world go round. Love is the Answer (could you please repeat the question?). Or recall the passage I read to open the service: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; but when I became an adult, I put an end to childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now Faith, Hope, and Love abide -- these three. And the greatest of these is Love.” Think about this for a moment: what does it mean to “know fully, even as one has been fully known” -- to become an adult, to see life, to see one’s beloved, to see the Creator of the Universe, face to face? Maybe this is really what love is all about -- the ability to look into the face of one’s neighbor, or even a stranger, and see one’s beloved reflected there as well, or to look into the face of one’s enemy and recognize that they too were created in the image of God. I can’t really be certain about this, of course; just because I read it in the Bible doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s so. But at the very least it is worth a second look, a closer look. Because who knows what one may see in a mirror, if one looks closely enough.
I also want to point out just one more thing here this morning, which is that the Latin word used to translate the Greek agape in this passage (and many of the others I’ve mentioned here this morning) is caritas, which some of you may recognize from the King James Bible as “charity.” God’s overflowing love operating in the human heart manifests itself in the world as Charity. And charity is more than simply giving assistance to those less fortunate than ourselves. It is a tangible expression of God’s love for us all -- an act of generosity inspired by a feeling of gratitude, which encourages us to share our good fortune with others because we realize that we ourselves have been beneficiaries of God’s many gifts to us in ways that we can never fully repay. And so we learn to express our love of God, and more importantly, our appreciation of God’s love for us, by acting in a loving way toward all of God’s creation. And I know that this is a Unitarian Church, and that there are probably a lot of folks here who don’t even really believe in God, at least in any conventional sense of the word. And that’s perfectly fine, because it doesn’t really matter either. What matters is that God believes in us, and trusts that through the power of love, we will eventually grow to our full potential as kind, loving, generous and understanding human beings -- the very people that God intends for us to be.
“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; but when I became an adult, I put an end to childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now Faith, Hope, and Love abide -- these three. And the greatest of these is Love.” --1st Corinthians 13: 11-13.
If you are proud of this church, become its advocate.
If you are concerned for it future, share its message.
If its values resonate deep within you, give it a measure of your devotion.
Its destiny, the larger hope, rests in your hands.
--Michael A. Schuler
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday February 15, 2004
[extemporaneous introduction]
You know, there’s been so much written and said about the subject of Love that sometimes it seems impossible to come up with a fresh approach to the topic. We see it everywhere, talk about it constantly, but do we ever truly understand it? that is, see love as love truly is, rather than simply being swept away head-over-heels by its irresistible power, often when we least expect it...as so many of us have in our lives (and maybe even hope to again). There are so many truisms, so many fantasies and clichés, yet Love the Cliché will lose out to Love the Irresistible Power every time. And even in the fairy tale, it's rarely "happily ever after." No wonder Shakespeare cautions us to "speak low, if you speak love." Clichés do not become clichés by accident, of course; behind each cliché there is a fragment of a larger truth which mere words simply cannot express with the same intensity and freshness as the experience itself. And yet we inevitably struggle to find those words, as if, by giving a name to what we feel, we might just gain a little control over the experience, just as the Miller's daughter gained control of Rumpelstiltskin in that classic fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm.
What is true of Romance is also, in many ways, true of Religion as well. For example, every Sunday morning here at the First Religious Society we stand up and declare proudly that "Love is the Doctrine of this Church." But what do we really mean when we say this? Typically, when I think of Love in a Religious context, my mind is almost immediately drawn to Paul’s famous description in 1st Corinthians 13: "Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on is own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends." Or I’m reminded of the one Great Commandment of both the Gospels and the Hebrew Bible: to love the Lord our God with all our heart, and all our soul, and all our strength, and all our mind, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Or I may even be tempted to try to make sense of the Scriptural admonition to love my enemies, to "do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you"-- perhaps one of the more troubling and problematic edicts of Christian Ethics. And yet, there it is. "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.... " "Greater Love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends..." What are we to make of statements like this, in a world where some people are willing to blow themselves up simply to take the lives of a few of their enemies, all in the perceived service of God? And does this somehow in turn justify pre-emptive violence based on fear and suspicion: doing unto others BEFORE they get a chance to do it unto you? Or does Love teach us a better way?
In his famous sermon on "Loving Your Enemies," Martin Luther King Jr. attempted to make sense of these Biblical injunctions by talking about the three different words for love in Ancient Greek: eros, philia, and agape, observing that in each instance it is agape which is elevated to the staring role. King described agape as an "understanding and creative, redemptive goodwill for all" -- a love that empowers us to dwell together in peace. He continued by saying: "An overflowing love which seeks nothing in return, agape is the love of God operating in the human heart. At this level, we love [others] not because we like them, nor because their ways appeal to us, nor even because they possess some type of divine spark; we love [them] because God loves them. At this level, we love the person who does an evil deed, although we hate the deed that [they do]."
Empathy, Compassion, Divine Forgiveness...this is the level at which agape functions. Yet it's often seemed to me that agape love is highly overrated, while eros and philia have gotten something of a bum rap. In the lives of all but the truly saintly, agape rapidly becomes distant and abstract: it lacks the intensity, the immediacy, of the other two types of love. How can we have compassion if passion itself is missing? Where is empathy without a glimmer of understanding?
Erotic love is passionate by nature: intense, immediate, powerful and often irrational. Erotic love frequently manifests itself as the painful hunger to possess, fully and completely, another individual, and to be possessed by them in turn: a union, a mutual joining, a desire to become whole and fulfilled in partnership with someone whose absence makes us suffer, and leaves us feeling fragmented and incomplete, empty and alone. This momentary satisfaction is an illusion, of course: a temporary fusion too intense to be prolonged indefinitely. And yet we crave it with an intensity beyond all other appetites. In the Symposium, Plato has Socrates use the word eros to describe the philosopher's passionate desire for wisdom: a craving, a hunger for the knowledge that will complete us and make us whole, make us one with the truth. When we "seek the truth in love," our search must be a passionate search, our desire for truth something which takes possession of us and drives out all the easy answers and facile explanations: irrational to the extent that it scorns mere rationalization, and satisfied only by a complete and utter union with "The True," however ephemeral it may at first appear.
Philia, on the other hand, is a far more rational form of love. The word is frequently translated as "friendship," but this really doesn't do it justice. Philia is a form of love which grows out of our ability to recognize differences of opinion, of preference, of whatever, and still honor that person's integrity and worth, whether we agree with them or not; or indeed, whether we even like them or not. It's the love which enables us to survive our disagreements, and the ebb and flow of our passions, and ultimately to affirm the power of our common humanity: not God's love "operating in the human heart," but an essentially human love born of our ability to perceive and understand our connectedness, and mutual interdependence, with one another as human beings. And the basis of this friendship, this philia, is not so much Affection as it is Respect.
I think the most articulate description of this I’ve ever heard was Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s Ware Lecture "Love Is Too Strong a Word," which he delivered at the UUA General Assembly in Rochester, New York way back in 1986. (I can’t begin to tell you how hard I had to search to find this again, so I’m going to quote it at some length). But essentially, that evening Vonnegut said to the assembled Unitarian-Universalists (myself included):
***
I will tell you what my theory is: The Christian preachers exhort their listeners to love one another, and to love their neighbors and so on. Love is simply too strong a word to be much use in ordinary, day-to-day relationships. Love is for Romeo and Juliet.
I'm to love my neighbor? How can I do that when I'm not even speaking to my wife and kids today? My wife said to me the other day, after a knock-down, drag-out fight about interior decoration, "I don't love you any more." And I said to her, "So what else is new?" She really didn't love me then, which was perfectly normal. She will love me some other time -- I think, I hope. It's possible.
If she had wanted to terminate the marriage, to carry it past the point of no return, she would have had to say "I don't respect you any more." Now -- that would be terminal.
One of the many unnecessary American catastrophes going on right now...is all the people who are getting divorced because they don't love each other any more. That is like trading in a car when the ashtrays are full. When you don't respect your mate anymore -- that's when the transmission is shot and there's a crack in the engine block.
I like to think that Jesus said in Aramaic, "Ye shall respect one another." That would be a sign to me that he really wanted to help us here on earth, and not just in the afterlife. Then again, he had no way of knowing what ludicrously high standards Hollywood was going to set for love....
And look at the spectrum of emotions we automatically think of when we hear the word "love." If you can't love your neighbors, then you can at least like them. If you can't like them, you can at least not give a damn about them. If you can't ignore them, then you have to hate them, right? You've exhausted all the other possibilities. That's a quick trip to hate, isn't it? And it starts with love. It is such a logical trip, like the one from "white hot" to "ice-cold" with "red hot, hot, warm, tepid, room temperature, cool, chilly, and freezing" in between. The spectrum of emotions suggested by the word "love" again: "love," and then "like," and then "don't give a damn about," and then "hate."
That is my explanation of why hatred is so common in that part of the world dominated by Christianity. There are all these people who have been told to do their best at loving. They fail, most of them. And why wouldn't they fail, since loving is extremely difficult. Most of these people are also failures at pole vaulting and performers on the flying trapeze. And when they fail to love day after day, come one, come all, the logic of the language leads them to the seemingly inevitable conclusion that they must hate instead. The step beyond hating, of course, is killing in imaginary self-defense.
"Ye shall respect one another." Now there is something almost anybody in reasonable mental health can do day after day, year in and year out, come one, come all, to everyone's clear benefit. "Respect" does not imply a spectrum of alternatives, some of them very dangerous. "Respect" is like a light switch. It is either on or off. And if we are no longer able to respect someone, we don't feel like killing him or her. Our response is restrained. We simply want to make him or her feel like something the cat drug in.
Compare making somebody feel like something the cat drug in with Armageddon or World War Three....
***
God’s overflowing love operating in the human heart. The passionate desire to be United-And-Made-One with That-Which-Makes-One-Complete. And Respect for one’s neighbor, (and even for one’s enemy) based on a more fundamental sense of self-respect, whether you “love” that other person or not.
Love manifests itself in our lives, and through our lives, in as many different ways as life itself. God is Love. Love makes the world go round. Love is the Answer (could you please repeat the question?). Or recall the passage I read to open the service: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; but when I became an adult, I put an end to childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now Faith, Hope, and Love abide -- these three. And the greatest of these is Love.” Think about this for a moment: what does it mean to “know fully, even as one has been fully known” -- to become an adult, to see life, to see one’s beloved, to see the Creator of the Universe, face to face? Maybe this is really what love is all about -- the ability to look into the face of one’s neighbor, or even a stranger, and see one’s beloved reflected there as well, or to look into the face of one’s enemy and recognize that they too were created in the image of God. I can’t really be certain about this, of course; just because I read it in the Bible doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s so. But at the very least it is worth a second look, a closer look. Because who knows what one may see in a mirror, if one looks closely enough.
I also want to point out just one more thing here this morning, which is that the Latin word used to translate the Greek agape in this passage (and many of the others I’ve mentioned here this morning) is caritas, which some of you may recognize from the King James Bible as “charity.” God’s overflowing love operating in the human heart manifests itself in the world as Charity. And charity is more than simply giving assistance to those less fortunate than ourselves. It is a tangible expression of God’s love for us all -- an act of generosity inspired by a feeling of gratitude, which encourages us to share our good fortune with others because we realize that we ourselves have been beneficiaries of God’s many gifts to us in ways that we can never fully repay. And so we learn to express our love of God, and more importantly, our appreciation of God’s love for us, by acting in a loving way toward all of God’s creation. And I know that this is a Unitarian Church, and that there are probably a lot of folks here who don’t even really believe in God, at least in any conventional sense of the word. And that’s perfectly fine, because it doesn’t really matter either. What matters is that God believes in us, and trusts that through the power of love, we will eventually grow to our full potential as kind, loving, generous and understanding human beings -- the very people that God intends for us to be.
“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; but when I became an adult, I put an end to childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now Faith, Hope, and Love abide -- these three. And the greatest of these is Love.” --1st Corinthians 13: 11-13.
If you are proud of this church, become its advocate.
If you are concerned for it future, share its message.
If its values resonate deep within you, give it a measure of your devotion.
Its destiny, the larger hope, rests in your hands.
--Michael A. Schuler
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