a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at The First Relgious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Neighborhood Sunday September 25th, 2005
Some years ago now, not too long after I was called to my very first pulpit in Midland, Texas, I traveled to California to attend a training session for newly-minted ministers in our denomination. The conference was held at the El Retirio Jesuit Retreat Center in the Los Altos foothills: it was a beautiful site, located on 48 acres of wooded grounds just south of San Francisco, with a magnificent view of San Francisco bay and the lower peninsula. The facilities were excellent, the food delicious, the workshops stimulating and thought-provoking; and as we sat at dinner on the last evening, looking out from on-high over Silicon Valley as the sun set behind us in the west, one of my colleagues turned to me and remarked, in obvious reference to the monastic vows of our hosts, "If this is poverty, bring on chastity!"
My given name, Timothy, means literally "timid before God." It's an appropriate name, I think, for a Unitarian-Universalist minister, although often these days ministry hardly seems like a vocation for the timid. It takes a lot of nerve to step into the pulpit week after week, in the sincere belief that you have something to say that is worth listening to. It takes a lot of nerve to ask people to give of themselves and their resources, their time and their money, in support of a dream which exists, for the time being, mostly in imagination; just as it takes a lot of nerve to invite one's “neighbors and fellow creatures” to share in that dream, as full and equal partners in a church community. It takes a lot of nerve to do all these things, which I suppose is why they tend to make us nervous. Until we learn to come to grips with our nervousness — to confront our timidity in the presence of issues of ultimate concern — our dreams remain fantasies rather than aspirations. This is a challenge which is primarily spiritual in nature, requiring both the recognition of our own anxieties and shortcomings, as well as the humble acknowledgment of our own unique gifts for service and ministry.
That was one of the things I learned at that conference in California so many years ago. But it was not the only thing. That trip was also something of a personal pilgrimage for me. From 1965 to 1970 my family had lived in a neighborhood about five miles south of the retreat center, so on the way from the airport I managed to persuade a carload of my fellow ministers to swing by the old homestead, so that I might see how the place had changed in the quarter of a century since I had lived there. As someone who had spent a decade living in student housing, and was just beginning for the first time the process of shopping for a home of his own, I was rather surprised to learn that the modest tract house in which I had spent my boyhood, on which my parents had made payments of $165 a month, was even then worth some twenty times what they paid for it (and God only knows what it would sell for now). But even more amazing was the little tree near our driveway which the city had planted to replace the one I had driven over in my mother's station wagon at the age of thirteen, after sneaking the keys out of her purse in order to show off to my friends. That tree had changed quite a bit since I last saw it, propped up by two wooden stakes to keep it from bending in the wind. It towered well above the roof of the house, shading the entire front yard.
So, What is Spirituality? (and where can we get some?) Generally the first place I look is to the language of the third principle of Unitarian Universalism, which calls for "Acceptance of one another, and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations." And in the past I've always gone straight for what I felt was the heart of the matter, and pretty much let the rest of it fend for itself. Spiritual Growth is what really matters; what difference does it make whether it takes place in our congregations or during a walk in the woods or up on a mountaintop somewhere? Isn't it all pretty much the same? And as for the "acceptance of one another" part, doesn't that just sort of come with the territory? It's like Emerson said: "To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men — that is genius."
But lately I've been having second thoughts about a lot of this. I don't know that it's enough any more simply to recognize that we are all pretty much alike, that we've all been created (to use the traditional metaphor) "in the image of God." We need to be able to acknowledge, and perhaps even appreciate, the ways that we are all different as well — and that the genius and wisdom of God, if you will, in creating us this way, is greater than our own. And it's not enough simply to go off by ourselves, to get close to nature and feel "spiritual" because we've been able to isolate ourselves from the distractions of everyday life. We need to learn how to do this very important work in the midst of the demands of "the real world;" and together, in our congregations, in a Community, rather than all alone.
It's been my experience over the years that Roman Catholics talk a lot about spirituality, but often when they do, it is characterized as something which lies within the exclusive domain of "religious virtuosos" — individuals living in cloisters under vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience; contemporary Saints like Mother Teresa, whose desire to pursue the interior life has inspired them to renounce the world in dramatic fashion, and set themselves apart from you and I. Yet it occurs to me that, in many ways, the tree in my old front yard serves as a much better metaphor of the spiritual life, growing as it did over time from a small seedling into a sturdy and impressive monument. The changes themselves may not be noticeable from one day to the next. But they become dramatic indeed after a decade or two of steady growth.
I've been hearing a lot more talk about spirituality in Unitarian Universalist circles these days as well, although still not nearly so much as one does among Catholics. We tend to be a bit more timid about these things, especially those of us who were originally attracted to this faith because it represented in our minds a reasonable, if not always wholly rational, approach to religion. There are even times when I wonder whether the third principle ought to read "Encouragement of one another, and Acceptance of spiritual growth in our congregations," reflecting our uncertain hesitancy concerning the subtle supernatural overtones of the term, and the natural association of the word "spirit" with sprites and spooks and other things that go bump in the night. When attempting to understand "spirituality" from a rational point of view, it is important that we allow ourselves to look beyond all of the superficial “hocus-pocus” sometimes associated with the word, to focus instead on some of its broader and more basic connotations.
In the New Testament, the Greek word for spirit, pneuma, is identical to the one meaning "breath" or "wind." In other words, "spirituality" refers to an element of our experience which (like the wind) can be felt, but not seen; which is as essential to our being as air, as intimate a part of our lives as breathing out and breathing in. Spirituality refers to the depth dimension of human existence: our anxieties and aspirations; our hopes, dreams and secret fears; our feelings of wholeness and oneness with the universe; our sense of frailty, powerlessness, alienation, and emotional broken-ness when confronted with evil, loss, suffering, and the fact of our own mortality. Spirituality is as much a product of the human spirit as it is the Holy Spirit: we romanticize it with trivial sentimentality, mystify it with unintelligible metaphysical hyperbole, hide it behind superficial devotional ceremony; and yet it remains, in its essence, a very simple thing, like a gentle autumn breeze blowing steadily upon one's face.
We do ourselves a great disservice when we view our spirituality as something distant and wholly other from our day to day experience. But it's an easy mistake to make, resulting I think from our failure to recognize that the spirit manifests itself in two distinct and complimentary modes. There is an active, expressive component to the spiritual life, and a more reflective, contemplative one; aspiration and inspiration, animus and anima, yin and yang. For most of us, one or the other of these components will be dominant, habitually preferred and taken for granted; while we long for its absent compliment to make us whole. "If only I could get organized;" "If only I could get away from it all." And yet a balanced spirituality consists of both doing and being, in roughly equal parts: a solid center and a growing edge, in the world, but not of it.
Nor is the spiritual life a static, status quo. Rather, it is a dynamic process; it consists of a series of never-ending spirals, from initiation through doubt to new insight. It begins with a call from something beyond ourselves: a realization of some limitation or shortcoming, something out of balance; and an vague, yearning intimation of something more. Yet before we can transcend our current awareness, we must inevitably pass through "the dark night of the soul:" a period of testing and temptation, when that which once sustained us is no longer viable, and that which will someday again sustain us is as yet unseen and beyond our grasp.
Spiritual growth requires an element of risk, and it is during these times of risk that our capacity to trust, to remain open and receptive, to be willing to follow the spirit where it leads us, undergoes its greatest trial. It is at these times that we need most the support and comfort of others in community, the guidance of teachers and fellow seekers. Yes, ultimately, each of us must face the darkness alone, to find on the other side that which was missing for ourselves. But in doing so, we learn once again to see the face of God in the eyes of the least among us, and to recognize in our own uniqueness the one quality we share with all creatures great and small: that they too are unique and precious in the eyes of God. And once the passage has been completed, rest not too comfortably in your new-found enlightenment. For the spiritual life is not only dynamic, it is also progressive: each year the tree must add another ring as it grows a few inches closer to the sky.
In many respects, spiritual progress is a relative concept. We all grow at different speeds, we grow to different heights — it's hardly a competitive enterprise; there are millions of varieties of trees in God's garden. And yet there are also certain constants, standard practices which can help each of us to achieve our full bloom and foliage. Patience, persistence, compassion, and trust; honesty, integrity, generosity, and diligence; humility, vision, wonder, and awe: cultivate these qualities within yourself, reflect upon them in your quiet moments, express them in the living of your daily life. Bit by bit you shall grow taller and stronger; the comforting shadow you cast shall grow long and wide. You need not leave the world to seek the spirit. Rather, seek to bring the spirit to the world where you live, and grow.
To be sure, there is also much which can be learned from the observation of "religious virtuosos" — renowned saints and gurus, present and past, living and dead, who have grown to great heights, cast long shadows. There are techniques which can be learned and mastered, pathways which can be followed. But we must never forget that spirituality itself is not a technique: it is an attitude, a virtue, which no virtuoso can embody for us. The imitation of Christ is all well and good. But ultimately imitation must give way to personal authenticity if we wish ourselves to become more Christ-like, or glimpse our Buddha nature, discover our totem, our "spirit guide."
Do you wish to meditate? It’s not difficult; you don't need to take special classes, or shell out hundreds of dollars for a designer mantra. All meditation techniques involve four basic constants: a relatively distraction-free environment; a comfortable body posture; a mental device to aid concentration such as chanting or following your breath; and, most importantly of all, a passive, open, receptive attitude — a willingness to let the spirit speak to you. Our Unitarian and Universalist traditions have a rich heritage of using personal journals, or diaries, as vehicles for spiritual self-examination: the journals of Emerson and Thoreau world-famous. A journal is a daily prayer with pen and paper, a private, personal communion with one's own experience, free of both pretense and banality. Not that it’s always great literature either -- the important thing is that we regularly take time to reflect upon our lives, and to record those reflections for ourselves. Nor should we overlook the expressive side of spirituality: for there is as much to be learned through doing, through service, as there is in the solitude of one's own contemplative reflection. The key is to strike a balance, a harmony of yin and yang, in which what we do and who we are leads us onward from what we were to what we yet shall become.
My own spiritual discipline is based on guidelines developed by the Reverend Harry Scholefield, the minister emeritus of the First Unitarian Church of San Francisco. Harry taught four steps for the development of a rich spiritual life. The first of these is Daily Practice — a minimum of a half-hour a day should be set aside at a regular time for private reflection and contemplation. You can do this while walking, or while sitting in a chair; it may occur in a regular place, or in different places. But it must be daily, for a minimum of a half-hour. Unless, of course, you are too busy — in which case Harry suggested you should meditate for a full hour!
The second step is the use of a Diary, or "meditation log." The style, length, content and character of the log are entirely up to the user, but it should in some way reflect the process of the meditation, recording dreams, memories, poems or quotations, from the widest possible variety of sources. All that matters about any diary is that it's content is somehow significant to the writer. But the process of translating one's reflections to paper is what separates contemplation from idle daydreaming.
The third step is one of Memorization. Some of the passages from the diary — typically poems or brief quotations — are committed to memory. The passages memorized should be of special significance to the memorizer, and should become the focus of at least part of the daily meditation. Memorization represents the re-internalizing of the fruits of one's contemplative reflection: a key element in the process of spiritual growth and transformation. When we memorize something, we learn it “by heart”-- it becomes a part of us rather than merely an item of passing interest.
The final step in this scheme is Experimentation. As the practice of this discipline becomes more and more integrated into one's daily habits, the period of meditation can also be used as a means of concentrating attention on self-transformation, the development of character, commitment to social change, a fresh appreciation and awareness of both the joy and the suffering of human existence, or any of hundreds of other human concerns which are, in their essence, religious in nature. This dual-focus on both material from one's diary and free experimentation keeps the daily discipline fresh, and gradually gives it direction, continuity, and spiritual depth.
A rich spiritual life is indeed a precious treasure: one which we can freely share with others, and yet enjoy fully without diminution for ourselves. Indeed, it often seems that the more we do share of our spirituality, the greater abundance we discover in our own lives. Yet it is also a delicate thing, a thing which must be carefully tended and nurtured if we wish to taste its sweetest fruits. This cultivation is not difficult: anyone can learn to do it. The real question is whether or not we are willing to do so. For the spirit itself is never far from us. It merely waits patiently for each of us to plant the seed.
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Sunday, September 18, 2005
THE NATURE OF TRUTH AND THE TRUTH OF NATURE
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religous Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday September 18th, 2005
Opening Words: "Eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs." -- from A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean
****
[Extemporaneous Introduction: this topic purchased at the Service Auction...]
I thought we might start out this morning by looking at one of the most fundamental problems in both philosophy and theology, which basically goes like this: How do we know what we think we know, and how do we know that we know it? This deceptively simple question is, as you might imagine, a little trickier than it appears at first glance. Most of the time most of us go through life assuming that "seeing is believing" -- that there is a common sense correlation between 'the way things really are" and the evidence of our own two eyes. Yet it also doesn't take us too long to figure out that sometimes "appearances can be deceiving," and that there is often a lot more to life than meets the eye. Our understanding of what is True, and even our experience of what is Real, is filtered -- not just by our senses, but also by our expectations and even the structure of our minds. We perceive the world a certain way because there are limitations to what we can see and hear and touch and smell; and then our minds try to organize that experience of the world according to what seems to make sense.
This process begins with the concept of a subjective "Mind" itself, that is different and distinct from the World "out there." Starting with our own self-awareness, our brains categorize our experiences, distinguishing not only between "self" and "other," but between objects and actions, things and deeds, numbers and functions. We analyze by differentiating one thing from another, or by dissecting a thing into its constituent parts. We synthesize by discerning the commonalities among things we have previously identified as separate, and putting them back together again, perhaps in new or different ways. We count things and add them up, subtract and divide them, then multiply them again, factor the variables, calculate the trends and measure all the angles, because at the end of the day we like to think that we know what the bottom line is. We conceive of the world based not only on what we perceive, but on what we EXPECT to perceive, -- and those expectations shape both our experience of reality and our understanding of the truth in ways that are often all but invisible to us, because from our perspective, it's all just "common sense."
So, we form ideas about the world, and those ideas in turn shape our experience of the world in ways that make sense to us. That all seems simple enough. And yet, recognizing that this relationship between perception and conceptualization is not exactly one-to-one -- or more specifically, that what we perceive is only a small fraction of What Is, and that we can also conceive of things which we will never perceive, while our perceptions themselves are often shaped by our preconceptions (and possibly even our misconceptions)...this changes the nature of the game a little. Knowing that we are not capable of seeing it all, but that we can imagine things we will never see, and that what we do see is often only exactly what we expect to see, forces us to ask a couple of slightly different questions, namely: how "real" are our ideas, really? And how do we know which ones we can trust, and which ones are merely figments of our imagination?
There's a really obvious answer to these questions, and I want to skip ahead a little and talk about it now, because I know if I don't it's all you'll be thinking about until I get to it anyway. But the obvious answer to these questions is "by trial and error." How do we know if an idea is any good? We try it out, and if it gives us good results (which is to say, the results we expected or hoped for) then it's obviously a good idea and we continue to believe it; while if it doesn't, then maybe it's a bad idea and we need to think of something better. This philosophy is sometimes called "pragmatism," and it was best articulated by the psychologist William James (which is one reason why "real" philosophers tend to hate it)...because it is simple, and straightforward, and (from the perspective of a serious philosopher) seriously wrong in so many different ways that it is difficult to enumerate them all. But probably the main problem "real" philosophers have with Pragmatism is its absolute Relativism. You have your ideas, and I have mine, and if your ideas work for you, that's great; but don't bother ME about it (if you don't mind), because I have ideas of my own, thank you very much. James himself was very much aware of this problem with his philosophy, and he resolved it through something he called "radical empiricism" -- basically a negotiated common reality based on the consensus which develops from conversation about shared experience and perception.
But even a negotiated, consensual reality retains many of the same objections initially raised by the professional philosophers. Another concern, which is even probably more significant to ordinary people, has to do with the role of "belief" in the pragmatic "truth" of an idea. James put it this way: if you had to leap across an open chasm, you are much more likely to complete that leap successfully if you start out believing that you can actually do it, rather than believing that you can't. This is the so-called "leap of faith," American-style...since it has absolutely nothing to do with a belief in God, but is merely about the power of positive thinking and getting from point "A" to point "B" safely and in one piece. Yet this notion of the "Will to Believe" has all sorts of significant intellectual consequences, since it seems to say (at least on some level) that it is the intensity of our belief that makes an idea real. And you don't have to be a professional philosopher to see what kind of trouble an idea like that could eventually lead to. This goes well beyond the comparative advantages and disadvantages of optimism verses pessimism. Taken to its logical extreme, it basically asserts that "wishing makes it so." Yet wishful thinking is hardly a philosophy that even the most pragmatic individual is likely to succeed with. And so we are back again to our original set of questions, with perhaps an added nuance: how much of our destiny is the result of an act of Will, and how much is merely Fate? But that's a topic for another day....
William James formulated his ideas about pragmatism at the end of the 19th century, in a self-conscious attempt to bring together two divergent strains of philosophical thought which had dominated Western civilization for the previous two centuries. (And at this point I need to apologize to any philosophy majors in the room for trying to boil down everything you learned in college into about thirty seconds). But on one hand you had the Empiricist tradition of John Locke and his subsequent followers and critics. Locke saw the human mind as a tabula rasa or "blank slate" on which our sense-impressions of the world form our ideas about the world and our place within it. Reality is what we see with our own two eyes, and every thing else follows after. And on the other hand was the Transcendental Idealism of Immanuel Kant and his successors, who were much more sensitive about the distinctions that could be made between Reality, and our experience of reality, and our pre-existing concepts about what is "really" real, which tend to shape our perceptions and give meaning to our experience. The fact that the Idealists wrote mostly in German and the Empiricists in English did little to facilitate mutual understanding, especially on the English side, where Locke's defenders tended to conflate the ideas of his English-speaking critics George Berkeley and David Hume with the less skeptical, more nuanced Idealism of the Germans.
The post-Kantian German Transcendental Idealists (and I hope that's the last time I ever say something like THAT from this pulpit, although I suspect it won't be) had a much more sophisticated view of perception than either Locke or his critics. They basically distinguished between the world of Phenomena, or appearance, which was a shared world of experience and perception, and the world of the Noumena which might be thought of as the objective, pre-existing reality behind or beneath or beyond the world of Phenomena, which is essentially opaque to our limited senses, and can only be apprehended through an act of mindful imagination. But the realm of the Noumena is not just an imaginary world. If anything, it is more real than the world of phenomena which we experience and perceive, since it exists independently of our awareness of it, and we need not depend upon an imperfect act of perception in order to have knowledge of its existence.
Well, that's probably about enough of that for now. It's an interesting, but complicated set of ideas, I know; it took me about a decade before I finally felt like I was starting to "get it" (and I'm still not sure I REALLY understand). But I do want to take a moment to say just a few words about our own spiritual ancestors, the American Transcendentalists, and how they fit into all this. Because they were the ones whose thinking about this issues essentially shaped our own understanding, and our practices here in the Unitarian Church. Although perhaps not very well appreciated either in their own time or now, there was another school of English (or, more strictly speaking, Scottish) philosophy in the 18th century which was very much aware of the difficulty of simply assuming that whatever we perceived about the world was actually real, but who finessed the problem of skepticism by assuming instead that since human beings are also a product of the reality which we observe, we possess certain "faculties" which allow us, almost instinctively, both to Trust what we see, and what we THINK about what we see, without falling into the trap of absolute doubt.
In other words, human beings do not stand outside "the world" and observe it objectively; we are part of the world, we participate in it and our perceptions and reflections about that experience share the same reality of both the thing we are experiencing and the experience itself. Our perceptions may not be perfect, but they are all part and particle of the same puzzle and can be relied on as such. The philosophy of these so-called "common sense Realists" was very popular at Harvard when Ralph Waldo Emerson was a student there, and it gave him a different perspective on what the German Idealists were trying to say, when their ideas finally started to flow into the English-speaking world in the form of the Romantic movement.
None of this will be on the mid-term, by the way....
Romanticism was an intellectual and literary movement in love with Nature, and with the notion that "natural" human beings were somehow closer to their origins, closer to God, than civilized people were. They believed in intuition: that introspection was better than circumspection, and that Universal Truth resided most authentically within the inmost chambers of the human soul, safe from the corruption of the society of one's peers. Our eyes and our ears and the conventional wisdom of our neighbors may tell us one thing, but our spirits, our souls, tell us something else. The wisdom of the world falls short of the wisdom of the Oversoul -- it is mere "understanding" only, and not the Pure Reason of the Divine Mind in whose image we were created, and whose essential character we all share.
Emerson was not, strictly speaking, a philosopher. He saw himself more as a poet, and perhaps even a mystic...a writer and public speaker, and for a time a Unitarian minister, although he was never really that comfortable with the pastoral part of the job, and gave it up as soon as he felt he could afford to. But in passages like the one I read earlier from his book Nature, Emerson reveals the true nature of his own mystical insight into the underlying nature of reality itself, which came to him neither through an act of perception nor an act of reflection, but rather by what can best be described as a sudden and momentary experience of unanticipated inspiration, during which he apprehended immediately and without mediation the "true" nature of the Noumenal Universe, where "all mean egotism vanishes."
"I become a transparent eye-ball..." he wrote. "I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God." His description is reminiscent of the experiences of mystics in every period of history and from every point on the globe. The whole of Creation is very, very big; while human beings are very, very small; yet we are part of that Whole, and still whole within ourselves, connected intimately to everything that is, and ever was, and ever will be; and that is the only reality that really matters. It's not exactly rational, but it's not exactly irrational either -- it's more non-rational, and perhaps even a little unrealistic and unreasonable as well. But it's still True -- true in a way that defies definition or often even description. And once we've "seen" it, we see it over and over again everywhere we look for it; but none of our ideas, and none of our words, are really equal to the task of capturing the experience in its entirety.
And as for the question of knowing which ideas we can trust, well a lot of that has to do with one's tolerance for ambiguity. If you demand certainty from life before you will trust it, you will shape your ideas to fit that expectation...and over time you will ultimately be disappointed. But if you can learn to trust without being certain, your imagination becomes free to explore to the very limits of possibility -- free to think outside the box, free to soar among the clouds and build castles in the air, and then to return to earth again to put the foundations under them, and live in ways that no one has ever dreamed of living before. And with each act of creative imagination, the universe itself grows larger and more accessible, and the realm of possibility becomes more real, and more true....
****
Reading: from Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man cast off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, -- no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, -- master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.
at the First Religous Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday September 18th, 2005
Opening Words: "Eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs." -- from A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean
****
[Extemporaneous Introduction: this topic purchased at the Service Auction...]
I thought we might start out this morning by looking at one of the most fundamental problems in both philosophy and theology, which basically goes like this: How do we know what we think we know, and how do we know that we know it? This deceptively simple question is, as you might imagine, a little trickier than it appears at first glance. Most of the time most of us go through life assuming that "seeing is believing" -- that there is a common sense correlation between 'the way things really are" and the evidence of our own two eyes. Yet it also doesn't take us too long to figure out that sometimes "appearances can be deceiving," and that there is often a lot more to life than meets the eye. Our understanding of what is True, and even our experience of what is Real, is filtered -- not just by our senses, but also by our expectations and even the structure of our minds. We perceive the world a certain way because there are limitations to what we can see and hear and touch and smell; and then our minds try to organize that experience of the world according to what seems to make sense.
This process begins with the concept of a subjective "Mind" itself, that is different and distinct from the World "out there." Starting with our own self-awareness, our brains categorize our experiences, distinguishing not only between "self" and "other," but between objects and actions, things and deeds, numbers and functions. We analyze by differentiating one thing from another, or by dissecting a thing into its constituent parts. We synthesize by discerning the commonalities among things we have previously identified as separate, and putting them back together again, perhaps in new or different ways. We count things and add them up, subtract and divide them, then multiply them again, factor the variables, calculate the trends and measure all the angles, because at the end of the day we like to think that we know what the bottom line is. We conceive of the world based not only on what we perceive, but on what we EXPECT to perceive, -- and those expectations shape both our experience of reality and our understanding of the truth in ways that are often all but invisible to us, because from our perspective, it's all just "common sense."
So, we form ideas about the world, and those ideas in turn shape our experience of the world in ways that make sense to us. That all seems simple enough. And yet, recognizing that this relationship between perception and conceptualization is not exactly one-to-one -- or more specifically, that what we perceive is only a small fraction of What Is, and that we can also conceive of things which we will never perceive, while our perceptions themselves are often shaped by our preconceptions (and possibly even our misconceptions)...this changes the nature of the game a little. Knowing that we are not capable of seeing it all, but that we can imagine things we will never see, and that what we do see is often only exactly what we expect to see, forces us to ask a couple of slightly different questions, namely: how "real" are our ideas, really? And how do we know which ones we can trust, and which ones are merely figments of our imagination?
There's a really obvious answer to these questions, and I want to skip ahead a little and talk about it now, because I know if I don't it's all you'll be thinking about until I get to it anyway. But the obvious answer to these questions is "by trial and error." How do we know if an idea is any good? We try it out, and if it gives us good results (which is to say, the results we expected or hoped for) then it's obviously a good idea and we continue to believe it; while if it doesn't, then maybe it's a bad idea and we need to think of something better. This philosophy is sometimes called "pragmatism," and it was best articulated by the psychologist William James (which is one reason why "real" philosophers tend to hate it)...because it is simple, and straightforward, and (from the perspective of a serious philosopher) seriously wrong in so many different ways that it is difficult to enumerate them all. But probably the main problem "real" philosophers have with Pragmatism is its absolute Relativism. You have your ideas, and I have mine, and if your ideas work for you, that's great; but don't bother ME about it (if you don't mind), because I have ideas of my own, thank you very much. James himself was very much aware of this problem with his philosophy, and he resolved it through something he called "radical empiricism" -- basically a negotiated common reality based on the consensus which develops from conversation about shared experience and perception.
But even a negotiated, consensual reality retains many of the same objections initially raised by the professional philosophers. Another concern, which is even probably more significant to ordinary people, has to do with the role of "belief" in the pragmatic "truth" of an idea. James put it this way: if you had to leap across an open chasm, you are much more likely to complete that leap successfully if you start out believing that you can actually do it, rather than believing that you can't. This is the so-called "leap of faith," American-style...since it has absolutely nothing to do with a belief in God, but is merely about the power of positive thinking and getting from point "A" to point "B" safely and in one piece. Yet this notion of the "Will to Believe" has all sorts of significant intellectual consequences, since it seems to say (at least on some level) that it is the intensity of our belief that makes an idea real. And you don't have to be a professional philosopher to see what kind of trouble an idea like that could eventually lead to. This goes well beyond the comparative advantages and disadvantages of optimism verses pessimism. Taken to its logical extreme, it basically asserts that "wishing makes it so." Yet wishful thinking is hardly a philosophy that even the most pragmatic individual is likely to succeed with. And so we are back again to our original set of questions, with perhaps an added nuance: how much of our destiny is the result of an act of Will, and how much is merely Fate? But that's a topic for another day....
William James formulated his ideas about pragmatism at the end of the 19th century, in a self-conscious attempt to bring together two divergent strains of philosophical thought which had dominated Western civilization for the previous two centuries. (And at this point I need to apologize to any philosophy majors in the room for trying to boil down everything you learned in college into about thirty seconds). But on one hand you had the Empiricist tradition of John Locke and his subsequent followers and critics. Locke saw the human mind as a tabula rasa or "blank slate" on which our sense-impressions of the world form our ideas about the world and our place within it. Reality is what we see with our own two eyes, and every thing else follows after. And on the other hand was the Transcendental Idealism of Immanuel Kant and his successors, who were much more sensitive about the distinctions that could be made between Reality, and our experience of reality, and our pre-existing concepts about what is "really" real, which tend to shape our perceptions and give meaning to our experience. The fact that the Idealists wrote mostly in German and the Empiricists in English did little to facilitate mutual understanding, especially on the English side, where Locke's defenders tended to conflate the ideas of his English-speaking critics George Berkeley and David Hume with the less skeptical, more nuanced Idealism of the Germans.
The post-Kantian German Transcendental Idealists (and I hope that's the last time I ever say something like THAT from this pulpit, although I suspect it won't be) had a much more sophisticated view of perception than either Locke or his critics. They basically distinguished between the world of Phenomena, or appearance, which was a shared world of experience and perception, and the world of the Noumena which might be thought of as the objective, pre-existing reality behind or beneath or beyond the world of Phenomena, which is essentially opaque to our limited senses, and can only be apprehended through an act of mindful imagination. But the realm of the Noumena is not just an imaginary world. If anything, it is more real than the world of phenomena which we experience and perceive, since it exists independently of our awareness of it, and we need not depend upon an imperfect act of perception in order to have knowledge of its existence.
Well, that's probably about enough of that for now. It's an interesting, but complicated set of ideas, I know; it took me about a decade before I finally felt like I was starting to "get it" (and I'm still not sure I REALLY understand). But I do want to take a moment to say just a few words about our own spiritual ancestors, the American Transcendentalists, and how they fit into all this. Because they were the ones whose thinking about this issues essentially shaped our own understanding, and our practices here in the Unitarian Church. Although perhaps not very well appreciated either in their own time or now, there was another school of English (or, more strictly speaking, Scottish) philosophy in the 18th century which was very much aware of the difficulty of simply assuming that whatever we perceived about the world was actually real, but who finessed the problem of skepticism by assuming instead that since human beings are also a product of the reality which we observe, we possess certain "faculties" which allow us, almost instinctively, both to Trust what we see, and what we THINK about what we see, without falling into the trap of absolute doubt.
In other words, human beings do not stand outside "the world" and observe it objectively; we are part of the world, we participate in it and our perceptions and reflections about that experience share the same reality of both the thing we are experiencing and the experience itself. Our perceptions may not be perfect, but they are all part and particle of the same puzzle and can be relied on as such. The philosophy of these so-called "common sense Realists" was very popular at Harvard when Ralph Waldo Emerson was a student there, and it gave him a different perspective on what the German Idealists were trying to say, when their ideas finally started to flow into the English-speaking world in the form of the Romantic movement.
None of this will be on the mid-term, by the way....
Romanticism was an intellectual and literary movement in love with Nature, and with the notion that "natural" human beings were somehow closer to their origins, closer to God, than civilized people were. They believed in intuition: that introspection was better than circumspection, and that Universal Truth resided most authentically within the inmost chambers of the human soul, safe from the corruption of the society of one's peers. Our eyes and our ears and the conventional wisdom of our neighbors may tell us one thing, but our spirits, our souls, tell us something else. The wisdom of the world falls short of the wisdom of the Oversoul -- it is mere "understanding" only, and not the Pure Reason of the Divine Mind in whose image we were created, and whose essential character we all share.
Emerson was not, strictly speaking, a philosopher. He saw himself more as a poet, and perhaps even a mystic...a writer and public speaker, and for a time a Unitarian minister, although he was never really that comfortable with the pastoral part of the job, and gave it up as soon as he felt he could afford to. But in passages like the one I read earlier from his book Nature, Emerson reveals the true nature of his own mystical insight into the underlying nature of reality itself, which came to him neither through an act of perception nor an act of reflection, but rather by what can best be described as a sudden and momentary experience of unanticipated inspiration, during which he apprehended immediately and without mediation the "true" nature of the Noumenal Universe, where "all mean egotism vanishes."
"I become a transparent eye-ball..." he wrote. "I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God." His description is reminiscent of the experiences of mystics in every period of history and from every point on the globe. The whole of Creation is very, very big; while human beings are very, very small; yet we are part of that Whole, and still whole within ourselves, connected intimately to everything that is, and ever was, and ever will be; and that is the only reality that really matters. It's not exactly rational, but it's not exactly irrational either -- it's more non-rational, and perhaps even a little unrealistic and unreasonable as well. But it's still True -- true in a way that defies definition or often even description. And once we've "seen" it, we see it over and over again everywhere we look for it; but none of our ideas, and none of our words, are really equal to the task of capturing the experience in its entirety.
And as for the question of knowing which ideas we can trust, well a lot of that has to do with one's tolerance for ambiguity. If you demand certainty from life before you will trust it, you will shape your ideas to fit that expectation...and over time you will ultimately be disappointed. But if you can learn to trust without being certain, your imagination becomes free to explore to the very limits of possibility -- free to think outside the box, free to soar among the clouds and build castles in the air, and then to return to earth again to put the foundations under them, and live in ways that no one has ever dreamed of living before. And with each act of creative imagination, the universe itself grows larger and more accessible, and the realm of possibility becomes more real, and more true....
****
Reading: from Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man cast off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, -- no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, -- master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.
Sunday, September 11, 2005
ACTS OF GOD
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday September 11th, 2005
On the clear, calm morning of June 7th, 1692, just a few minutes after 11 o'clock, the earth unexpectedly trembled and shook, and then without warning the ocean surged up and permanently buried beneath the waves a significant portion of the city of Port Royal, Jamaica. Over 40 ships at anchor in the harbor were also lost, along with approximately 1700 lives. With a population of nearly 6000 souls, Port Royal had been (up until that moment) the largest English speaking community in the New World. At one time a popular haven for freebooters and buccaneers, the town still retained much of that same wide-open spirit: a profligate prosperity defined by decades of rum, plunder, and piracy. When news of the catastrophe eventually reached New England (some two months later) the Reverend Cotton Mather briefly turned his attention from the Witch Trials then taking place in Salem to "behold an accident speaking to all our English America." Describing Port Royal as "a very Sodom for wickedness," Mather characterized the catastrophe as a sign of God's righteous wrath and judgment -- both a warning to the faithful, as well as just punishment for those who flaunted their licentiousness and ignored God's holy ordinances.
I mention this simply to illustrate that the practice of attributing theological significance to natural catastrophes has a long and distinguished heritage even here in New England, yet history has not always been kind to those who discern the hand of God behind the misfortunes of their opponents. And I suspect that much of what is now being said along these same lines about the devastation caused by the Hurricane Katrina will likewise quickly be discredited and forgotten. Pronouncements by Muslim Clerics that the hurricane represents the wrath of Allah against the great infidel America may carry some credibility in the Arabic-speaking world, but are generally ignored here in the homeland of the infidels themselves. The handful of fundamentalist Christian preachers who have characterized the devastation of the Big Easy as God's punishment of a community which openly promotes Gay tourism and a libertine "let the good times roll" lifestyle are likewise routinely dismissed as crackpots, except perhaps by the handful of fellow crackpots who are willing to believe almost ANYTHING they're told, so long as they're also told that "it sez so" in the Bible.
Pat Robertson once claimed to have rebuked a hurricane, and diverted it from it's path and safely out to sea, but apparently this time around he was more concerned about the assassination of foreign leaders and creating fresh vacancies on the Supreme Court than with pestering God about the weather. And even the scientific community can sometimes sound a little apocalyptic in their pronouncements. I don't know for sure whether Global Warming is the underlying cause of all this horrible weather we've been experiencing, but I do know that there are an awful lot of awfully smart people who think that it is, many of whom were initially skeptical but are now convinced by the data. I'm still waiting to hear of any honest-to-God scientist whose opinion has been changed in the opposite direction. Yet dire predictions of doom and destruction by wind and rain and flood as punishment for our profligacy regarding greenhouse gasses sometimes sound a little reminiscent of Cotton Mather, and his ultimately misguided obsession with witches and witchcraft. There has to be a better way to get the message out.
Most homeowners insurance policies typically contain explicit exclusions, or require a separate premium, for what are known in the industry as "Acts of God" -- that is to say, "events arising out of natural causes with no human intervention, which could not have been prevented by reasonable care or foresight," such as lightning, and earthquakes, and floods. The reason events like these are excluded from coverage has to do with the complex question of actuarial liability. My former wife (who was an insurance adjuster before she became an attorney) once tried to explain this to me, and as a theologian this is what I understood: if God is ultimately responsible for things like lightning bolts, but "acts in mysterious ways," how can we acccurately calculate the risk and assess the liability, much less hold actual human beings (or human negligence) accountable for the damage?
Yet our contemporary scientific worldview increasing reveals to us that there is really no such thing as a "natural" disaster. If the wind blows and the rain falls and a swamp becomes flooded, that is hardly disastrous -- it's just part of the natural order of things. It's only when people are hurt and their property destroyed that a storm becomes a catastrophe, and presents us with a slightly different set of moral and ethical choices. A disaster is a social phenomenon, which is generally either mitigated or exacerbated by decisions we make as human beings. Do we simply blame the victims and and excuse our inactivity by saying that it is all simply God's will, nature taking it's natural course? Or do we acknowledge that God sometimes also acts in the world through the actions and activities of human beings, and then respond faithfully to the call to be of service to others in their time of peril?
Our basic human powerlessness in the face of powerful natural forces like a hurricane teaches us the important spiritual lesson of Humility. There are lots of things in this world that are beyond our immediate control, and when we realize this and accept it we gain an important insight into our true place in the universe. But this isn't the only spiritual lesson we learn at times of natural disaster: it is only the first. Our natural human empathy for the plight of those whose lives have been afflicted by the storm also teaches us Compassion, and from this we learn in turn the restorative power of our own Generosity. The word "generosity" comes from a Latin root which means "to give birth" or to create, as in Genesis. Through Generosity, we give birth to the power of our own creativity, and generate good things in the world. And then finally, we learn as well the spiritual lesson of Gratitude, as we discover through experience our mutual interdependence, and the necessity of our helping one another and receiving help from others in order to survive and transcend the many challenges that life itself holds for each of us.
The wind and the rain of Hurricane Katrina have long since passed over the Gulf Coast, but we are just now beginning to appreciate the full extent of the catastrophe. Fortunately, it now appears that the number of people killed outright by the storm, or who perished in the days immediately following, may be far less than many had initially feared. The cost of repairing the extensive property damage can only be guessed at, but could easily approach 60 billion dollars, while the overall cost to the economy might well exceed 200 billion. And then there is the disruption to our social fabric, which is difficult to measure in any currency. A million people displaced from their homes, many of whom may never return to the same neighborhoods and communities where they used to live. Ugly racial and class divisions brought to the surface, and exposed for all the world to see. And then the failure which makes this disaster truly tragic: the apparent inability (or perhaps unwillingness) of the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world to provide assistance in a timely fashion to its most helpless and vulnerable members. I don't really blame anyone in particular; I agree with the President, that there will be plenty of time later to figure out what went right, and what went wrong, and what might have been done better. But I do feel a little ashamed that so little seemed to go right when it mattered most, and I'm not really sure what to do about my shame, and my anger, and my trepidation about what will happen next.
Most homeowners insurance policies also typically carry an exclusion against damages that arise from an Act of War, which is to say a deliberate and intentional act of malice intended to do harm. Four years ago today our country was viciously attacked by a small group of religious fanatics who believed that the cold-blooded murder of 2973 human beings somehow reflected the will of their God. And as is true, I suspect, for many of you, it doesn't take much for me to recall to mind where I was and how I felt when I first learned of the attacks against the World Trade Center on 9/11, or how I felt in the days and weeks afterwards: sadness at the loss of life, and depression over the corresponding loss of innocence and sense of security; pride in the courage of the first responders who risked (and in many cases lost) their own lives while rushing to the aid of the victims; anger toward those who had attacked us, and eventually dismay as I saw that anger manipulated and exploited in order to lead our nation into a war I felt at the time and still feel was misguided and unnecessary. In the past four years I've watched our country answer the violent and intolerant religious fanaticism of the terrorists with an often violent and intolerant religious fanaticism of our own: a crusade against the jihadists, in which both our traditional political civility and our precious and hard-won civil liberties often seem forgotten relics of a bygone era.
I understand the logic of "an eye for and eye." I understand how difficult it is to struggle against an opponent who respects no limits of violence or brutality -- who deliberately attacks civilians and other soft targets in order to strike at the most vulnerable and the most cherished members of a society. I understand that terrorism, as a tactic, is designed to evoke precisely that sort of a response in kind: to goad the victim into become an aggressor, thereby matching the brutality of the terrorists. But I also realize that there is an alternative, which we know from the Gospels as the commandment to turn the other cheek, and to love our enemies, to return good for evil, and do unto others as we would have others do unto us. I'm not saying that it's easy, or even that it's logical, but it's an ethical principle commonly held in some form or another by all of the world's great religions, including, of course, the religion of Islam.
And I also know how easy it is, when you are feeling powerless and in danger, and your home and your family and everything else you value is threatened by forces beyond your control, and maybe you're hungry, and you're scared, and you can't even be certain what's going to happen next... how easy it is to become angry and bitter and to blame those who are powerful and in control and have the ability to help and protect you for their failure to come to your rescue. And maybe that's justified, maybe it's not; yet I also realize that there is another way: The way that begins with Humility, and grows through Compassion to cultivate both a spirit of Generosity and that essential Gratitude which recognizes the fundamental interdependence of us all: rich and poor, black and white, even (dare I say it) Democrat and Republican, and brings us together in a spirit of mutual respect and cooperation as we work together to face and solve the problems that confront us as a Nation, as a Society, and as a Community of Human Beings.
And this is why I am so proud, and so gratified by what happened here on the Common Friday night. A handful of people saw a need and had an idea, they shared their vision, brought people together, and created in a very short time a very Good Time for a very good cause. And all I can say is "Laissez le Bon Temp Rouler!" -- "Let the Good Times Roll!" and roll, and roll; and feel the Spirit of God rolling through you into the world.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday September 11th, 2005
On the clear, calm morning of June 7th, 1692, just a few minutes after 11 o'clock, the earth unexpectedly trembled and shook, and then without warning the ocean surged up and permanently buried beneath the waves a significant portion of the city of Port Royal, Jamaica. Over 40 ships at anchor in the harbor were also lost, along with approximately 1700 lives. With a population of nearly 6000 souls, Port Royal had been (up until that moment) the largest English speaking community in the New World. At one time a popular haven for freebooters and buccaneers, the town still retained much of that same wide-open spirit: a profligate prosperity defined by decades of rum, plunder, and piracy. When news of the catastrophe eventually reached New England (some two months later) the Reverend Cotton Mather briefly turned his attention from the Witch Trials then taking place in Salem to "behold an accident speaking to all our English America." Describing Port Royal as "a very Sodom for wickedness," Mather characterized the catastrophe as a sign of God's righteous wrath and judgment -- both a warning to the faithful, as well as just punishment for those who flaunted their licentiousness and ignored God's holy ordinances.
I mention this simply to illustrate that the practice of attributing theological significance to natural catastrophes has a long and distinguished heritage even here in New England, yet history has not always been kind to those who discern the hand of God behind the misfortunes of their opponents. And I suspect that much of what is now being said along these same lines about the devastation caused by the Hurricane Katrina will likewise quickly be discredited and forgotten. Pronouncements by Muslim Clerics that the hurricane represents the wrath of Allah against the great infidel America may carry some credibility in the Arabic-speaking world, but are generally ignored here in the homeland of the infidels themselves. The handful of fundamentalist Christian preachers who have characterized the devastation of the Big Easy as God's punishment of a community which openly promotes Gay tourism and a libertine "let the good times roll" lifestyle are likewise routinely dismissed as crackpots, except perhaps by the handful of fellow crackpots who are willing to believe almost ANYTHING they're told, so long as they're also told that "it sez so" in the Bible.
Pat Robertson once claimed to have rebuked a hurricane, and diverted it from it's path and safely out to sea, but apparently this time around he was more concerned about the assassination of foreign leaders and creating fresh vacancies on the Supreme Court than with pestering God about the weather. And even the scientific community can sometimes sound a little apocalyptic in their pronouncements. I don't know for sure whether Global Warming is the underlying cause of all this horrible weather we've been experiencing, but I do know that there are an awful lot of awfully smart people who think that it is, many of whom were initially skeptical but are now convinced by the data. I'm still waiting to hear of any honest-to-God scientist whose opinion has been changed in the opposite direction. Yet dire predictions of doom and destruction by wind and rain and flood as punishment for our profligacy regarding greenhouse gasses sometimes sound a little reminiscent of Cotton Mather, and his ultimately misguided obsession with witches and witchcraft. There has to be a better way to get the message out.
Most homeowners insurance policies typically contain explicit exclusions, or require a separate premium, for what are known in the industry as "Acts of God" -- that is to say, "events arising out of natural causes with no human intervention, which could not have been prevented by reasonable care or foresight," such as lightning, and earthquakes, and floods. The reason events like these are excluded from coverage has to do with the complex question of actuarial liability. My former wife (who was an insurance adjuster before she became an attorney) once tried to explain this to me, and as a theologian this is what I understood: if God is ultimately responsible for things like lightning bolts, but "acts in mysterious ways," how can we acccurately calculate the risk and assess the liability, much less hold actual human beings (or human negligence) accountable for the damage?
Yet our contemporary scientific worldview increasing reveals to us that there is really no such thing as a "natural" disaster. If the wind blows and the rain falls and a swamp becomes flooded, that is hardly disastrous -- it's just part of the natural order of things. It's only when people are hurt and their property destroyed that a storm becomes a catastrophe, and presents us with a slightly different set of moral and ethical choices. A disaster is a social phenomenon, which is generally either mitigated or exacerbated by decisions we make as human beings. Do we simply blame the victims and and excuse our inactivity by saying that it is all simply God's will, nature taking it's natural course? Or do we acknowledge that God sometimes also acts in the world through the actions and activities of human beings, and then respond faithfully to the call to be of service to others in their time of peril?
Our basic human powerlessness in the face of powerful natural forces like a hurricane teaches us the important spiritual lesson of Humility. There are lots of things in this world that are beyond our immediate control, and when we realize this and accept it we gain an important insight into our true place in the universe. But this isn't the only spiritual lesson we learn at times of natural disaster: it is only the first. Our natural human empathy for the plight of those whose lives have been afflicted by the storm also teaches us Compassion, and from this we learn in turn the restorative power of our own Generosity. The word "generosity" comes from a Latin root which means "to give birth" or to create, as in Genesis. Through Generosity, we give birth to the power of our own creativity, and generate good things in the world. And then finally, we learn as well the spiritual lesson of Gratitude, as we discover through experience our mutual interdependence, and the necessity of our helping one another and receiving help from others in order to survive and transcend the many challenges that life itself holds for each of us.
The wind and the rain of Hurricane Katrina have long since passed over the Gulf Coast, but we are just now beginning to appreciate the full extent of the catastrophe. Fortunately, it now appears that the number of people killed outright by the storm, or who perished in the days immediately following, may be far less than many had initially feared. The cost of repairing the extensive property damage can only be guessed at, but could easily approach 60 billion dollars, while the overall cost to the economy might well exceed 200 billion. And then there is the disruption to our social fabric, which is difficult to measure in any currency. A million people displaced from their homes, many of whom may never return to the same neighborhoods and communities where they used to live. Ugly racial and class divisions brought to the surface, and exposed for all the world to see. And then the failure which makes this disaster truly tragic: the apparent inability (or perhaps unwillingness) of the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world to provide assistance in a timely fashion to its most helpless and vulnerable members. I don't really blame anyone in particular; I agree with the President, that there will be plenty of time later to figure out what went right, and what went wrong, and what might have been done better. But I do feel a little ashamed that so little seemed to go right when it mattered most, and I'm not really sure what to do about my shame, and my anger, and my trepidation about what will happen next.
Most homeowners insurance policies also typically carry an exclusion against damages that arise from an Act of War, which is to say a deliberate and intentional act of malice intended to do harm. Four years ago today our country was viciously attacked by a small group of religious fanatics who believed that the cold-blooded murder of 2973 human beings somehow reflected the will of their God. And as is true, I suspect, for many of you, it doesn't take much for me to recall to mind where I was and how I felt when I first learned of the attacks against the World Trade Center on 9/11, or how I felt in the days and weeks afterwards: sadness at the loss of life, and depression over the corresponding loss of innocence and sense of security; pride in the courage of the first responders who risked (and in many cases lost) their own lives while rushing to the aid of the victims; anger toward those who had attacked us, and eventually dismay as I saw that anger manipulated and exploited in order to lead our nation into a war I felt at the time and still feel was misguided and unnecessary. In the past four years I've watched our country answer the violent and intolerant religious fanaticism of the terrorists with an often violent and intolerant religious fanaticism of our own: a crusade against the jihadists, in which both our traditional political civility and our precious and hard-won civil liberties often seem forgotten relics of a bygone era.
I understand the logic of "an eye for and eye." I understand how difficult it is to struggle against an opponent who respects no limits of violence or brutality -- who deliberately attacks civilians and other soft targets in order to strike at the most vulnerable and the most cherished members of a society. I understand that terrorism, as a tactic, is designed to evoke precisely that sort of a response in kind: to goad the victim into become an aggressor, thereby matching the brutality of the terrorists. But I also realize that there is an alternative, which we know from the Gospels as the commandment to turn the other cheek, and to love our enemies, to return good for evil, and do unto others as we would have others do unto us. I'm not saying that it's easy, or even that it's logical, but it's an ethical principle commonly held in some form or another by all of the world's great religions, including, of course, the religion of Islam.
And I also know how easy it is, when you are feeling powerless and in danger, and your home and your family and everything else you value is threatened by forces beyond your control, and maybe you're hungry, and you're scared, and you can't even be certain what's going to happen next... how easy it is to become angry and bitter and to blame those who are powerful and in control and have the ability to help and protect you for their failure to come to your rescue. And maybe that's justified, maybe it's not; yet I also realize that there is another way: The way that begins with Humility, and grows through Compassion to cultivate both a spirit of Generosity and that essential Gratitude which recognizes the fundamental interdependence of us all: rich and poor, black and white, even (dare I say it) Democrat and Republican, and brings us together in a spirit of mutual respect and cooperation as we work together to face and solve the problems that confront us as a Nation, as a Society, and as a Community of Human Beings.
And this is why I am so proud, and so gratified by what happened here on the Common Friday night. A handful of people saw a need and had an idea, they shared their vision, brought people together, and created in a very short time a very Good Time for a very good cause. And all I can say is "Laissez le Bon Temp Rouler!" -- "Let the Good Times Roll!" and roll, and roll; and feel the Spirit of God rolling through you into the world.
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