a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Mothers Day, Sunday May 14th, 2006
“Sweet are the thoughts that savor of content;
The quiet mind Is richer than a crown.”
--Lines from a Sampler on the wall of an old farmhouse
Some years ago now I had the opportunity to attend a public lecture at Oregon State University by the well-known science fiction writer Ursula K. LeGuin. LeGuin is one of my favorite authors, and I’d actually already met her several times before (since we both were living in Portland, Oregon at the time) -- first at a Science Fiction convention book-signing, and then later at the “Fishtrap” summer writing conference in Enterprise Oregon (where we spent a lovely afternoon sitting at a picnic table talking about her Earthsea series while all of the other aspiring writers were over at the “big tent” trying to network with agents and publishers), and then finally by chance standing in line in the Anne Hughes coffee room at Powell’s “City of Books” bookstore on Burnside Street in Portland, where we greeted one another like old friends. But I’ll never forget this particular lecture, because afterwards during the Q & A one of the students asked her which of her works she considered to be her greatest accomplishment, and without batting an eye or skipping a beat she responded “my children.” And I thought I’d share this story with you this morning both in honor of Mother’s Day, and also because it makes such a nice introduction to this morning’s topic.
For those of you who weren’t here last week, this morning’s sermon is actually the second in a two-sermon series inspired by the book I read from earlier: philosopher William B. Irvine’s On Desire: Why We Want What We Want. You can find the entire text of last week’s sermon on our FRS website, but to summarize briefly, in his book Irvine argues that our desires are more complicated than we think, and can’t really be trusted either. They arise from multiples sources, often forming long chains of “instrumental” and “terminal” desires, and are conditioned by something he calls the “biological incentive system” which has evolved through natural selection over the millennia to give us pleasure or cause us pain in order to reward activities that make us more likely to survive to reproduce, and to discourage us from behaviors that don’t. We aren’t really in control of our BIS, and it really cares very little for our happiness either, once we have served “nature’s purpose.” Furthermore, our desires themselves are typically more emotional than rational, and left to their own devices are also essentially insatiable... which can easily put us on to something Irvine calls “the satisfaction treadmill” -- always wanting and seeking more and more, but never finding it to be enough.
Faced with a dilemma such as this, human beings essentially have three choices. The first is hedonism: the pursuit of pleasure for it’s own sake. We can basically just give into our desires entirely, and pursue them with a single-minded abandon until they either wear us out or kill us. This option actually sounds a lot better in theory than it is in practice. For one thing, our desires often conflict with one another. We want to have things our own way, but we also want to be liked and admired by other people, some of whom we may actually need in order to get what we want. And then there is Irvine’s “satisfaction treadmill” I spoke of earlier: the strange psychological quirk of our biological incentive system that always seems to leave us hungry for more no matter how much we have consumed already.
Which brings us to the second option, which is Asceticism: the attempt to suppress our desires through rigorous physical, mental, and spiritual discipline. The problem with Asceticism is that it is both very difficult and not much fun, since it basically calls for us to control our desires by denying them (and ourselves) any comfort or pleasure at all.
Which leaves us with the third option, the “middle way” which involves first learning to Understand the nature of our desires, and then Mastering them by consciously transforming nature’s purpose into something of our own choosing.
Perhaps one of the earliest and most influential proponents of a “middle way” was Siddhartha Guatama, better known as the Buddha or “enlightened one,” who lived approximately 2500 years ago on the Indian subcontinent. I’m guessing most of you know a lot of this story already, but here it is again anyway. Siddhartha spent the first 30 years of his life as a prince in a castle, never wanting for any human comfort, and completely sheltered from the slightest hint of pain or suffering.
But after a series of accidental encounters which made him aware of poverty and illness and death, he renounced that lifestyle and went to live as an ascetic in the forest. Eventually these extreme physical and spiritual mortification failed to satisfy him as well; he took some nourishment and became enlightened to the Four Noble Truths of the Dharma. The first is that all life is suffering (which includes not only physical pain, but also disappointment and discouragement). The reason for this suffering is our “thirst” -- our insatiable desire for things that come into being and pass away. But there is a way out of this cycle, through the Noble Eight-fold path: Right Understanding, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration.
Let’s take a little closer look at these. Right Understanding and Right Intention basically add up to a correct comprehension of the Nature of Reality as described by the Four Noble Truths, together with the expressed desire to renunciate one’s desires. Right Speech, Right Action, and Right Livelihood are essentially moral prescriptions: Thou shalt not Lie, Thou shalt not Steal, Thou shalt not Kill pretty much cover the same territory. Right Effort is a little more sophisticated. Right Effort consists of mastering the five basic “distractors” which afflict us all: Sexual Desire (or “Lust”); Ill-Will (think Envy and Anger); Lethargy (or Sloth); Worry; and Doubt. Finally, Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration are the disciplines which lead most directly to our eventual enlightenment and liberation: a sensitive awareness to everything that is happening around us, together with the practice of a contemplative meditation which helps us to live fully and contentedly in the here and now, without being consumed by our restless desire for something more, or even the desire to be free from the grip of desire itself.
“For most people,” Irvine writes, “now represents an infinitesimal slice in the infinity of time. To an enlightened person, now -- the current moment -- is all we can know or experience. We are stuck in the present moment, in an eternal now. The past and future are known only by inference. Because the enlightened person has the ability to stay in the moment, he can experience beauty and wonder during even the most commonplace moments. The unenlightened person cannot.”
Irvine goes on to illustrate this point by asking his readers to imagine two people stuck in traffic. The unenlightened person “will likely sit there in a distracted state of mind. He might experience anxiety about being stuck -- and of course it is pointless anxiety since there is nothing he can do to get unstuck. He might think about the things he must do when he gets to his office and about how good it will feel to get home that evening. The enlightened person, in the same situation, might instead contemplate the sky. It is not only blue but a beautiful blue that changes from hour to hour, and it is typically populated with clouds of varying shape, color, and texture. And if the sky is overcast with leaden clouds, he might instead contemplate the smoke drifting up from the tailpipes of the cars in front of him -- the way it swirls and then dissolves into nothingness. If it is raining, he might study the way the raindrops on his windshield merge and the irregular paths they take as they trickle down. Indeed, he might even contemplate the glass of his windshield: how miraculous that a substance can block the wind but transmit light! The enlightened person will become a master of inconspicuous consumption, as compared to the conspicuous consumption in which most of us revel. While the drivers around him are experiencing boredom and anxiety, the enlightened driver might experience bliss.”
Of course, Irvine is also well aware that some people, “on hearing this description of enlightenment, will ridicule the person who can find pleasure gazing at the smoke drifting up from the tailpipes of the cars blocking his way. Such a person is at best childlike and at worst a fool. They will pity him. But who is more to be pitied, the person who is almost incapable of satisfaction and must therefore spend unsatisfying days in pursuit of a moment or two of satisfaction, or the person who can find satisfaction in the most ordinary moments and whose days are therefore filled with satisfying moments? If what we are interested in is satisfaction, it is the former person who is to be pitied; but...most of us aren’t interested in satisfaction. We are instead interested in ‘success,” which not only is different from satisfaction but is to a considerable extent incompatible with it.”
The paradoxical relationship between “satisfaction” and “success” poses a very important philosophical question for us to consider: is it every truly possible for human beings to “achieve” our “Heart’s Content?” The Desire for Success is based on Ambition, but a Sense of Satisfaction is rooted in Appreciation. Success is the product of an experience of discontent and the desire to better ourselves and our condition, while Satisfaction is an expression of our gratitude for what we have and who we are. Success is also often a manifestation of Greed: a desire to acquire and consume more and more; while Satisfaction often expresses itself though generosity, and the pleasures gained by sharing what we already have with others. Finally, the desire for Success is often linked to human pride, and the desire to be respected and admired (and perhaps even envied) by everyone who sees us; while Satisfaction is more often associated with humility, and the realization that we are what we are, and that that’s OK.
To put this in a slightly different way, those who seek success simply for the sake of achieving success rarely feel satisfied, while those who learn to seek satisfaction for its own sake quite often become quite successful as well, although = almost as an afterthought. A restless feeling of dissatisfaction is part of our biological inheritance, and mastering it completely is almost impossible. But according to Irvine, “the worst way to deal with our feelings of dissatisfaction is by working to satisfy the desires we find within us. If we do this, we practically guarantee that we will never experience lasting satisfaction, since the desire we satisfy will quickly be replaced by another desire.” Rather, “the best way to gain satisfaction -- lasting satisfaction -- is to change not the world and our position in it but ourselves. In particular, we should work at wanting what we already have.... We should remember that in most cases what we have... is something that we once dreamed of having, or something that someone less fortunate than us presently dreams of having.... We should endeavor to enjoy this dream, rather than ignoring it to pursue some other dream....”
In many ways, as Human Beings we ARE slaves to our desires, but in Irvine’s view we do not have to submit to that slavery voluntarily or completely. Rather, like any slave, we can recognize that while we may be powerless to escape our enslavement, we can still subvert it; we can still “form a personal plan for living and superimpose it over the plan imposed on us by our evolutionary master. If we do this, we will no longer simply being doing [nature’s] bidding; we will instead be taking our life and doing something with it, something we find meaningful. We will thereby be conferring meaning on our life, to the extent that it is possible to do so.”
When we look at life from this perspective, our quandary becomes much more clear. We can either chose to continue to play in a game which we can never win, constantly experiencing the frustration and the disappointment of constant anxiety, envy, bitterness and discontent; or we can choose to change the game by changing ourselves, by giving up the vain attempt to control things that are not really ours to control, and instead realizing that it is indeed possible to find satisfaction and contentment by looking within ourselves, by looking to the HEART of things. Rather than seeking fame and fortune, or the attainment of worldly success, we should teach ourselves to feel fortunate for the gift of life itself, and the things of the world which are close at hand that give us satisfaction.
When we learn to control our expectations, we make them easier to satisfy as well. When we learn to take pleasure in the simple things that are all around us, we discover that joy is our constant companion, and never far away. Irvine observes that “seen from the cosmic point of view, our existence is an astounding accident. The universe not only could get along without us but for billions of years it did get along. What we must settle for is meaning in some lesser sense -- call it personal meaning. In ‘choosing’ a plan of living, I am doing what I want to in life.... Will this make my life ‘genuinely’ meaningful? Probably not, but I think it will make it more personally meaningful....”
The key to personal happiness and genuine satisfaction, and the ultimate discovery of our Heart’s Content, is hardly a secret: it can be found simply in learning to embrace the lives we have: by becoming aware of the emotional sources of our insatiable desires, and teaching ourselves to redirect those desires toward aspirations that we find personally meaningful, whatever those may be: better relationships, creative achievements (or perhaps merely the mastery of one’s chosen craft), a deep appreciation for the many gifts we have gratuitously received from the Universe.
Evolution has programmed us to feel restless and discontented. But by confronting those feelings for what they are, and asserting our own freedom to choose, we can replace the mindless pursuit of worldly success with the mindful appreciation of who we are and all the blessings of life itself.
And in that moment, we shall be truly satisfied....
Sunday, May 14, 2006
Sunday, May 7, 2006
Thy Heart's Desire
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, MA
Sunday May 7th, 2006
OPENING WORDS: “This is the mission of our faith: to teach the fragile art of hospitality; to revere both the critical mind and the generous heart; to prove that diversity need not mean divisiveness; and to witness to all that we must hold the whole world in our hands”
-- William F. Schulz
A stingy old miser who had been diagnosed with a terminal illness was determined to prove wrong the saying, "You can't take it with you." After much thought and consideration, he finally figured out a scheme to take at least some of his assets with him when he died.
He instructed his wife to go to the bank and withdraw enough money to fill two large pillowcases. He then directed her to take the bags of money up to the attic and leave them directly above his bed. His plan was that when he passed away, he would reach out and grab the bags as he ascended into heaven.
Several weeks after the funeral, the deceased man’s wife went up into the attic to clean. Coming upon the two forgotten pillowcases stuffed with cash she sadly shook her head and exclaimed, "Oh, that darned old fool. I knew he should have had me put the money in the basement."
I thought I’d start out this morning by asking you all a question, which you don’t really need to try to answer right away. But how do you suppose you would live your lives differently, if money were no object? It’s a trick question, I know. On some level money is always an object; in fact, often it seems like it’s the only object of just about everything we do, and that the more of it one gets, the trickier it becomes simply dealing with the hassles of trying to keep track of it all.
But the question is tricky in another way as well. The underlying assumption of questions like this always seems to be the fantasy of unlimited material wealth: that you would somehow miraculously have all the money you could ever want or need, and never need to worry about it again. But suppose you asked the question literally instead? Suppose there simply was no object in the world that could be thought of as “money” -- that it simply didn’t exist, because there simply wasn’t any need for it.
Is this really any more far fetched than the dream of having so much money that you never have to worry about it again? Nothing to sell or buy, because anything you could possibly ever want or need was freely available, kind of like in Star Trek, or perhaps the Garden of Eden. If you were hungry, you would just go to the replicator unit and order whatever it was you wanted to eat (or in the alternative, perhaps just pluck a piece of fruit from the nearest tree. No, no, not THAT tree. The other tree...). And the same with your clothing, your transportation, your shelter from the elements, and whatever else you might dream of wanting or needing or having. Because the real question that interests me is this: If you didn’t have to worry about earning a living, how would you choose to spend your life?
Of course, this exercise may all just seem like a lot of idle daydreaming to many of you. But personally I think it’s important to ask ourselves these kinds of questions every once in awhile, for a couple of reasons. The first is that, as we sort through the long list of things we can imagine ourselves doing if money were no object, we begin to realize that there are lots of other limitations in life that prevent us from simply having or doing whatever it is that pops into our heads at any given moment. Think about it. Even if you could in theory “have it all,” you probably wouldn’t want to have it all at once.
So if we ask ourselves the question properly, it can help us to focus in more clearly on the things we truly value, whatever those may be. And at the same time, questions like these can also help to prevent us from squandering our time, our money, and our precious lives on things that don’t really matter to us at all -- the “shiny objects” that are more diversion than they are worth, and distract us from our heart’s desire.
I chose this topic, and its companion for next Sunday, because I had the desire to read a book. It’s a desire I get quite often, actually -- I see a review, or hear an interview with an author on the radio, about a topic of profound interest (or perhaps passing curiosity) to me; and the next thing I know I’m on-line at Amazon ordering a copy, which arrives in the mail in a week or so (which is the closest thing to a Star Trek replicator in MY limited experience). Obviously I can’t afford to buy every book I desire to read, and I don’t really even have the time to read everybook I buy...so they tend to pile up in rather tall stacks around the parsonage until I find (or make) the time to open them, or at least find a place for them on my already crowded bookshelves. “We do not choose our obsessions; our obsessions choose us.” I think I read that somewhere once....
This particular book [William B. Irvine’s On Desire: Why We Want What We Want, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)] had been sitting on my nightstand for about four months, and I wanted to read it because I thought it might help me better understand the process which had brought it (and so many others like it) into my life in the first place. My desire to own every book I find interesting (and my fantasy of someday reading every book I own) is grounded in a more fundamental desire to be smarter than I really am, which in turn is based on my desire to become a better minister, which I suppose in turn is based on a desire to be liked and respected and admired by all of you to whom I minister, and who contribute the money that pays my salary and allows me to buy all these books in the first place. And at the center of this long, circular chain of desires is the hope that somehow it will all make a difference, in my life in in yours; and the desire to make that difference happen -- to be a source of comfort, and inspiration, and wisdom for the members of this congregation, and then (together with your help), to help make the world a more comfortable, inspired, and wiser place to live.
Of course, even though life itself is a gift from the Universe, we all do still have to make a living...and (so far as we can know) we only get “one wild and precious life” to live. As far as nature is concerned, the purpose of life is to survive long enough to reproduce and create another generation...and everything else is pretty much extraneous. According to philosopher William Irvine, the process of evolution has shaped our desires in such a way that activities which contribute to nature’s purpose naturally give us pleasure (which thus makes them desirable); while things which are dangerous or detract from that purpose often cause us pain (thus warning us to avoid them).
This “biological incentive system” helps explain why food tastes good and loud, unexpected noises make our hearts race, yet it is hardly foolproof -- processed foods saturated with high fructose corn syrup may taste delicious to our evolutionary palate, causing us to crave them with an intensity beyond all reason, but this hardly means they are good for us, or conducive to our long-term evolutionary survival. Yet even when we know this intellectually, it takes an awful lot of will power to trump our emotional desire to eat the whole package of Oreos when we are feeling lonely and alone and afraid that no one loves us.
According to Irvine, “The relationship between the intellect and the emotions can best be viewed as an uneasy alliance.” The intellect is good at calculating what Irvine calls “instrumental desires” -- the things we decide we want to do in order to be able to do what we really want to do -- that is to say, the things that make us feel good. For example, “the intellect might point out...that what the emotions want would in fact feel bad, that what they want may feel good now but will feel bad later, or that although what they want would feel good, there is something else that would feel even better.”
Furthermore, Irvine continues, “The intellect can also help sort through conflicting emotions and determine which will be acted on and which won’t. The emotions are perfectly willing to listen to the intellect as long as the intellect isn’t trying to impose its views but is merely trying to help the emotions get what they want.” On the other hand, without some level of emotional buy-in, it is very difficult for the intellect alone to get us to do what we know is right, no matter how badly we may think we want it.
Because of this phenomenon, Irvine goes on to observe, “The relationship between the intellect and the emotions is therefore asymmetrical. Although the emotions have veto power over the intellect, in most cases the intellect only has the power of persuasion in its dealings with the emotions, and it can persuade them only if it can invoke a stronger emotion than the one it wants to suppress. Conversely, the intellect can form a desire, but if the emotions don’t commit, the resulting desire will be feeble. And if the emotions object, the resulting desire will be stillborn....”
“Why does the intellect play second fiddle to the emotions?” Irvine asks. “Why, in battles between the emotions and the intellect, do the emotions generally win? For the simple reason that they refuse to fight fairly. The emotions, in their dealings with the intellect, don’t use reason to gain its cooperation. Instead, they wear it down with -- what else? -- emotional entreaties. They beg, whine, and bully. They won’t take no for an answer. They won’t give the intellect a moment’s peace. In most cases, the best the intellect can hope for is to withstand these entreaties for a spell. Then it succumbs....”
The heart wants what it will, and no amount of willpower alone can dissuade it from its appetites. Neither is it especially reasonable in those appetites; rather, as we mature we often simply learn how better to use our Reason to rationalize our emotional desires, so that at least they might appear reasonable for the moment. No matter how intelligent or sophisticated we may think we are, our heads still generally serve our hearts, rather than the other way around. Advertisers understand this, of course; in fact it’s how they make their living, marketing to our feelings of dissatisfaction, and our appetite for more. And for some reason that would appear to defy all logic, no matter how much we may consume we never seem to feel satisfied.
Yet understanding this one simple thing about ourselves is the first step towards mastering our desires, and directing them toward a greater good. “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” wrote the philosopher David Hume. Our intelligence can tell us how to get from “A” to “B,” but it can not tell us whether or not “B” is really worth doing. For that we need our hearts.
We can not deduce “ought” from “is.” The facts alone will not tell us whether something is right or wrong; only our feelings can do that. But not feelings that are obsessed with the thirst to satisfy their own insatiable appetites. Rather, feelings which have discovered their own capacity for compassion, for experiencing the pain of others as if it was their own. Feelings which are hungry for both justice and mercy, and which understand both accountability and forgiveness. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied” the Scripture tells us. When we learn how to direct our desires toward an internalized sense of what is right and what is good, toward a profound and passionate understanding of the spiritual laws that are written upon the heart, we become better and more sophisticated spiritual beings in our own right: no longer slaves to our desires, but rather partners with them.
Nature wants us to “be fruitful and multiply,” to procreate in order to give birth to a new generation of life itself. And so we have evolved to feel great pleasure in the act of love: to love our mates, to love our offspring, to love life itself and all the things about being alive that give us pleasure and a sense of satisfaction. Yet intellectually we also know that we share the fate of all living creatures, and that someday we must die. Mostly we try not to think about this too much, at least not consciously; but even so, the inescapable awareness of our own mortality which lingers just beneath the surface of our rational thoughts can generate within us a sort of restless fear, as well as the passionate desire to cling to life regardless of the cost -- to seek out wealth, and fame, and power beyond all proportion to our ordinary needs, as though if we could just become rich and famous and powerful enough we might somehow cheat death and live forever. Our heads know this isn’t true, but our hearts don’t care -- the heart wants what it wants, and rarely listens to reason unless (as the philosophers tell us) it finds it in its own best interest to do so.
And still, much of the wisdom of growing older grows out of the realization that there are many ways to be creative, there are many ways of becoming truly generous, which give the heart great pleasure and satisfaction even in the face of limited time and resources. The things we CHOOSE to give our hearts to: not just family and career (as important at these things are), but art, music, science and literature, our larger communities, works of compassion and justice-making, the health and well-being of the world itself...these are things which can not only give us great pleasure and satisfaction, they are also the things that potentially give our lives a larger meaning as well. But these are the topics I will address next week, when I speak about “Thy Heart’s Content.”
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, MA
Sunday May 7th, 2006
OPENING WORDS: “This is the mission of our faith: to teach the fragile art of hospitality; to revere both the critical mind and the generous heart; to prove that diversity need not mean divisiveness; and to witness to all that we must hold the whole world in our hands”
-- William F. Schulz
A stingy old miser who had been diagnosed with a terminal illness was determined to prove wrong the saying, "You can't take it with you." After much thought and consideration, he finally figured out a scheme to take at least some of his assets with him when he died.
He instructed his wife to go to the bank and withdraw enough money to fill two large pillowcases. He then directed her to take the bags of money up to the attic and leave them directly above his bed. His plan was that when he passed away, he would reach out and grab the bags as he ascended into heaven.
Several weeks after the funeral, the deceased man’s wife went up into the attic to clean. Coming upon the two forgotten pillowcases stuffed with cash she sadly shook her head and exclaimed, "Oh, that darned old fool. I knew he should have had me put the money in the basement."
I thought I’d start out this morning by asking you all a question, which you don’t really need to try to answer right away. But how do you suppose you would live your lives differently, if money were no object? It’s a trick question, I know. On some level money is always an object; in fact, often it seems like it’s the only object of just about everything we do, and that the more of it one gets, the trickier it becomes simply dealing with the hassles of trying to keep track of it all.
But the question is tricky in another way as well. The underlying assumption of questions like this always seems to be the fantasy of unlimited material wealth: that you would somehow miraculously have all the money you could ever want or need, and never need to worry about it again. But suppose you asked the question literally instead? Suppose there simply was no object in the world that could be thought of as “money” -- that it simply didn’t exist, because there simply wasn’t any need for it.
Is this really any more far fetched than the dream of having so much money that you never have to worry about it again? Nothing to sell or buy, because anything you could possibly ever want or need was freely available, kind of like in Star Trek, or perhaps the Garden of Eden. If you were hungry, you would just go to the replicator unit and order whatever it was you wanted to eat (or in the alternative, perhaps just pluck a piece of fruit from the nearest tree. No, no, not THAT tree. The other tree...). And the same with your clothing, your transportation, your shelter from the elements, and whatever else you might dream of wanting or needing or having. Because the real question that interests me is this: If you didn’t have to worry about earning a living, how would you choose to spend your life?
Of course, this exercise may all just seem like a lot of idle daydreaming to many of you. But personally I think it’s important to ask ourselves these kinds of questions every once in awhile, for a couple of reasons. The first is that, as we sort through the long list of things we can imagine ourselves doing if money were no object, we begin to realize that there are lots of other limitations in life that prevent us from simply having or doing whatever it is that pops into our heads at any given moment. Think about it. Even if you could in theory “have it all,” you probably wouldn’t want to have it all at once.
So if we ask ourselves the question properly, it can help us to focus in more clearly on the things we truly value, whatever those may be. And at the same time, questions like these can also help to prevent us from squandering our time, our money, and our precious lives on things that don’t really matter to us at all -- the “shiny objects” that are more diversion than they are worth, and distract us from our heart’s desire.
I chose this topic, and its companion for next Sunday, because I had the desire to read a book. It’s a desire I get quite often, actually -- I see a review, or hear an interview with an author on the radio, about a topic of profound interest (or perhaps passing curiosity) to me; and the next thing I know I’m on-line at Amazon ordering a copy, which arrives in the mail in a week or so (which is the closest thing to a Star Trek replicator in MY limited experience). Obviously I can’t afford to buy every book I desire to read, and I don’t really even have the time to read everybook I buy...so they tend to pile up in rather tall stacks around the parsonage until I find (or make) the time to open them, or at least find a place for them on my already crowded bookshelves. “We do not choose our obsessions; our obsessions choose us.” I think I read that somewhere once....
This particular book [William B. Irvine’s On Desire: Why We Want What We Want, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)] had been sitting on my nightstand for about four months, and I wanted to read it because I thought it might help me better understand the process which had brought it (and so many others like it) into my life in the first place. My desire to own every book I find interesting (and my fantasy of someday reading every book I own) is grounded in a more fundamental desire to be smarter than I really am, which in turn is based on my desire to become a better minister, which I suppose in turn is based on a desire to be liked and respected and admired by all of you to whom I minister, and who contribute the money that pays my salary and allows me to buy all these books in the first place. And at the center of this long, circular chain of desires is the hope that somehow it will all make a difference, in my life in in yours; and the desire to make that difference happen -- to be a source of comfort, and inspiration, and wisdom for the members of this congregation, and then (together with your help), to help make the world a more comfortable, inspired, and wiser place to live.
Of course, even though life itself is a gift from the Universe, we all do still have to make a living...and (so far as we can know) we only get “one wild and precious life” to live. As far as nature is concerned, the purpose of life is to survive long enough to reproduce and create another generation...and everything else is pretty much extraneous. According to philosopher William Irvine, the process of evolution has shaped our desires in such a way that activities which contribute to nature’s purpose naturally give us pleasure (which thus makes them desirable); while things which are dangerous or detract from that purpose often cause us pain (thus warning us to avoid them).
This “biological incentive system” helps explain why food tastes good and loud, unexpected noises make our hearts race, yet it is hardly foolproof -- processed foods saturated with high fructose corn syrup may taste delicious to our evolutionary palate, causing us to crave them with an intensity beyond all reason, but this hardly means they are good for us, or conducive to our long-term evolutionary survival. Yet even when we know this intellectually, it takes an awful lot of will power to trump our emotional desire to eat the whole package of Oreos when we are feeling lonely and alone and afraid that no one loves us.
According to Irvine, “The relationship between the intellect and the emotions can best be viewed as an uneasy alliance.” The intellect is good at calculating what Irvine calls “instrumental desires” -- the things we decide we want to do in order to be able to do what we really want to do -- that is to say, the things that make us feel good. For example, “the intellect might point out...that what the emotions want would in fact feel bad, that what they want may feel good now but will feel bad later, or that although what they want would feel good, there is something else that would feel even better.”
Furthermore, Irvine continues, “The intellect can also help sort through conflicting emotions and determine which will be acted on and which won’t. The emotions are perfectly willing to listen to the intellect as long as the intellect isn’t trying to impose its views but is merely trying to help the emotions get what they want.” On the other hand, without some level of emotional buy-in, it is very difficult for the intellect alone to get us to do what we know is right, no matter how badly we may think we want it.
Because of this phenomenon, Irvine goes on to observe, “The relationship between the intellect and the emotions is therefore asymmetrical. Although the emotions have veto power over the intellect, in most cases the intellect only has the power of persuasion in its dealings with the emotions, and it can persuade them only if it can invoke a stronger emotion than the one it wants to suppress. Conversely, the intellect can form a desire, but if the emotions don’t commit, the resulting desire will be feeble. And if the emotions object, the resulting desire will be stillborn....”
“Why does the intellect play second fiddle to the emotions?” Irvine asks. “Why, in battles between the emotions and the intellect, do the emotions generally win? For the simple reason that they refuse to fight fairly. The emotions, in their dealings with the intellect, don’t use reason to gain its cooperation. Instead, they wear it down with -- what else? -- emotional entreaties. They beg, whine, and bully. They won’t take no for an answer. They won’t give the intellect a moment’s peace. In most cases, the best the intellect can hope for is to withstand these entreaties for a spell. Then it succumbs....”
The heart wants what it will, and no amount of willpower alone can dissuade it from its appetites. Neither is it especially reasonable in those appetites; rather, as we mature we often simply learn how better to use our Reason to rationalize our emotional desires, so that at least they might appear reasonable for the moment. No matter how intelligent or sophisticated we may think we are, our heads still generally serve our hearts, rather than the other way around. Advertisers understand this, of course; in fact it’s how they make their living, marketing to our feelings of dissatisfaction, and our appetite for more. And for some reason that would appear to defy all logic, no matter how much we may consume we never seem to feel satisfied.
Yet understanding this one simple thing about ourselves is the first step towards mastering our desires, and directing them toward a greater good. “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” wrote the philosopher David Hume. Our intelligence can tell us how to get from “A” to “B,” but it can not tell us whether or not “B” is really worth doing. For that we need our hearts.
We can not deduce “ought” from “is.” The facts alone will not tell us whether something is right or wrong; only our feelings can do that. But not feelings that are obsessed with the thirst to satisfy their own insatiable appetites. Rather, feelings which have discovered their own capacity for compassion, for experiencing the pain of others as if it was their own. Feelings which are hungry for both justice and mercy, and which understand both accountability and forgiveness. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied” the Scripture tells us. When we learn how to direct our desires toward an internalized sense of what is right and what is good, toward a profound and passionate understanding of the spiritual laws that are written upon the heart, we become better and more sophisticated spiritual beings in our own right: no longer slaves to our desires, but rather partners with them.
Nature wants us to “be fruitful and multiply,” to procreate in order to give birth to a new generation of life itself. And so we have evolved to feel great pleasure in the act of love: to love our mates, to love our offspring, to love life itself and all the things about being alive that give us pleasure and a sense of satisfaction. Yet intellectually we also know that we share the fate of all living creatures, and that someday we must die. Mostly we try not to think about this too much, at least not consciously; but even so, the inescapable awareness of our own mortality which lingers just beneath the surface of our rational thoughts can generate within us a sort of restless fear, as well as the passionate desire to cling to life regardless of the cost -- to seek out wealth, and fame, and power beyond all proportion to our ordinary needs, as though if we could just become rich and famous and powerful enough we might somehow cheat death and live forever. Our heads know this isn’t true, but our hearts don’t care -- the heart wants what it wants, and rarely listens to reason unless (as the philosophers tell us) it finds it in its own best interest to do so.
And still, much of the wisdom of growing older grows out of the realization that there are many ways to be creative, there are many ways of becoming truly generous, which give the heart great pleasure and satisfaction even in the face of limited time and resources. The things we CHOOSE to give our hearts to: not just family and career (as important at these things are), but art, music, science and literature, our larger communities, works of compassion and justice-making, the health and well-being of the world itself...these are things which can not only give us great pleasure and satisfaction, they are also the things that potentially give our lives a larger meaning as well. But these are the topics I will address next week, when I speak about “Thy Heart’s Content.”
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Ice for the Polar Bears
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Earth Day, Sunday April 23rd, 2006
OPENING WORDS:
“We are called to assist the earth, to heal her wounds and in the process, heal our own -- indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty, and wonder. This is our hope: That the child born today may still have a bit of green grass under their bare feet, a breath of clean air to breath, a patch of blue water to sail upon, and a whale on the horizon to set them dreaming.”
--Wangari Maathai (from her Nobel Prize acceptance speech)
--------
When I was still married, my father-in-law (who I saw in person precisely half-a-dozen times in 18 years of marriage) would occasionally phone our home just to check-in with his daughter and find out how things were going out in our neck of the woods. My former wife was not exactly close to the rest of her family. Her brother (who lives in rural Pennsylvania about an hour outside of Pittsburgh) I have only seen once, and I never did meet my mother-in-law, who passed away a decade before I ever met Margie. The anniversary of that death was typically a catalyst for one of these infrequent calls, which almost always ended in exactly the same way -- with my father-in-law lovingly reminding his daughter and grandchildren not to expect too much from him in the way of an inheritance when he finally passed away, since he was planning to leave his entire estate to buy ice for the Polar Bears at the Kansas City Zoo. It was kind of a family joke, endearing in an eccentric sort of way, which suited my father-in-law to a “T.”
My father-in-law was (and remains) an avid woodworker, a dedicated golfer, and a diehard fan of the Chicago Cubs. For much of his career he was employed as an early pioneer in the field of data processing, and even in retirement he still kept an IBM mainframe in the basement of his home and did freelance work for local businesses, back in the days when an Apple II Plus was a state-of-the-art desktop computer.
He is also a direct descendent of Captain James Weddell, the Antarctic explorer who discovered and named both the Weddell sea and the Weddell seal. On Sunday afternoons when his own children were little, Ray used to take them regularly to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, where he would stand in front of the exhibit of the stuffed seal bearing his family’s name, and lecture Margie and her brother Jim (in a voice just a little too loud to be intended for their ears alone) about the illustrious exploits of their notorious ancestor: a lecture which always ended in exactly the same way. “So remember children, it’s a proud name and a proud heritage. Never let anyone misspell it, never let anyone mispronounce it, and never EVER forget that you are a WEDDELL.” Margie used to tell me that often the people standing around them would break into spontaneous applause at the conclusion of this speech, while she and her brother tried to make themselves as small as possible, so they might attempt to slip between the cracks in the floor.
I’m not exactly certain how or why my father-in-law developed his commitment to the Polar Bears, but I suspect it followed the same lines as his other passions. And I know that while our own kids were still at home, Margie and I often used to take them to the Washington Park Zoo in Portland, Oregon, where the Polar Bears were one of our favorite exhibits. They are impressive, magnificent creatures -- so huge and yet so graceful (especially in the water); potentially so dangerous, and yet so compellingly attractive at the same time. The exhibit in Portland is designed like an aquarium, so that you can actually walk along below the surface of the water and view the animals as they swim, through a series of large, Plexiglas windows. It’s no wonder my father-in-law plans to bequeath them his entire estate. Once you’ve seen a Polar Bear up close, it’s hard to imagine a more deserving heir or a more worthy legacy.
Of course, the reason I’m telling you all this is that my former father-in-law’s idiosyncratic cause has now become front page news. The Polar Bears are running out of ice -- not the ones who are living in zoos, but those who still inhabit their natural habitat in the Arctic, whose very survival as a species is increasingly threatened by the effects of Global Warming.
I don’t really think I’m going to have to preach very hard or will have much trouble convincing those of you here in this room that Global Warming is real. The hard part is knowing what to do about it. The problem seems so immense, and the potential consequences so catastrophic, that the whole issue easily becomes a little mind-numbing. Graphs and statistics and molecular calculations based on measurements in the parts per million; elaborate computer models of changing climate patterns, ocean currents, and feedback loops; apocalyptic “worst case” scenarios predicting mass extinctions and sea levels 200 feet higher than they are today...the facts and figures -- the observations, measurements, calculations and projections -- are both emotionally overwhelming and difficult to grasp.
Scientists tell us that 19 of the 20 warmest years on record have occurred within the last quarter century, but what does that really mean to someone who associates “warmth” with “comfort?” We see with our own eyes the devastating effects of hurricanes like Katrina, which seem to grow stronger and more numerous every year; but there have always been hurricanes, and they have always been disastrous. Yet somehow, the image a polar bear perched on the edge of a melting ice flow, along with reports that these magnificent animals are now drowning in unheard of numbers as they attempt to navigate a diminishing polar ice pack, has a vividness and an urgency that is easy to understand. What once seemed solid and unchanging is literally disappearing beneath their feet. And beneath our feet as well.
Those of us who are trained to do grief counseling are taught that individuals who receive catastrophic news or are otherwise forced to cope with some sort of trauma will typically react by moving through five predictable mental and emotional stages. These stages are most frequently associated with the work of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross on the experience of Death and Dying, but they can actually be observed surrounding any Change of Circumstance which produces an Experience of Loss and thus evokes a Sense of Grief, from the news that you or someone you love is afflicted with a terminal illness to the discovery that your battery is dead and your car won’t start on a cold winter morning.
The intensity of the reaction is a function of how significant the potential loss is perceived, but the five stages remain the same. Our first response is typically one of DENIAL -- this isn’t really happening to me. You turn the key again, and then again; you check the lights, the heater, you turn off the radio; you turn the key one last time and still there’s no result....
So you move on to the next stage, which is ANGER. You curse the car, you curse the weather, maybe slam your hand against the wheel or the dashboard; curse anyone and anything else you can think to curse, including perhaps the entire economic system which has you awake and out of your warm bed on a cold winter morning trying to start your car so you can commute to a job you don’t especially like in the first place.
Then, as you start to realize that there are potential consequences to the failure of your car to start, you begin BARGAINING. If only the car will start one more time you promise to buy a new battery, get a tune up and flush the cooling system, replace the tires, belts and hoses, and never miss a scheduled oil change again.
When you finally recognize that the car isn’t going to start and that you are powerless to change that fact, you give up hope and instead DEPRESSION makes its appearance. The battery is dead and there is nothing you can do about it...and because of that you are probably going to end up being late to work as well.
But with any luck, this Depression will quickly be followed by ACCEPTANCE -- you go back inside, call the Auto Club, and make other plans to move forward with your day. In the case of something relatively trivial, like a dead battery, this whole process may only take five or ten minutes. Depending on your personality and how often you have experienced things like this before, you may even skip a stage, or move through two or three of them simultaneously.
But more serious losses typically take much longer to resolve. And the real “Grief Work” doesn’t actually begin until one has both accepted the reality of their loss and allowed themselves to feel the pain of it, and then started the challenging process of adjusting to a new environment without the lost object, and reinvesting themselves in that new reality. (*)
The potentially catastrophic change represented by Global Warming, and the traumatic losses that accompany it, represent a serious need for “grief work” on a global scale. Many of us have been in deep Denial for decades. Many more of us are profoundly Angry, and some of us are now Bargaining furiously: if only we could get more people to turn out the lights when they leave the room, and to drive hybrid cars instead of SUVs; if only we could build more wind turbines and stop burning fossil fuels, then all would be right in the world again. The Depressing news is that it may already be too late. We may already be powerless to turn back the rising tide, and reverse the runaway Greenhouse Effect that the uncontrolled Carbon Dioxide emissions of our modern industrial economy has already created.
Only Time will Tell. But Acceptance of this possibility does not mean we must surrender to it. No matter how overwhelming the problem may seem, or how helpless we may feel about our ability to change things, there is always one thing over which we have complete control. We can always control how we CHOOSE to respond. We can choose to ignore the fact that our past actions have consequences and continue on as we always have; we can choose to feel helpless and simply give in to the inevitable. Or we can choose to act as if our future actions have meaning, responding in the way that we know we should respond, even though we have no real assurance that our actions will be effective.
And this is where the problem of Global Warming ceases to be a question of science and economics, and becomes instead a moral and a spiritual issue.
The Hebrew scriptures tell us that God created the earth in six days, and that He gave humanity dominion over it, along with a mandate to go forth and subdue it. And there are many conservative theologians who read this passage in Genesis as a blank check for human beings to do whatever they wish to the Earth; to exploit it and all its creatures for their own personal pleasure and profit, without regard to any other consideration.
But there are other, more enlightened theologians, who interpret this mandate in a dramatically different light. Human beings are the custodians of the earth, charged with the responsibility of sustaining and renewing it, so that all God’s creatures might be fruitful and multiply. And these competing world-views, both grounded in Scripture, perhaps have more to say about the ultimate survival of our planet than any scientific insight or technological innovation.
It is not so much the changes in our climate we must grieve and ultimately learn to accept, as it is the change in our lifestyles that must come to pass if we ever hope to arrest and reverse the trend. In a word, we must learn to think of prosperity differently than we do at present. Our current economic system is based on concepts of increasing productivity and maximizing return, within an unregulated marketplace which efficiently matches the demands of Buyers to what Sellers can supply, and holds down prices by holding down costs (or in many cases simply pushing them off on those who cannot afford to object or are not powerful enough to resist).
An improved economic system must somehow incorporate the idea of Sustainability into this equation. It sounds so simple, and yet it appears so elusive, especially here in the wealthiest nation in the history of the planet, where a mere 4% of the world’s [human] population consumes far more than our fair share of the world’s resources, and produce a full 25% of the world’s Greenhouse gasses.
In the Earth Day materials distributed this year by the UU Ministry for the Earth, one writer observes that “We Americans suffer from a “Gratitude Deficit Disorder’ -- we keep trying to make ourselves happy through more stuff, but it never works, so we have to grab for even more stuff. It’s a never ending escalation, this addiction to stuff. We must break the cycle, remembering that happiness comes from relationships, connections, [the] satisfaction of worthwhile endeavors.... If we pay attention, the Earth will teach us gratitude instead of grasping, simple joy instead of compulsive consumption, openness to life instead of a driven (and fruitless) attempt to control everything. Thoughtlessness needs to give way to awareness, arrogance to compassion, addiction to balanced calm. A deep and abiding connection with nature can be that antidote to the compulsiveness and stresses of a life spent chasing the materialism of our post-modern American Dream....”
Which brings us once again back to the subject of Polar Bears. A Polar Bear is a predator. And unlike its closest (and more efficient) cousin, the Kodiak Grizzly (whose favorite food is salmon, but who also eats nuts, berries, roots, bulbs, ground dwelling rodents, and in a pinch even one of us), Polar Bears basically eat seals and perhaps an occasional walrus. They’ve also been known to snack on eggs (and the birds who lay them), kelp, and the carrion of various other marine animals, but (like all predators), Polar Bears live in a brutal but delicate harmony with their principle source of food.
When seals are abundant and hunting is good, they eat their fill of the choicest blubber and leave the rest of the seal carcass for scavengers like ravens, arctic foxes, and (of course) their own cubs, who depend on the adult bears for their own livelihood. And when seals are scarce and times are hard, the bears starve... beginning with the youngest and most vulnerable. All things being equal, the natural limitations of the bear’s own appetites and a fluctuating supply of food keeps the entire system in rough balance, although it remains a cold, cruel world “red in tooth and claw,” in which the bears must instinctively either kill or die.
The difference between a Polar Bear and a Human Being is that Homo Sapiens theoretically have the wisdom to control our instincts, to anticipate the consequences of our actions, and to change our behavior before it is too late. And the problem is that we have instead used this same ability to consume far beyond the ordinary limits of our natural appetites, and then to shift our predatory attention to other potential sources of “food” as we abandon once-plentiful resources we have ruthlessly and methodically exhausted through our greed.
But our efficiency is catching up with us. We are just too darn clever for our own good. And until we recognize and acknowledge that adopting and practicing an Ethic of Sustainability is the principle duty of responsible “dominion,” we will be continually skipping from catastrophe to catastrophe, one step ahead of the Polar Bear.
When we do become Mindful of the Duty of Sustainability, we begin once more to restore balance and harmony to our planet. It begins with individuals like you and me, who first change our own behavior, and then band together and organize in order to support one another, to educate those around us, and to influence the decisions of the people who make policy. It means holding ourselves accountable for the true cost of our own lifestyles, and changing our definition and understanding of “success.”
But perhaps most importantly, it means learning to see ourselves as the one part of this planet that is capable of seeing the bigger picture, and assuming the responsibility to behave appropriately: to replace our “natural” instinct to act only in our own short-term, short-sighted, selfish self-interest, and instead to take a more “global” perspective.
It means moving beyond our denial and our anger, our bargaining and even our depression, to accept the realization that we do indeed have a responsibility to provide ice for the polar bears...not because it is profitable, not even because it benefits us directly, but simply because it is the right thing to do...and to do otherwise would be to leave a very bitter legacy indeed.
--------
(*) Thanks to the TLC Group of Dallas, TX for use of their material on the stages of grief.. “TLC Group grants anyone the right to use this information without compensation so long as the copy is not used for profit or as training materials in a profit making activity such as workshops, lectures, and seminars, and so long as this paragraph is retained in its entirety.”
--------
READING from Day of Promise by Linda M. Underwood
All this talk of saving souls.
Souls weren't made to be saved,
like Sunday clothes that
Give out at the seams.
They're made for wear; they
come with lifetime guarantees.
Don't save your soul.
Pour it out like rain on
cracked, parched earth.
Give your soul away, or
pass it like a candle flame.
Sing it out, or
laugh it up the wind.
Souls were made for hearing
breaking hearts, for puzzling dreams,
remembering August flowers,
forgetting hurts.
These men who talk of saving souls!
They have the look of bullies
who blow out candles before
you sing happy birthday,
and want the world to be
in alphabetical order.
I will spend my soul,
playing it out like sticky string
into the world,
so I can catch every
last thing I touch.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Earth Day, Sunday April 23rd, 2006
OPENING WORDS:
“We are called to assist the earth, to heal her wounds and in the process, heal our own -- indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty, and wonder. This is our hope: That the child born today may still have a bit of green grass under their bare feet, a breath of clean air to breath, a patch of blue water to sail upon, and a whale on the horizon to set them dreaming.”
--Wangari Maathai (from her Nobel Prize acceptance speech)
--------
When I was still married, my father-in-law (who I saw in person precisely half-a-dozen times in 18 years of marriage) would occasionally phone our home just to check-in with his daughter and find out how things were going out in our neck of the woods. My former wife was not exactly close to the rest of her family. Her brother (who lives in rural Pennsylvania about an hour outside of Pittsburgh) I have only seen once, and I never did meet my mother-in-law, who passed away a decade before I ever met Margie. The anniversary of that death was typically a catalyst for one of these infrequent calls, which almost always ended in exactly the same way -- with my father-in-law lovingly reminding his daughter and grandchildren not to expect too much from him in the way of an inheritance when he finally passed away, since he was planning to leave his entire estate to buy ice for the Polar Bears at the Kansas City Zoo. It was kind of a family joke, endearing in an eccentric sort of way, which suited my father-in-law to a “T.”
My father-in-law was (and remains) an avid woodworker, a dedicated golfer, and a diehard fan of the Chicago Cubs. For much of his career he was employed as an early pioneer in the field of data processing, and even in retirement he still kept an IBM mainframe in the basement of his home and did freelance work for local businesses, back in the days when an Apple II Plus was a state-of-the-art desktop computer.
He is also a direct descendent of Captain James Weddell, the Antarctic explorer who discovered and named both the Weddell sea and the Weddell seal. On Sunday afternoons when his own children were little, Ray used to take them regularly to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, where he would stand in front of the exhibit of the stuffed seal bearing his family’s name, and lecture Margie and her brother Jim (in a voice just a little too loud to be intended for their ears alone) about the illustrious exploits of their notorious ancestor: a lecture which always ended in exactly the same way. “So remember children, it’s a proud name and a proud heritage. Never let anyone misspell it, never let anyone mispronounce it, and never EVER forget that you are a WEDDELL.” Margie used to tell me that often the people standing around them would break into spontaneous applause at the conclusion of this speech, while she and her brother tried to make themselves as small as possible, so they might attempt to slip between the cracks in the floor.
I’m not exactly certain how or why my father-in-law developed his commitment to the Polar Bears, but I suspect it followed the same lines as his other passions. And I know that while our own kids were still at home, Margie and I often used to take them to the Washington Park Zoo in Portland, Oregon, where the Polar Bears were one of our favorite exhibits. They are impressive, magnificent creatures -- so huge and yet so graceful (especially in the water); potentially so dangerous, and yet so compellingly attractive at the same time. The exhibit in Portland is designed like an aquarium, so that you can actually walk along below the surface of the water and view the animals as they swim, through a series of large, Plexiglas windows. It’s no wonder my father-in-law plans to bequeath them his entire estate. Once you’ve seen a Polar Bear up close, it’s hard to imagine a more deserving heir or a more worthy legacy.
Of course, the reason I’m telling you all this is that my former father-in-law’s idiosyncratic cause has now become front page news. The Polar Bears are running out of ice -- not the ones who are living in zoos, but those who still inhabit their natural habitat in the Arctic, whose very survival as a species is increasingly threatened by the effects of Global Warming.
I don’t really think I’m going to have to preach very hard or will have much trouble convincing those of you here in this room that Global Warming is real. The hard part is knowing what to do about it. The problem seems so immense, and the potential consequences so catastrophic, that the whole issue easily becomes a little mind-numbing. Graphs and statistics and molecular calculations based on measurements in the parts per million; elaborate computer models of changing climate patterns, ocean currents, and feedback loops; apocalyptic “worst case” scenarios predicting mass extinctions and sea levels 200 feet higher than they are today...the facts and figures -- the observations, measurements, calculations and projections -- are both emotionally overwhelming and difficult to grasp.
Scientists tell us that 19 of the 20 warmest years on record have occurred within the last quarter century, but what does that really mean to someone who associates “warmth” with “comfort?” We see with our own eyes the devastating effects of hurricanes like Katrina, which seem to grow stronger and more numerous every year; but there have always been hurricanes, and they have always been disastrous. Yet somehow, the image a polar bear perched on the edge of a melting ice flow, along with reports that these magnificent animals are now drowning in unheard of numbers as they attempt to navigate a diminishing polar ice pack, has a vividness and an urgency that is easy to understand. What once seemed solid and unchanging is literally disappearing beneath their feet. And beneath our feet as well.
Those of us who are trained to do grief counseling are taught that individuals who receive catastrophic news or are otherwise forced to cope with some sort of trauma will typically react by moving through five predictable mental and emotional stages. These stages are most frequently associated with the work of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross on the experience of Death and Dying, but they can actually be observed surrounding any Change of Circumstance which produces an Experience of Loss and thus evokes a Sense of Grief, from the news that you or someone you love is afflicted with a terminal illness to the discovery that your battery is dead and your car won’t start on a cold winter morning.
The intensity of the reaction is a function of how significant the potential loss is perceived, but the five stages remain the same. Our first response is typically one of DENIAL -- this isn’t really happening to me. You turn the key again, and then again; you check the lights, the heater, you turn off the radio; you turn the key one last time and still there’s no result....
So you move on to the next stage, which is ANGER. You curse the car, you curse the weather, maybe slam your hand against the wheel or the dashboard; curse anyone and anything else you can think to curse, including perhaps the entire economic system which has you awake and out of your warm bed on a cold winter morning trying to start your car so you can commute to a job you don’t especially like in the first place.
Then, as you start to realize that there are potential consequences to the failure of your car to start, you begin BARGAINING. If only the car will start one more time you promise to buy a new battery, get a tune up and flush the cooling system, replace the tires, belts and hoses, and never miss a scheduled oil change again.
When you finally recognize that the car isn’t going to start and that you are powerless to change that fact, you give up hope and instead DEPRESSION makes its appearance. The battery is dead and there is nothing you can do about it...and because of that you are probably going to end up being late to work as well.
But with any luck, this Depression will quickly be followed by ACCEPTANCE -- you go back inside, call the Auto Club, and make other plans to move forward with your day. In the case of something relatively trivial, like a dead battery, this whole process may only take five or ten minutes. Depending on your personality and how often you have experienced things like this before, you may even skip a stage, or move through two or three of them simultaneously.
But more serious losses typically take much longer to resolve. And the real “Grief Work” doesn’t actually begin until one has both accepted the reality of their loss and allowed themselves to feel the pain of it, and then started the challenging process of adjusting to a new environment without the lost object, and reinvesting themselves in that new reality. (*)
The potentially catastrophic change represented by Global Warming, and the traumatic losses that accompany it, represent a serious need for “grief work” on a global scale. Many of us have been in deep Denial for decades. Many more of us are profoundly Angry, and some of us are now Bargaining furiously: if only we could get more people to turn out the lights when they leave the room, and to drive hybrid cars instead of SUVs; if only we could build more wind turbines and stop burning fossil fuels, then all would be right in the world again. The Depressing news is that it may already be too late. We may already be powerless to turn back the rising tide, and reverse the runaway Greenhouse Effect that the uncontrolled Carbon Dioxide emissions of our modern industrial economy has already created.
Only Time will Tell. But Acceptance of this possibility does not mean we must surrender to it. No matter how overwhelming the problem may seem, or how helpless we may feel about our ability to change things, there is always one thing over which we have complete control. We can always control how we CHOOSE to respond. We can choose to ignore the fact that our past actions have consequences and continue on as we always have; we can choose to feel helpless and simply give in to the inevitable. Or we can choose to act as if our future actions have meaning, responding in the way that we know we should respond, even though we have no real assurance that our actions will be effective.
And this is where the problem of Global Warming ceases to be a question of science and economics, and becomes instead a moral and a spiritual issue.
The Hebrew scriptures tell us that God created the earth in six days, and that He gave humanity dominion over it, along with a mandate to go forth and subdue it. And there are many conservative theologians who read this passage in Genesis as a blank check for human beings to do whatever they wish to the Earth; to exploit it and all its creatures for their own personal pleasure and profit, without regard to any other consideration.
But there are other, more enlightened theologians, who interpret this mandate in a dramatically different light. Human beings are the custodians of the earth, charged with the responsibility of sustaining and renewing it, so that all God’s creatures might be fruitful and multiply. And these competing world-views, both grounded in Scripture, perhaps have more to say about the ultimate survival of our planet than any scientific insight or technological innovation.
It is not so much the changes in our climate we must grieve and ultimately learn to accept, as it is the change in our lifestyles that must come to pass if we ever hope to arrest and reverse the trend. In a word, we must learn to think of prosperity differently than we do at present. Our current economic system is based on concepts of increasing productivity and maximizing return, within an unregulated marketplace which efficiently matches the demands of Buyers to what Sellers can supply, and holds down prices by holding down costs (or in many cases simply pushing them off on those who cannot afford to object or are not powerful enough to resist).
An improved economic system must somehow incorporate the idea of Sustainability into this equation. It sounds so simple, and yet it appears so elusive, especially here in the wealthiest nation in the history of the planet, where a mere 4% of the world’s [human] population consumes far more than our fair share of the world’s resources, and produce a full 25% of the world’s Greenhouse gasses.
In the Earth Day materials distributed this year by the UU Ministry for the Earth, one writer observes that “We Americans suffer from a “Gratitude Deficit Disorder’ -- we keep trying to make ourselves happy through more stuff, but it never works, so we have to grab for even more stuff. It’s a never ending escalation, this addiction to stuff. We must break the cycle, remembering that happiness comes from relationships, connections, [the] satisfaction of worthwhile endeavors.... If we pay attention, the Earth will teach us gratitude instead of grasping, simple joy instead of compulsive consumption, openness to life instead of a driven (and fruitless) attempt to control everything. Thoughtlessness needs to give way to awareness, arrogance to compassion, addiction to balanced calm. A deep and abiding connection with nature can be that antidote to the compulsiveness and stresses of a life spent chasing the materialism of our post-modern American Dream....”
Which brings us once again back to the subject of Polar Bears. A Polar Bear is a predator. And unlike its closest (and more efficient) cousin, the Kodiak Grizzly (whose favorite food is salmon, but who also eats nuts, berries, roots, bulbs, ground dwelling rodents, and in a pinch even one of us), Polar Bears basically eat seals and perhaps an occasional walrus. They’ve also been known to snack on eggs (and the birds who lay them), kelp, and the carrion of various other marine animals, but (like all predators), Polar Bears live in a brutal but delicate harmony with their principle source of food.
When seals are abundant and hunting is good, they eat their fill of the choicest blubber and leave the rest of the seal carcass for scavengers like ravens, arctic foxes, and (of course) their own cubs, who depend on the adult bears for their own livelihood. And when seals are scarce and times are hard, the bears starve... beginning with the youngest and most vulnerable. All things being equal, the natural limitations of the bear’s own appetites and a fluctuating supply of food keeps the entire system in rough balance, although it remains a cold, cruel world “red in tooth and claw,” in which the bears must instinctively either kill or die.
The difference between a Polar Bear and a Human Being is that Homo Sapiens theoretically have the wisdom to control our instincts, to anticipate the consequences of our actions, and to change our behavior before it is too late. And the problem is that we have instead used this same ability to consume far beyond the ordinary limits of our natural appetites, and then to shift our predatory attention to other potential sources of “food” as we abandon once-plentiful resources we have ruthlessly and methodically exhausted through our greed.
But our efficiency is catching up with us. We are just too darn clever for our own good. And until we recognize and acknowledge that adopting and practicing an Ethic of Sustainability is the principle duty of responsible “dominion,” we will be continually skipping from catastrophe to catastrophe, one step ahead of the Polar Bear.
When we do become Mindful of the Duty of Sustainability, we begin once more to restore balance and harmony to our planet. It begins with individuals like you and me, who first change our own behavior, and then band together and organize in order to support one another, to educate those around us, and to influence the decisions of the people who make policy. It means holding ourselves accountable for the true cost of our own lifestyles, and changing our definition and understanding of “success.”
But perhaps most importantly, it means learning to see ourselves as the one part of this planet that is capable of seeing the bigger picture, and assuming the responsibility to behave appropriately: to replace our “natural” instinct to act only in our own short-term, short-sighted, selfish self-interest, and instead to take a more “global” perspective.
It means moving beyond our denial and our anger, our bargaining and even our depression, to accept the realization that we do indeed have a responsibility to provide ice for the polar bears...not because it is profitable, not even because it benefits us directly, but simply because it is the right thing to do...and to do otherwise would be to leave a very bitter legacy indeed.
--------
(*) Thanks to the TLC Group of Dallas, TX for use of their material on the stages of grief.. “TLC Group grants anyone the right to use this information without compensation so long as the copy is not used for profit or as training materials in a profit making activity such as workshops, lectures, and seminars, and so long as this paragraph is retained in its entirety.”
--------
READING from Day of Promise by Linda M. Underwood
All this talk of saving souls.
Souls weren't made to be saved,
like Sunday clothes that
Give out at the seams.
They're made for wear; they
come with lifetime guarantees.
Don't save your soul.
Pour it out like rain on
cracked, parched earth.
Give your soul away, or
pass it like a candle flame.
Sing it out, or
laugh it up the wind.
Souls were made for hearing
breaking hearts, for puzzling dreams,
remembering August flowers,
forgetting hurts.
These men who talk of saving souls!
They have the look of bullies
who blow out candles before
you sing happy birthday,
and want the world to be
in alphabetical order.
I will spend my soul,
playing it out like sticky string
into the world,
so I can catch every
last thing I touch.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
The Flesh Made Word
an Easter Homily delivered by the Rev Dr. Tim W Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Easter Sunday April 16th, 2006
OPENING WORDS: from A Passion for the Possible by William Sloane Coffin
As I see it, the primary religious task these days is to try to think straight. Seeing clearly is more important even than good behavior, for redemptive action is born of vision. Religious faith, far from being a substitute for thought, makes better thinking possible.
***
“In the beginning, there was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word WAS God....And the Word became Flesh, and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” These few lines from the first chapter of John’s Gospel, like numerous other passages from that provocative Second century document, contain some of the most theologically sophisticated ideas to be found anywhere in the New Testament.
And fortunately for us, by the time the Fourth Century Church Fathers also figured out that many of these same ideas were not, strictly speaking, entirely in accordance with the emerging definition of Christian Orthodoxy, it was too late; the Fourth Gospel had already become a well-established part of the New Testament canon. And so John became the so-called “spiritual” gospel, which offers to its readers a very different perspective on the events and meaning of the ministry of Jesus than those provided by Matthew, Mark and Luke.
These first three Gospels all basically agree on what Jesus said and the things that he did, a coincidence which modern Biblical scholars now believe derives from the likelihood that the anonymous authors of Matthew and Luke both copied from Mark in the preparation of their manuscripts. But this in turn leads us to another, more important insight into the true nature of Scripture. You can’t always take everything you read in the Bible as “the Gospel Truth.” To paraphrase the words of the famous 19th-century Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing: the Bible is a book written by human beings, for human beings, and in the language of human beings; and its meaning is to be found in the same manner as that of other books -- through the constant exercise of reason.
Modern Bible scholars sometimes like to distinguish between “the Jesus of History” and “the Christ of Faith.” The first is supposed to be a real person, like Shakespeare or Beethoven or Socrates, who had an actual life that we can study and learn about just like we would the study the biography of any other historical figure. The Christ of Faith, on the other hand, has more to do with one’s theological beliefs about the MEANING of that life, and especially one’s beliefs about what happened on that first Easter Sunday three days after Jesus had been arrested, crucified and killed by the Romans nearly 2000 years ago, and what that event has meant in the lives of those who call themselves Christians ever since.
But when you stop to think about these things a little more carefully, this careful distinction between faith and history doesn’t really hold up. To begin with, the idea of a “Christ of Faith” can mean just about anything or nothing. Most human beings have experiences that might be thought of as “spiritual” just in the normal course of everyday living. But whether we talk about them in terms of “Christ” or “Brahma” or “Buddha” or even simply “Nature” says a lot more about who we are and how we were taught than it does about the experience itself.
And when it comes to our knowledge of the historical Jesus, things become even more problematic. To put it in context, we have much better objective, verifiable scientific proof for both Global Warming and the “theory” of Evolution than we do tangible evidence for the proposition that Jesus of Nazareth ever even lived, much less that he said or did any of the things the New Testament says he did. When it comes to the biography of this obscure first century Jewish rabbi, there is very little that we can say for certain, or even with much confidence. We aren’t really sure precisely when he was born, or where, or even who his parents were; we don’t know what he looked like, how tall he was, what color his eyes were, whether he was right- or left-handed, and so on and so on. Many of the things he is said to have taught were also taught by other people, and many of the things he is said to have done (like walking on water or turning water into wine) quite frankly seem impossible.
What we do have is Words, in the form of a book, the New Testament, and God knows how many other books, letters, sermons, lectures, hymns, inscriptions, poems, parchment and papyri fragments, graffiti, gossip, half-remembered stories and conversations repeated and handed down from generation to generation. What we have is the memory of a life, transformed into language. The Flesh made Word: a spoken (and later written) tale which has survived long beyond that moment in time when the flesh itself has passed away, and which takes on a life of its own which is essentially immortal so long as life itself endures.
And when you DO stop to think about it, this is pretty amazing in its own right. Because these Words also have the power to change people’s lives, usually for the better (although not always). They can give people hope and comfort in times of trouble; they can help them overcome problems, teach them to be kind and generous and compassionate and forgiving; but they have also started wars, and created conflict and enmity and hatred between people as well, even though most people who actually study them find a very different message there.
These words can inspire us to think important thoughts of our own, and help us to understand our own experience of living. And we don’t necessarily have to believe or agree with every word we read or hear in order to learn something from it. Because even if it isn’t all True, someone once saw some Truth in them somewhere. And if we learn to look closely and listen carefully to the Words themselves, we just might see and hear it too.
Which brings us at last to Easter. What exactly IS the Miracle of Easter? Frederick Buechner offers us a long list of things the Resurrection isn’t, and to that list I will add one more. Resurrection is NOT Resuscitation. Resuscitation is something that physicians and firefighters try to do to a corpse. They pound on its chest, they shock it with electricity, they try to breathe new life into flesh that has already given up the ghost; and sometimes they actually succeed in their task (although not nearly so often in real life as they appear to on TV).
But even a successful resuscitation is only a temporary measure. It may give you a few more months, or a few more years; it may even give you an entire lifetime; but at some point it no longer really matters, because every living thing eventually succumbs to the fate to which all flesh is heir.
Resurrection is something different than that. Different from Memory, different from Poetry; different from the Renewal of Hope in the despairing heart, or the Rebirth of New Life from the cold earth in Spring; different even from the undying Power of the Spirit of God’s Love to transform our lives by grounding our souls in a profound sense of the Eternal (although this is perhaps a little closer than the others).
Resurrection is both Miracle and Mystery: something we will never fully understand, even when we feel we have experienced the miracle ourselves. But still we try to put the experience into words, because this is one way human beings attempt to communicate to one another the things that are most important to us. We speak, we sing, we write things down; and in doing so, our words survive us, and also potentially change the lives of people we will never see or meet ourselves.
William Willimon, a professor of Christian Ministry and Dean of the Chapel at Duke University, once wrote: “in an age of anxiety and dislocation, we think it impossible to live without ‘absolute truth.’ But what the God of Israel and the church promises us is not absolute truth reduced to propositions but the reality of the kingdom of God and eternal communion with the One who is the way, the truth, and the life. There is a sense in which we cannot know the truth without first being made truthful. Our problem with the gospel is moral before it is intellectual. We will use anything -- even intellectual discussions about the truth -- in a last-ditch attempt to keep Christ from us. So knowing the truth is a matter of being transformed, forgiven, born again before we can acknowledge the lies on which our lives our based, before we can care to entrust our lives to the One who is the way, the truth, and the life.”
Most Unitarian Universalists I suspect might feel a little uncomfortable talking about the Truth of our lives in the same kind of language used by Professor Willimon. Yet the realization that “Truth” is not merely a question of intellectual discussion or logical propositions, but rather a matter of being transformed and learning to trust, is just as important for Religious Liberals as it is for any Born-Again Christian.
And so we come on a Sunday morning, young and old, rich and poor, wise and foolish, happy and sorrowful, to a place we find empty except for our presence here. And we hear the stories, and we sing the songs, and we pray that someday we too may learn how to make the words living flesh again....
***
READING: from Listening to Your Life by Frederick Buechner
WE CAN SAY THAT the story of the Resurrection means simply that the teachings of Jesus are immortal like the plays of Shakespeare or the music of Beethoven and that their wisdom and truth will live on forever. Or we can say that the Resurrection means that the spirit of Jesus is undying, that he himself lives on among us, the way that Socrates does, for instance, in the good that he left behind him, in the lives of all who follow his great example. Or we can say that the language in which the Gospels describe the Resurrection of Jesus is the language of poetry and that, as such, it is not to be taken literally but as pointing to a truth more profound than literal. Very often, I think, this is the way that the Bible is written, and I would point to some of the stories about the birth of Jesus, for instance, as examples; but in the case of the Resurrections, this simply does not apply because there really is no story about the Resurrection in the New Testament. Except in the most fragmentary way, it is not described at all. There is no poetry about it. Instead, it is simply proclaimed as a fact. Christ is risen! In fact, the very existence of the New Testament itself proclaims it. Unless something very real indeed took place on that strange, confused morning, there would be no New Testament, no Church, no Christianity.
Yet we try to reduce it to poetry anyway: the coming of spring with the return of life to the dead earth, the rebirth of hope in the despairing soul. We try to suggest that these are the miracles that the Resurrection is all about, but they are not. In their way they are all miracles, but they are not this miracle, this central one to which the whole Christian faith points.
Unlike the chief priests and the Pharisees, who tried with soldiers and a great stone to make themselves as secure as they could against the terrible possibility of Christ’s really rising again from the dead, we are considerably more subtle. We tend in our age to say, “Of course, it was bound to happen. Nothing could stop it.” But when we are pressed to say what it was that actually did happen, what we are apt to come out with is something pretty meager: this “miracle” of truth that never dies, the “miracle” of a life so beautiful that two thousand years have left the memory of it undimmed, the “miracle” of doubt turning into faith, fear into hope. If I believed that this or something like this was all that the Resurrection meant, then I would turn in my certificate of ordination and take up some other profession. Or at least I hope that I would have the courage to.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Easter Sunday April 16th, 2006
OPENING WORDS: from A Passion for the Possible by William Sloane Coffin
As I see it, the primary religious task these days is to try to think straight. Seeing clearly is more important even than good behavior, for redemptive action is born of vision. Religious faith, far from being a substitute for thought, makes better thinking possible.
***
“In the beginning, there was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word WAS God....And the Word became Flesh, and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” These few lines from the first chapter of John’s Gospel, like numerous other passages from that provocative Second century document, contain some of the most theologically sophisticated ideas to be found anywhere in the New Testament.
And fortunately for us, by the time the Fourth Century Church Fathers also figured out that many of these same ideas were not, strictly speaking, entirely in accordance with the emerging definition of Christian Orthodoxy, it was too late; the Fourth Gospel had already become a well-established part of the New Testament canon. And so John became the so-called “spiritual” gospel, which offers to its readers a very different perspective on the events and meaning of the ministry of Jesus than those provided by Matthew, Mark and Luke.
These first three Gospels all basically agree on what Jesus said and the things that he did, a coincidence which modern Biblical scholars now believe derives from the likelihood that the anonymous authors of Matthew and Luke both copied from Mark in the preparation of their manuscripts. But this in turn leads us to another, more important insight into the true nature of Scripture. You can’t always take everything you read in the Bible as “the Gospel Truth.” To paraphrase the words of the famous 19th-century Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing: the Bible is a book written by human beings, for human beings, and in the language of human beings; and its meaning is to be found in the same manner as that of other books -- through the constant exercise of reason.
Modern Bible scholars sometimes like to distinguish between “the Jesus of History” and “the Christ of Faith.” The first is supposed to be a real person, like Shakespeare or Beethoven or Socrates, who had an actual life that we can study and learn about just like we would the study the biography of any other historical figure. The Christ of Faith, on the other hand, has more to do with one’s theological beliefs about the MEANING of that life, and especially one’s beliefs about what happened on that first Easter Sunday three days after Jesus had been arrested, crucified and killed by the Romans nearly 2000 years ago, and what that event has meant in the lives of those who call themselves Christians ever since.
But when you stop to think about these things a little more carefully, this careful distinction between faith and history doesn’t really hold up. To begin with, the idea of a “Christ of Faith” can mean just about anything or nothing. Most human beings have experiences that might be thought of as “spiritual” just in the normal course of everyday living. But whether we talk about them in terms of “Christ” or “Brahma” or “Buddha” or even simply “Nature” says a lot more about who we are and how we were taught than it does about the experience itself.
And when it comes to our knowledge of the historical Jesus, things become even more problematic. To put it in context, we have much better objective, verifiable scientific proof for both Global Warming and the “theory” of Evolution than we do tangible evidence for the proposition that Jesus of Nazareth ever even lived, much less that he said or did any of the things the New Testament says he did. When it comes to the biography of this obscure first century Jewish rabbi, there is very little that we can say for certain, or even with much confidence. We aren’t really sure precisely when he was born, or where, or even who his parents were; we don’t know what he looked like, how tall he was, what color his eyes were, whether he was right- or left-handed, and so on and so on. Many of the things he is said to have taught were also taught by other people, and many of the things he is said to have done (like walking on water or turning water into wine) quite frankly seem impossible.
What we do have is Words, in the form of a book, the New Testament, and God knows how many other books, letters, sermons, lectures, hymns, inscriptions, poems, parchment and papyri fragments, graffiti, gossip, half-remembered stories and conversations repeated and handed down from generation to generation. What we have is the memory of a life, transformed into language. The Flesh made Word: a spoken (and later written) tale which has survived long beyond that moment in time when the flesh itself has passed away, and which takes on a life of its own which is essentially immortal so long as life itself endures.
And when you DO stop to think about it, this is pretty amazing in its own right. Because these Words also have the power to change people’s lives, usually for the better (although not always). They can give people hope and comfort in times of trouble; they can help them overcome problems, teach them to be kind and generous and compassionate and forgiving; but they have also started wars, and created conflict and enmity and hatred between people as well, even though most people who actually study them find a very different message there.
These words can inspire us to think important thoughts of our own, and help us to understand our own experience of living. And we don’t necessarily have to believe or agree with every word we read or hear in order to learn something from it. Because even if it isn’t all True, someone once saw some Truth in them somewhere. And if we learn to look closely and listen carefully to the Words themselves, we just might see and hear it too.
Which brings us at last to Easter. What exactly IS the Miracle of Easter? Frederick Buechner offers us a long list of things the Resurrection isn’t, and to that list I will add one more. Resurrection is NOT Resuscitation. Resuscitation is something that physicians and firefighters try to do to a corpse. They pound on its chest, they shock it with electricity, they try to breathe new life into flesh that has already given up the ghost; and sometimes they actually succeed in their task (although not nearly so often in real life as they appear to on TV).
But even a successful resuscitation is only a temporary measure. It may give you a few more months, or a few more years; it may even give you an entire lifetime; but at some point it no longer really matters, because every living thing eventually succumbs to the fate to which all flesh is heir.
Resurrection is something different than that. Different from Memory, different from Poetry; different from the Renewal of Hope in the despairing heart, or the Rebirth of New Life from the cold earth in Spring; different even from the undying Power of the Spirit of God’s Love to transform our lives by grounding our souls in a profound sense of the Eternal (although this is perhaps a little closer than the others).
Resurrection is both Miracle and Mystery: something we will never fully understand, even when we feel we have experienced the miracle ourselves. But still we try to put the experience into words, because this is one way human beings attempt to communicate to one another the things that are most important to us. We speak, we sing, we write things down; and in doing so, our words survive us, and also potentially change the lives of people we will never see or meet ourselves.
William Willimon, a professor of Christian Ministry and Dean of the Chapel at Duke University, once wrote: “in an age of anxiety and dislocation, we think it impossible to live without ‘absolute truth.’ But what the God of Israel and the church promises us is not absolute truth reduced to propositions but the reality of the kingdom of God and eternal communion with the One who is the way, the truth, and the life. There is a sense in which we cannot know the truth without first being made truthful. Our problem with the gospel is moral before it is intellectual. We will use anything -- even intellectual discussions about the truth -- in a last-ditch attempt to keep Christ from us. So knowing the truth is a matter of being transformed, forgiven, born again before we can acknowledge the lies on which our lives our based, before we can care to entrust our lives to the One who is the way, the truth, and the life.”
Most Unitarian Universalists I suspect might feel a little uncomfortable talking about the Truth of our lives in the same kind of language used by Professor Willimon. Yet the realization that “Truth” is not merely a question of intellectual discussion or logical propositions, but rather a matter of being transformed and learning to trust, is just as important for Religious Liberals as it is for any Born-Again Christian.
And so we come on a Sunday morning, young and old, rich and poor, wise and foolish, happy and sorrowful, to a place we find empty except for our presence here. And we hear the stories, and we sing the songs, and we pray that someday we too may learn how to make the words living flesh again....
***
READING: from Listening to Your Life by Frederick Buechner
WE CAN SAY THAT the story of the Resurrection means simply that the teachings of Jesus are immortal like the plays of Shakespeare or the music of Beethoven and that their wisdom and truth will live on forever. Or we can say that the Resurrection means that the spirit of Jesus is undying, that he himself lives on among us, the way that Socrates does, for instance, in the good that he left behind him, in the lives of all who follow his great example. Or we can say that the language in which the Gospels describe the Resurrection of Jesus is the language of poetry and that, as such, it is not to be taken literally but as pointing to a truth more profound than literal. Very often, I think, this is the way that the Bible is written, and I would point to some of the stories about the birth of Jesus, for instance, as examples; but in the case of the Resurrections, this simply does not apply because there really is no story about the Resurrection in the New Testament. Except in the most fragmentary way, it is not described at all. There is no poetry about it. Instead, it is simply proclaimed as a fact. Christ is risen! In fact, the very existence of the New Testament itself proclaims it. Unless something very real indeed took place on that strange, confused morning, there would be no New Testament, no Church, no Christianity.
Yet we try to reduce it to poetry anyway: the coming of spring with the return of life to the dead earth, the rebirth of hope in the despairing soul. We try to suggest that these are the miracles that the Resurrection is all about, but they are not. In their way they are all miracles, but they are not this miracle, this central one to which the whole Christian faith points.
Unlike the chief priests and the Pharisees, who tried with soldiers and a great stone to make themselves as secure as they could against the terrible possibility of Christ’s really rising again from the dead, we are considerably more subtle. We tend in our age to say, “Of course, it was bound to happen. Nothing could stop it.” But when we are pressed to say what it was that actually did happen, what we are apt to come out with is something pretty meager: this “miracle” of truth that never dies, the “miracle” of a life so beautiful that two thousand years have left the memory of it undimmed, the “miracle” of doubt turning into faith, fear into hope. If I believed that this or something like this was all that the Resurrection meant, then I would turn in my certificate of ordination and take up some other profession. Or at least I hope that I would have the courage to.
Sunday, April 9, 2006
The Meaning of Membership
a homily by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
delivered at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Palm Sunday April 9th, 2006
The By-Laws of the First Religious Society state that: “Any person may become a member of the Society who is in sympathy with its purpose and program, and who has signed the Church Roll Book in the presence of the Minister, or in the Minister’s absence, in the presence of a member of the Parish Committee. Neither the covenant nor any other statement shall serve as a creedal test for membership.” That’s 62 words by my count, but there are really only three things you need to keep in mind.
WHAT are the requirements for becoming a member of this church? Sympathy. That’s it. Sympathy for the purpose and program of the Society. I’ll be coming to what that purpose and program are in just a moment, but for the time being all you need to remember is that it’s your Sympathy that truly matters.
HOW do you become a member of the Society? It’s easy. You sign up. Enroll. Subscribe. Enlist... However you want to think of it, it all means the same thing. You write your name in the book alongside the names of all the other people you see sitting all around you.
And then the final, most important thing: this is a Covenant that you are signing on to, and not a Creed. A Covenant is basically a promise of mutual accountability and support, rather than an agreement to all believe the same thing. To answer the question posed by the Prophet Amos, “Can two walk together lest they be agreed?” -- it is an agreement to walk together, rather than the refusal to walk at all unless we all agree.
Of course, folks can join this church any time they like, but once a year we like to set aside a small part of our service to recognize and honor the people who have become members of the Society in past twelve months, and also to invite anyone who would like to join today to come forward and be honored right along with them.
And if you are a little shy about being honored, don’t worry...you can always just stay in your pew and then discretely slip upstairs with me during the coffee hour and sign in private. Because the physical act of joining this church is (and ought to be) a simple thing -- as simple as signing your name. It’s the spiritual commitment which it represents that is truly important. And this is a very personal (and often a very private) commitment, which means different things to different people.
So what exactly IS the purpose of The First Religious Society? Once again, the by-laws tell us that “The purpose of the Society shall be to maintain services of worship in the Carlisle community and to upbuild in the hearts of its people the high ideals of a rational, progressive and exalting religion, in the laws of God and the service of humanity.”
And then the by-laws point to the language of our Covenant, and the three fundamental values we affirm every Sunday: Love, Truth, and Service. “To dwell together in peace, to seek knowledge in freedom, [and] to serve humanity in friendship, to the end that all souls shall grow into harmony with the Divine.” That’s what we’re here for, and this is the purpose for which we invite your sympathy when we welcome you as members of this Society.
And all of our programs here at FRS: not just our Worship, but also our Educational Programs, our Fellowship Events, our Community Outreach and our ministry of Pastoral Care, are all intended and designed to serve this more basic purpose.
I sometimes like to think of Membership as a combination of four other “ships.” The first of these is Discipleship: the commitment to becoming a Disciplined Religious Seeker, who makes “the free and responsible search for truth and meaning” a high priority in life. The second, of course, is Stewardship: accepting responsibility for the care and support of a religious institution which we have inherited as a legacy from our religious ancestors, and which we hold in trust for our own spiritual descendants.
The third “ship” is Leadership: setting a good example for our “Neighbors and Fellow Creatures,” and blazing a trail forward into a better and more fulfilling future for us all. And the final “ship” is the experience of Fellowship itself: the willingness to BE in a relationship of mutual accountability and support even when we DON’T always agree, even when we aren’t all exactly headed in the same direction, or even too certain that we want to be.
My friend Victoria Weinstein (who some of you may remember from my Installation three years ago -- she was the one who offered the Charge to the Congregation) typically tells the people who join her flock at the First Parish in Norwell: “I commend you for your courage in joining a church which will inevitably break your hearts, because like every other church, it is a human institution trying to live into divine values.“ I agree with Vickie wholeheartedly, and on that note, would now like to invite forward all of the courageous souls who have “signed the book” in the past twelve months, or who would like to sign today....
delivered at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Palm Sunday April 9th, 2006
The By-Laws of the First Religious Society state that: “Any person may become a member of the Society who is in sympathy with its purpose and program, and who has signed the Church Roll Book in the presence of the Minister, or in the Minister’s absence, in the presence of a member of the Parish Committee. Neither the covenant nor any other statement shall serve as a creedal test for membership.” That’s 62 words by my count, but there are really only three things you need to keep in mind.
WHAT are the requirements for becoming a member of this church? Sympathy. That’s it. Sympathy for the purpose and program of the Society. I’ll be coming to what that purpose and program are in just a moment, but for the time being all you need to remember is that it’s your Sympathy that truly matters.
HOW do you become a member of the Society? It’s easy. You sign up. Enroll. Subscribe. Enlist... However you want to think of it, it all means the same thing. You write your name in the book alongside the names of all the other people you see sitting all around you.
And then the final, most important thing: this is a Covenant that you are signing on to, and not a Creed. A Covenant is basically a promise of mutual accountability and support, rather than an agreement to all believe the same thing. To answer the question posed by the Prophet Amos, “Can two walk together lest they be agreed?” -- it is an agreement to walk together, rather than the refusal to walk at all unless we all agree.
Of course, folks can join this church any time they like, but once a year we like to set aside a small part of our service to recognize and honor the people who have become members of the Society in past twelve months, and also to invite anyone who would like to join today to come forward and be honored right along with them.
And if you are a little shy about being honored, don’t worry...you can always just stay in your pew and then discretely slip upstairs with me during the coffee hour and sign in private. Because the physical act of joining this church is (and ought to be) a simple thing -- as simple as signing your name. It’s the spiritual commitment which it represents that is truly important. And this is a very personal (and often a very private) commitment, which means different things to different people.
So what exactly IS the purpose of The First Religious Society? Once again, the by-laws tell us that “The purpose of the Society shall be to maintain services of worship in the Carlisle community and to upbuild in the hearts of its people the high ideals of a rational, progressive and exalting religion, in the laws of God and the service of humanity.”
And then the by-laws point to the language of our Covenant, and the three fundamental values we affirm every Sunday: Love, Truth, and Service. “To dwell together in peace, to seek knowledge in freedom, [and] to serve humanity in friendship, to the end that all souls shall grow into harmony with the Divine.” That’s what we’re here for, and this is the purpose for which we invite your sympathy when we welcome you as members of this Society.
And all of our programs here at FRS: not just our Worship, but also our Educational Programs, our Fellowship Events, our Community Outreach and our ministry of Pastoral Care, are all intended and designed to serve this more basic purpose.
I sometimes like to think of Membership as a combination of four other “ships.” The first of these is Discipleship: the commitment to becoming a Disciplined Religious Seeker, who makes “the free and responsible search for truth and meaning” a high priority in life. The second, of course, is Stewardship: accepting responsibility for the care and support of a religious institution which we have inherited as a legacy from our religious ancestors, and which we hold in trust for our own spiritual descendants.
The third “ship” is Leadership: setting a good example for our “Neighbors and Fellow Creatures,” and blazing a trail forward into a better and more fulfilling future for us all. And the final “ship” is the experience of Fellowship itself: the willingness to BE in a relationship of mutual accountability and support even when we DON’T always agree, even when we aren’t all exactly headed in the same direction, or even too certain that we want to be.
My friend Victoria Weinstein (who some of you may remember from my Installation three years ago -- she was the one who offered the Charge to the Congregation) typically tells the people who join her flock at the First Parish in Norwell: “I commend you for your courage in joining a church which will inevitably break your hearts, because like every other church, it is a human institution trying to live into divine values.“ I agree with Vickie wholeheartedly, and on that note, would now like to invite forward all of the courageous souls who have “signed the book” in the past twelve months, or who would like to sign today....
Sunday, April 2, 2006
The Magnificent Seven
(the 2006 “Sermon on the Amount”)
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday April 2nd, 2006
OPENING WORDS:
"We build on foundations, we did not lay.
We warm ourselves at fires, we did not light.
We sit in the shade of trees, we did not plant.
We drink from wells, we did not dig.
We profit from persons, we did not know.
We are ever bound in community." --Peter Raible
Timothy Muldoon lived alone in the Irish countryside, with only a pet dog for company. One day, the dog died, so Muldoon went to the parish priest and said, "Father, my dog is dead. Could ya' be sayin' a mass for the poor creature?"
Father Patrick replied, "I'm afraid not, my son. We cannot have services for an animal in the church. But there is a new denomination down the lane, some Unitarians, and there's no tellin' what they believe. Maybe they'll do something for the creature."
Muldoon said, "Thank you Father, I'll go right away. Tell me, do ya' think $5,000 is enough to donate for the service?"
“Five Thousand Dollars!” Father Patrick exclaimed, "Sweet Mary, Mother of Jesus! Why didn't ya' tell me the dog was Catholic?”
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about something Woody said at my installation. I’m sure you’ll remember it if your were there, because it was such a vivid image. During his “Charge to the Minister,” Woody advised me not to think of myself as a shepherd, but rather to be the sheepdog. Now I didn’t grow up on a farm, so my understanding of sheepdogs is really pretty limited. Basically, when I think of a sheepdog I think of a big, white hairy English sheepdog like the one in the Warner Brothers cartoons -- calm, courageous, quietly dignified, and always a step ahead of Wiley Coyote. A dog with a personality like the Golden Retriever we had when my kids were little -- a dog who let them tug on her ears, and pull her tail, and dress her up in funny clothing, and who never even let out a growl unless she heard something sinister prowling around outside the house in the middle of the night.
Anyway, a few weeks ago I was having lunch with Woody, and I asked him whether this was pretty much the same image he’d had in mind when he’d said what he said nearly three years ago. And he thought about it for a moment and then said No, that actually he’d been thinking of something more along the lines of a Border Collie.
So I’m shifting a little into Border Collie mode today, just to see if whether by barking a little more loudly and nipping at a few heels, I might be able to get our whole flock back grazing in greener pastures again. There were a lot of wonder things said about the ministry and congregational life at my Installation, most of which I know have now mostly passed from memory, but one thing I will never forget is how (notwithstanding my expressed desire for a “low key” celebration) Mary DeGarmo organized a fantastic party -- for months afterwards people referred to it as my “Coronation” -- yet despite having spent two full years in the Ministerial search process, and spending tens of thousands of dollars to find and bring me here, there was nothing in the church budget to pay for an Installation. Basically, all of the out-of-pocket expenses for that entire event were picked up by one very generous, anonymous donor, while many others also pitched-in in various other ways to make certain that the party was successful and that everyone had a good time.
And for me, this points to a profound paradox deep within the soul of the First Religious Society. Individually, the members of this congregation are some of the most generous and most committed, truly “liberal” people I have ever had the privilege of knowing anywhere. But institutionally, this same church often practices the old fashioned New England value of frugality almost (and I say again ALMOST) to the point of parsimony.
I have no real problem with frugality per se -- since I tend to be a pretty frugal guy myself. I drive a ten year old pick-up truck with over 100,000 miles on it; I buy almost all my clothes at Marshall’s (and what I can’t find there I get at Sears)... I don’t have any credit card debt; I don’t take exotic vacations; I don’t own a sailboat or a summer home (although I think someday I might like to); my kids are both through school, and I’ve even paid off all of my own student loans (which for someone who spent seventeen years in college and has five earned degrees is really saying something).
So I feel I understand the importance of getting your money’s worth, and the value of that wonderful old New England adage: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.” Yet when it comes to “doing Church,” sometimes this attitude can be a little misdirected. Church budgets ought to grow out of the ability of people to contribute generously, rather than the effort to “do Church on the Cheap.” Sure, we all want to get good value for our money. But the real point of being part of a Church like FRS is to support and promote our good values in the wider world. And who wants to pinch pennies doing that?
Here’s an interesting bit of information for you. Last year the average pledge here at the First Religious Society in Carlisle was about $915/family. That’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of, and I’m certain there are many congregations around the country who would be thrilled to have that high an average. But just down the road at the First Parish in Concord, the average annual pledge is about $1500 per household; and I’m told that the averages in Bedford and Lexington are about the same.
I realize that just looking at averages can sometimes be deceiving; and that our average pledge, for instance, doesn’t include all of the money that people contribute to this church in others ways, such as through our service auction or other fundraising activities, or simply by paying church-related expenses out of our own pockets, and then pocketing the receipts. But then again, the same is also true for these other churches as well. If we really want to understand the significance of the “average” pledge, we need to look a lot more closely at how experienced church fundraisers understand a congregation’s annual pledge campaign.
To make the math easy, lets assume a hypothetical congregation of 100 households with an average pledge of $1200 a year. Nowadays this is pretty much considered the “back of the envelope” benchmark of healthy stewardship for Unitarian Universalist congregations across the country. Anything higher than that is considered exemplary, and anything lower indicates room for improvement (although obviously every situation is unique, and there is a fair amount of regional variation).
But hypothetically, an average pledge of $100 a month in a congregation of 100 households would result in a canvass goal of $120,000. Experienced church fundraisers would divide that $120,000 goal into four equal amounts or “quartiles” of $30,000 each.
The first quartile they would expect to raise from the 5% of the congregation who comprise the largest contributors -- in this example, five contributions averaging $6000 apiece.
The next quartile they would raise from the 10% of the congregation who are the next highest givers: 10 gifts averaging $3000 apiece.
The third quartile consists of the next 20% of contributors, so again 20 gifts averaging $1500 each.
And the fourth quartile they would look to raise from the remaining 65% of the contributor pool, the majority of whom obviously would be pledging somewhere below the average.
Now it’s been my experience that when folks first stumble across this information, one of the first things they ask is “What’s wrong with those people in the fourth quartile? Why don’t they contribute more?”
And the answer is, there is nothing wrong with the people in the fourth quartile, and often they are contributing as much as they feel they can afford. It’s a statistical phenomenon: the 34th largest contribution probably isn’t that much different from the 36th; both are by definition above the Median, and probably above the Arithmetic Mean as well.
But one of those gifts gets averaged in with those of the larger contributors, while the other is averaged with smaller contributions from people who may be living on limited, fixed incomes, or who perhaps are only marginally involved in the life of the church in the first place.
And the more significant point is that every contribution is important in its own way, large or small. This is not a one-size-fits-all organization, and it needs the support of the entire range of potential contributors in order to flourish and thrive.
Personally, I’m much more interested in what inspires someone to become an above-average pledger: part of that elite 35% who do 75% of the work, and pay 75% of the bills, and (if you could actually figure out a way to measure such a thing) probably receive 75% of the spiritual benefit from participating as active members of a faith community as well.
Obviously, one criterion is that you have to be able to afford it. But affluence isn’t nearly as significant a factor as you might imagine. Statistically, Carlisle is one of the most affluent places in the world. I’m told that the median household income here is approximately $130,000 a year. Yet even in a place like this, people of very similar means will give dramatically different amounts to the church, regardless of the relative size of their incomes in comparison to those of their neighbors, or the general population.
A much more important characteristic than financial means is personal motivation, and this is generally something that originates from within the individual contributors themselves. Above Average Givers tend to share certain qualities with one another. The first is that they believe in the mission of the church, and have a vision for its future. This isn’t a private vision which they keep to themselves; it’s a shared, common vision, which they have helped to create in conversation with one another, and which they are committed to making real. Above Average Givers also tend to be committed to the people around them, or (as we like to put it around here) to the “love and regard” of their “neighbours & fellow cretures.” They trust one another, and build upon that trust in order to support something larger than themselves.
Above Average Givers also typically embody the spiritual values of Generosity and Gratitude. They know that they have been blessed in their lives in countless ways, and they are eager to share those blessings with others as best they can. And finally, Above Average Givers also tend to be leaders. They aren’t afraid to be out in front of the rest of the crowd, doing more than their fair share and encouraging others to follow their example. They realize that leadership is more about service and sacrifice than it is recognition or glory -- service in the sense of being a servant to something larger and more important than ourselves, sacrifice in the sense of making the world around us more sacred through our own grateful and generous presence in it.
Now the reason I’ve shared all this boring technical information about “quartiles” and “average pledges” with you is this. When you compare our current pledge profile to the profile predicted by the theoretical paradigm, one very obvious thing immediately jumps out. The paradigm says that this church ought to have five gifts averaging $6000 apiece. We have two. The paradigm also says that we ought to have ten gifts averaging $3000 apiece, and we appear to have nine...but if you assume that three of those actually belong with those of the first quartile givers, we are four short there as well.
Three plus four equals seven (which is math that even an English major with five college degrees can do). And therein lies the tale of the title of this sermon: The Magnificent Seven.
I don’t know who you are, but I have faith that you are here, somewhere, and destined to become important participants in the next generation of lay leadership of this congregation. Your vision will help shape our shared vision, and your commitment will help make that vision real. You may not be ready to step forward today, or this year, or perhaps even for several years. Or it may just be that the only reason you haven’t stepped forward already is that no one has ever really asked you, so you’ve never really thought about it before. But whatever the reason, until you do step forward, this congregation will never be able to achieve its full potential to serve the spiritual needs of this community of high achieving, above average souls.
And don’t think that this lets the rest of you off the hook either (this is the Border Collie barking now). This year the Finance Committee has asked for a 15% across the board increase in congregational giving just to keep up with inflation, and to compensate for the anticipated smaller return on our invested trust funds.
Basically, if your pledge hasn’t changed since the time of my Installation, your contribution is worth about 10% less than it was three years ago.
I know that these are difficult financial times for many of us, and that often it seems like a struggle just to make ends meet. But if we wait until everything is perfect in our financial lives before deciding to be generous, we will never be generous at all. This church needs all of our contributions, large and small, if it is to flourish and thrive in the days and years ahead.
Here’s one concluding thought. I realize that often it can seem easier to act generously ourselves, than it is to be the object of someone else’s generosity. Yet this reluctance to accept the generosity of others can also inhibit it -- because, after all, nobody likes to make other people uncomfortable.
We need to remember, and to remind ourselves often, that this church is a gift that we give to one another, and which we together give to the larger Carlisle community. Our willingness to accept and honor the generosity of our “Neighbours & Fellow Cretures” is perhaps one of the greatest gifts of true gratitude that we can ever give: both to our neighbors, and ultimately to ourselves as well.
*****
READING: by Steve De Groot. Quoted by Rebecca Parker in “Spiritual Practice for Our Time,” in Everyday Spiritual Practice: Simple Pathways for Enriching Your Life, Scott W. Alexander, ed. (Boston: Skinner House, 1999), pp 194-94. Steve was a member of Rebecca’s first congregation, speaking on Stewardship Sunday.
I first began to tithe, because I was taught to obey the teachings of my church, and tithing was one of them. I tithed because I saw obedience as the heart of faithfulness. When I began to understand that obedience was not all that important and could be evil, I continued to tithe because a different reasons had come to me. The people I loved most and admired tithed: my parents and leaders in our church. Their lives challenged me by their goodness. I wanted to be like them so I tithed to model my life on theirs.
But then I matured in my faith: I came to my own reason for tithing. This is why I do it now: I tithe because it tells the truth about who I am. If I did not tithe, it would say that I was a person who had nothing to give, or I was a person who received nothing from life, or I was a person who did not matter to the larger society, or I was a person whose life’s meaning was solely in providing for my own needs. But in fact who I am is the opposite of all those things. I am a person who has something to give. I am a person who has received abundantly from life. I am a person whose presence matters in the world. I am a person whose life has meaning because I am connected to and care about many things larger than myself alone. If I did not tithe, I would lose track of these truths about who I am. By tithing, I remember who I am.
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday April 2nd, 2006
OPENING WORDS:
"We build on foundations, we did not lay.
We warm ourselves at fires, we did not light.
We sit in the shade of trees, we did not plant.
We drink from wells, we did not dig.
We profit from persons, we did not know.
We are ever bound in community." --Peter Raible
Timothy Muldoon lived alone in the Irish countryside, with only a pet dog for company. One day, the dog died, so Muldoon went to the parish priest and said, "Father, my dog is dead. Could ya' be sayin' a mass for the poor creature?"
Father Patrick replied, "I'm afraid not, my son. We cannot have services for an animal in the church. But there is a new denomination down the lane, some Unitarians, and there's no tellin' what they believe. Maybe they'll do something for the creature."
Muldoon said, "Thank you Father, I'll go right away. Tell me, do ya' think $5,000 is enough to donate for the service?"
“Five Thousand Dollars!” Father Patrick exclaimed, "Sweet Mary, Mother of Jesus! Why didn't ya' tell me the dog was Catholic?”
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about something Woody said at my installation. I’m sure you’ll remember it if your were there, because it was such a vivid image. During his “Charge to the Minister,” Woody advised me not to think of myself as a shepherd, but rather to be the sheepdog. Now I didn’t grow up on a farm, so my understanding of sheepdogs is really pretty limited. Basically, when I think of a sheepdog I think of a big, white hairy English sheepdog like the one in the Warner Brothers cartoons -- calm, courageous, quietly dignified, and always a step ahead of Wiley Coyote. A dog with a personality like the Golden Retriever we had when my kids were little -- a dog who let them tug on her ears, and pull her tail, and dress her up in funny clothing, and who never even let out a growl unless she heard something sinister prowling around outside the house in the middle of the night.
Anyway, a few weeks ago I was having lunch with Woody, and I asked him whether this was pretty much the same image he’d had in mind when he’d said what he said nearly three years ago. And he thought about it for a moment and then said No, that actually he’d been thinking of something more along the lines of a Border Collie.
So I’m shifting a little into Border Collie mode today, just to see if whether by barking a little more loudly and nipping at a few heels, I might be able to get our whole flock back grazing in greener pastures again. There were a lot of wonder things said about the ministry and congregational life at my Installation, most of which I know have now mostly passed from memory, but one thing I will never forget is how (notwithstanding my expressed desire for a “low key” celebration) Mary DeGarmo organized a fantastic party -- for months afterwards people referred to it as my “Coronation” -- yet despite having spent two full years in the Ministerial search process, and spending tens of thousands of dollars to find and bring me here, there was nothing in the church budget to pay for an Installation. Basically, all of the out-of-pocket expenses for that entire event were picked up by one very generous, anonymous donor, while many others also pitched-in in various other ways to make certain that the party was successful and that everyone had a good time.
And for me, this points to a profound paradox deep within the soul of the First Religious Society. Individually, the members of this congregation are some of the most generous and most committed, truly “liberal” people I have ever had the privilege of knowing anywhere. But institutionally, this same church often practices the old fashioned New England value of frugality almost (and I say again ALMOST) to the point of parsimony.
I have no real problem with frugality per se -- since I tend to be a pretty frugal guy myself. I drive a ten year old pick-up truck with over 100,000 miles on it; I buy almost all my clothes at Marshall’s (and what I can’t find there I get at Sears)... I don’t have any credit card debt; I don’t take exotic vacations; I don’t own a sailboat or a summer home (although I think someday I might like to); my kids are both through school, and I’ve even paid off all of my own student loans (which for someone who spent seventeen years in college and has five earned degrees is really saying something).
So I feel I understand the importance of getting your money’s worth, and the value of that wonderful old New England adage: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.” Yet when it comes to “doing Church,” sometimes this attitude can be a little misdirected. Church budgets ought to grow out of the ability of people to contribute generously, rather than the effort to “do Church on the Cheap.” Sure, we all want to get good value for our money. But the real point of being part of a Church like FRS is to support and promote our good values in the wider world. And who wants to pinch pennies doing that?
Here’s an interesting bit of information for you. Last year the average pledge here at the First Religious Society in Carlisle was about $915/family. That’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of, and I’m certain there are many congregations around the country who would be thrilled to have that high an average. But just down the road at the First Parish in Concord, the average annual pledge is about $1500 per household; and I’m told that the averages in Bedford and Lexington are about the same.
I realize that just looking at averages can sometimes be deceiving; and that our average pledge, for instance, doesn’t include all of the money that people contribute to this church in others ways, such as through our service auction or other fundraising activities, or simply by paying church-related expenses out of our own pockets, and then pocketing the receipts. But then again, the same is also true for these other churches as well. If we really want to understand the significance of the “average” pledge, we need to look a lot more closely at how experienced church fundraisers understand a congregation’s annual pledge campaign.
To make the math easy, lets assume a hypothetical congregation of 100 households with an average pledge of $1200 a year. Nowadays this is pretty much considered the “back of the envelope” benchmark of healthy stewardship for Unitarian Universalist congregations across the country. Anything higher than that is considered exemplary, and anything lower indicates room for improvement (although obviously every situation is unique, and there is a fair amount of regional variation).
But hypothetically, an average pledge of $100 a month in a congregation of 100 households would result in a canvass goal of $120,000. Experienced church fundraisers would divide that $120,000 goal into four equal amounts or “quartiles” of $30,000 each.
The first quartile they would expect to raise from the 5% of the congregation who comprise the largest contributors -- in this example, five contributions averaging $6000 apiece.
The next quartile they would raise from the 10% of the congregation who are the next highest givers: 10 gifts averaging $3000 apiece.
The third quartile consists of the next 20% of contributors, so again 20 gifts averaging $1500 each.
And the fourth quartile they would look to raise from the remaining 65% of the contributor pool, the majority of whom obviously would be pledging somewhere below the average.
Now it’s been my experience that when folks first stumble across this information, one of the first things they ask is “What’s wrong with those people in the fourth quartile? Why don’t they contribute more?”
And the answer is, there is nothing wrong with the people in the fourth quartile, and often they are contributing as much as they feel they can afford. It’s a statistical phenomenon: the 34th largest contribution probably isn’t that much different from the 36th; both are by definition above the Median, and probably above the Arithmetic Mean as well.
But one of those gifts gets averaged in with those of the larger contributors, while the other is averaged with smaller contributions from people who may be living on limited, fixed incomes, or who perhaps are only marginally involved in the life of the church in the first place.
And the more significant point is that every contribution is important in its own way, large or small. This is not a one-size-fits-all organization, and it needs the support of the entire range of potential contributors in order to flourish and thrive.
Personally, I’m much more interested in what inspires someone to become an above-average pledger: part of that elite 35% who do 75% of the work, and pay 75% of the bills, and (if you could actually figure out a way to measure such a thing) probably receive 75% of the spiritual benefit from participating as active members of a faith community as well.
Obviously, one criterion is that you have to be able to afford it. But affluence isn’t nearly as significant a factor as you might imagine. Statistically, Carlisle is one of the most affluent places in the world. I’m told that the median household income here is approximately $130,000 a year. Yet even in a place like this, people of very similar means will give dramatically different amounts to the church, regardless of the relative size of their incomes in comparison to those of their neighbors, or the general population.
A much more important characteristic than financial means is personal motivation, and this is generally something that originates from within the individual contributors themselves. Above Average Givers tend to share certain qualities with one another. The first is that they believe in the mission of the church, and have a vision for its future. This isn’t a private vision which they keep to themselves; it’s a shared, common vision, which they have helped to create in conversation with one another, and which they are committed to making real. Above Average Givers also tend to be committed to the people around them, or (as we like to put it around here) to the “love and regard” of their “neighbours & fellow cretures.” They trust one another, and build upon that trust in order to support something larger than themselves.
Above Average Givers also typically embody the spiritual values of Generosity and Gratitude. They know that they have been blessed in their lives in countless ways, and they are eager to share those blessings with others as best they can. And finally, Above Average Givers also tend to be leaders. They aren’t afraid to be out in front of the rest of the crowd, doing more than their fair share and encouraging others to follow their example. They realize that leadership is more about service and sacrifice than it is recognition or glory -- service in the sense of being a servant to something larger and more important than ourselves, sacrifice in the sense of making the world around us more sacred through our own grateful and generous presence in it.
Now the reason I’ve shared all this boring technical information about “quartiles” and “average pledges” with you is this. When you compare our current pledge profile to the profile predicted by the theoretical paradigm, one very obvious thing immediately jumps out. The paradigm says that this church ought to have five gifts averaging $6000 apiece. We have two. The paradigm also says that we ought to have ten gifts averaging $3000 apiece, and we appear to have nine...but if you assume that three of those actually belong with those of the first quartile givers, we are four short there as well.
Three plus four equals seven (which is math that even an English major with five college degrees can do). And therein lies the tale of the title of this sermon: The Magnificent Seven.
I don’t know who you are, but I have faith that you are here, somewhere, and destined to become important participants in the next generation of lay leadership of this congregation. Your vision will help shape our shared vision, and your commitment will help make that vision real. You may not be ready to step forward today, or this year, or perhaps even for several years. Or it may just be that the only reason you haven’t stepped forward already is that no one has ever really asked you, so you’ve never really thought about it before. But whatever the reason, until you do step forward, this congregation will never be able to achieve its full potential to serve the spiritual needs of this community of high achieving, above average souls.
And don’t think that this lets the rest of you off the hook either (this is the Border Collie barking now). This year the Finance Committee has asked for a 15% across the board increase in congregational giving just to keep up with inflation, and to compensate for the anticipated smaller return on our invested trust funds.
Basically, if your pledge hasn’t changed since the time of my Installation, your contribution is worth about 10% less than it was three years ago.
I know that these are difficult financial times for many of us, and that often it seems like a struggle just to make ends meet. But if we wait until everything is perfect in our financial lives before deciding to be generous, we will never be generous at all. This church needs all of our contributions, large and small, if it is to flourish and thrive in the days and years ahead.
Here’s one concluding thought. I realize that often it can seem easier to act generously ourselves, than it is to be the object of someone else’s generosity. Yet this reluctance to accept the generosity of others can also inhibit it -- because, after all, nobody likes to make other people uncomfortable.
We need to remember, and to remind ourselves often, that this church is a gift that we give to one another, and which we together give to the larger Carlisle community. Our willingness to accept and honor the generosity of our “Neighbours & Fellow Cretures” is perhaps one of the greatest gifts of true gratitude that we can ever give: both to our neighbors, and ultimately to ourselves as well.
*****
READING: by Steve De Groot. Quoted by Rebecca Parker in “Spiritual Practice for Our Time,” in Everyday Spiritual Practice: Simple Pathways for Enriching Your Life, Scott W. Alexander, ed. (Boston: Skinner House, 1999), pp 194-94. Steve was a member of Rebecca’s first congregation, speaking on Stewardship Sunday.
I first began to tithe, because I was taught to obey the teachings of my church, and tithing was one of them. I tithed because I saw obedience as the heart of faithfulness. When I began to understand that obedience was not all that important and could be evil, I continued to tithe because a different reasons had come to me. The people I loved most and admired tithed: my parents and leaders in our church. Their lives challenged me by their goodness. I wanted to be like them so I tithed to model my life on theirs.
But then I matured in my faith: I came to my own reason for tithing. This is why I do it now: I tithe because it tells the truth about who I am. If I did not tithe, it would say that I was a person who had nothing to give, or I was a person who received nothing from life, or I was a person who did not matter to the larger society, or I was a person whose life’s meaning was solely in providing for my own needs. But in fact who I am is the opposite of all those things. I am a person who has something to give. I am a person who has received abundantly from life. I am a person whose presence matters in the world. I am a person whose life has meaning because I am connected to and care about many things larger than myself alone. If I did not tithe, I would lose track of these truths about who I am. By tithing, I remember who I am.
Sunday, March 19, 2006
Pirates, Pilgrims, Patriots
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at The First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday March 19th, 2006
There was a small item in the news a few weeks ago which I’ve been ruminating about ever since I first saw it. But apparently more Americans (which is to say, a LOT more Americans) can name the judges on “American Idol” or the members of the cartoon “Simpsons” family, than can correctly identify the five fundamental freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. Here are the percentages: 22% can name all five Simpsons (Bart, Lisa, Maggie, Homer and Marge) and 52% can name at least two; 25% can name all three American Idol judges, and 41% name two out of three -- but only 8% of Americans could name more than two of their First Amendment Rights, and only one in a thousand (one-tenth of one per cent -- or approximately the same percentage as there are Unitarian-Universalists in the general population) could correctly identify all five.
For my own part, I can both name all five Simpsons and all five of my First Amendment rights (although in the past I’ve often lumped the Right to Petition the Government for a Redress of Grievances right in with the Right of the People to Assemble Peaceably, since they naturally go together in my mind); but I could only identify one American Idol judge (Paula Abdul -- although I could also probably pick out the obnoxious British guy in a police line-up if I had to).
When you start to look at the actual data from this survey however, you’ll quickly discover that the situation isn’t nearly so bleak as we’ve been led to believe. Two-thirds of Americans could correctly name Freedom of Speech as a First Amendment Right (and isn’t Freedom of the Press pretty much the same thing?); while 24% could also correctly identify the Free Exercise of Religion. And on some level, what difference does it make to anyone but a lawyer (or maybe a historian) whether or not they know that the right to a jury trial is covered by the Seventh Amendment rather than the First, or if they can correctly identify the Fifth Amendment as the source of their right to avoid self-incrimination when “taking the Fifth” in front of a Cop, or a Judge, or a Congressional hearing?
The most interesting part of the survey though (at least for me) was that 21% of Americans also incorrectly believe that the First Amendment guarantees them the right to own and raise pets, and about the same percentage believe that it guarantees them the right to drive (even though the automobile wouldn’t even be invented for another century after the Bill of Rights was ratified).
We Americans cherish our Constitutional Rights, even if we aren’t always exactly sure of what they are. In many ways, the civil liberties protected by the Bill of Rights are what define us as a people, and as a nation: conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that we are all created equal, and endowed by our creator with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; an indivisible nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.
I may be idealistic (or maybe hopelessly naive), but I still like to believe that when it comes to the important task of protecting and defending our Constitutional freedoms, there are no Democrats or Republicans, no liberals or conservatives -- we are all liberals, we are all conservatives. The desire to preserve our God-given liberty -- even when we may not all precisely agree about what that means, even when we may not like what other people SAY it means, even when we aren’t exactly certain that we believe in the same God (or even that we believe in God at all) -- is the reason America exists in the first place: both as a nation, and as an idea.
Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, the Free Exercise of Religion (which is actually the first freedom mentioned in the First Amendment), the Right to Assemble Peaceably and to Petition the Government for the Redress of Grievances, and all of our other rights and liberties as well (including our unenumerated ninth amendment rights to own pets and drive automobiles) -- these are the freedoms that make America the envy of the world. So when we deny them to others in order to preserve them for ourselves, what kind of a nation does that make us?
We all may enjoy the right to remain silent, but that doesn’t mean that we have to use it. More than half a century ago now Martin Luther King Jr. warned us that a threat to freedom anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere. In 1759 Benjamin Franklin observed that “they that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,” while it was Vladimir Lenin who cynically remarked that “it is true that liberty is precious -- so precious it must be rationed.” When we discover ourselves destroying our own freedoms in order to “save” them, it really is time to take a long, hard look at where we are going, and how we got here in the first place.
Notwithstanding the First Amendment’s “wall of separation” between Church and State (another phrase that actually appears nowhere in the Constitution, but instead was coined by Thomas Jefferson to describe his views on the appropriate relationship between theology and government), American historians are well aware of the role that religion played in the formulation of American democracy. The principle of a separation of church and state was originally intended to keep churches free from government interference, rather than the other way around. Precursors of the US Constitution, such as the Mayflower Compact, were likewise modeled on Puritan church covenants, by which congregations organized themselves into local, self-governing communities of faith grounded in relationships of mutual accountability and support, united by the promise “to walk together according to God’s Holy Ordinances, insofar as they should be made clear to us in His Blessed Word of Truth” (to use language typical of these documents). Or to put it another way, the congregational polity of seventeenth-century Puritanism is the god-parent of the American ideal of political liberty, and many of the same principles of participatory democracy we now take for granted were born and nurtured in Meeting Houses just like this one all across New England.
But congregational polity also has another, outlaw step-child we don’t generally hear that much about. Three hundred years ago, the swashbuckling pirates who plundered merchant shipping throughout the Caribbean and all along the Eastern seaboard also organized their shipboard communities in a manner inspired by the familiar church covenants of Puritan congregations on both sides of the Atlantic. Having chosen to live outside the law, and as sworn enemies of both civil government and civilized society itself, they created instead a law and a society all their own, which was perhaps the most democratic, egalitarian, and ethnically pluralistic social order of its era (and perhaps of any era), notwithstanding the fact that it was also based on violence and theft of the most base and brutal sort.
According to historian Marcus Rediker, these pirate crews were formed from what one contemporary official called “the outcasts of all nations.” Convicts, debtors, vagabonds, escaped slaves and indentured servants, religious radicals and political prisoners, demobilized soldiers from Cromwell’s New Model Army and refugees from French Peasant revolts, “all men of unfortunate condition” who had either migrated or been exiled to colonial settlements “beyond the line” in the West Indies.
Escaping the brutal conditions of the New World plantations, they chose “to go upon the account” -- electing their officers and drawing up ship’s articles by which “crews allocated authority, distributed plunder, food, and other resources, and enforced discipline” (such as it was). Captains were generally granted unquestioned authority only in matters of “fighting, chasing, or being chased;” all other decisions were determined by a majority vote of the “Common Council,” who also elected a second officer unique to pirate crews, known as the Quartermaster, whose powers counterbalanced those of the Captain, and who was responsible for seeing to it that both provisions and treasure were fairly and equally distributed.
Captains were generally chosen for their personal courage, fighting skill, and knowledge of seamanship, as well as for their ability to inspire those around them to follow them into battle; while the Quartermaster was typically the most trusted individual on the ship -- a “social leader” who used his personal influence and reputation in an attempt to keep harmony as best he could among a group of heavily-armed (and often intoxicated) “masterless men,” who had little patience for even the hint of privilege or arbitrary authority.
One method that pirate crews used to minimize the danger of violence among themselves was to prohibit individuals from striking one another while aboard ship. No matter what the provocation, it simply wasn’t allowed. Instead, quarrels between shipmates were to be settled ashore with sword and pistol. “By taking such conflicts off the ship (and symbolically off the sea),” Rediker notes, “pirates promoted harmony in the crowded quarters belowdecks.” Anyone who violated this rule (or any of the other democratically-determined rules governing shipboard behavior) would be made “Governor of an Island” -- marooned alone on a deserted spit of sand, with only a flask of water and a pistol containing a single charge.
Yet eighteenth-century pirates also invented the world’s first Workers Compensation system. In sharp contrast to the harsh punishment reserved for those pirates who were chronically transgressive and disruptive, Ship’s Articles typically spelled out in very precise terms exactly how much was to be paid for every injury suffered by a pirate who was wounded in the exercise of their duty. One of my very favorite cartoons is of a pirate with an eye patch, a peg leg, and a hook for a hand saying to a shipmate “I’ve got half a mind to retire.” But for the real-life Pirates of the Caribbean, each of those injuries would have been worth a specific monetary stipend, paid out by the Quartermaster right off the top before any other distributions of treasure were made.
This rudimentary social welfare system helped to reinforce crew solidarity, and contributed to the sense of shared risk and shared reward so essential to the egalitarian pirate social order. Pirates were partners “who valued and respected the skills of their comrades,” and who recognized that they were engaged in very hazardous work which required both loyalty and cooperation if they were to succeed and survive. Knowing they would be provided for if luck turned against them made it that much easier for individual pirates to face those risks, and to share the inherent dangers of their profession equally with their shipmates.
Of course, this so-called “Golden Age of Piracy” truly was a Hobbsean world where life by its very nature tended to be nasty, brutish, and short -- a perpetual war of all against all, in which the strong and the powerful routinely took from the weak and the helpless at every opportunity, regardless of which side of the law they were on. Within the world’s first emerging global economy, piracy in many ways represented a rebellion of the human spirit against the oppressively overpowering forces of mercantile capitalism, which reduced human labor to a fungible commodity to be used up and then discarded in the relentless quest for ever greater profits.
Dressed in flamboyant clothing and exhibiting a “devil may care” attitude, pirates were often as greatly admired and romanticized as “social bandits” by the members of the laboring classes from which they had come as they were despised and feared by the wealthy merchants and ship captains they preyed upon. Their brief, violent lives of libertine indulgence, which ended more often than not at the end of a rope or at the bottom of Davey Jones’ locker, was the stuff of both legend and popular ballad -- a reputation which they have maintained down to this day thanks to actors like Errol Flynn and Johnny Depp, and writers ranging from Daniel Defoe to Howard Pyle.
Yet these fanciful images of swashbucklers, freebooters, and buccaneers tends to diminish our recognition that pirates were also real men (and in some cases, women) who desperately yearned for a freedom they felt had been denied them, and who seized that freedom in the only way available to them. And like the Pilgrims who crossed that same Atlantic ocean in search of religious freedom in the New World, and the Revolutionary Patriots descended from them, who fought a war and founded a new nation in order to secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity, these pirates drew their strength and support from the covenant they formed with one another, and to which they pledged, such as it was, their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor....
at The First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday March 19th, 2006
There was a small item in the news a few weeks ago which I’ve been ruminating about ever since I first saw it. But apparently more Americans (which is to say, a LOT more Americans) can name the judges on “American Idol” or the members of the cartoon “Simpsons” family, than can correctly identify the five fundamental freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. Here are the percentages: 22% can name all five Simpsons (Bart, Lisa, Maggie, Homer and Marge) and 52% can name at least two; 25% can name all three American Idol judges, and 41% name two out of three -- but only 8% of Americans could name more than two of their First Amendment Rights, and only one in a thousand (one-tenth of one per cent -- or approximately the same percentage as there are Unitarian-Universalists in the general population) could correctly identify all five.
For my own part, I can both name all five Simpsons and all five of my First Amendment rights (although in the past I’ve often lumped the Right to Petition the Government for a Redress of Grievances right in with the Right of the People to Assemble Peaceably, since they naturally go together in my mind); but I could only identify one American Idol judge (Paula Abdul -- although I could also probably pick out the obnoxious British guy in a police line-up if I had to).
When you start to look at the actual data from this survey however, you’ll quickly discover that the situation isn’t nearly so bleak as we’ve been led to believe. Two-thirds of Americans could correctly name Freedom of Speech as a First Amendment Right (and isn’t Freedom of the Press pretty much the same thing?); while 24% could also correctly identify the Free Exercise of Religion. And on some level, what difference does it make to anyone but a lawyer (or maybe a historian) whether or not they know that the right to a jury trial is covered by the Seventh Amendment rather than the First, or if they can correctly identify the Fifth Amendment as the source of their right to avoid self-incrimination when “taking the Fifth” in front of a Cop, or a Judge, or a Congressional hearing?
The most interesting part of the survey though (at least for me) was that 21% of Americans also incorrectly believe that the First Amendment guarantees them the right to own and raise pets, and about the same percentage believe that it guarantees them the right to drive (even though the automobile wouldn’t even be invented for another century after the Bill of Rights was ratified).
We Americans cherish our Constitutional Rights, even if we aren’t always exactly sure of what they are. In many ways, the civil liberties protected by the Bill of Rights are what define us as a people, and as a nation: conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that we are all created equal, and endowed by our creator with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; an indivisible nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.
I may be idealistic (or maybe hopelessly naive), but I still like to believe that when it comes to the important task of protecting and defending our Constitutional freedoms, there are no Democrats or Republicans, no liberals or conservatives -- we are all liberals, we are all conservatives. The desire to preserve our God-given liberty -- even when we may not all precisely agree about what that means, even when we may not like what other people SAY it means, even when we aren’t exactly certain that we believe in the same God (or even that we believe in God at all) -- is the reason America exists in the first place: both as a nation, and as an idea.
Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, the Free Exercise of Religion (which is actually the first freedom mentioned in the First Amendment), the Right to Assemble Peaceably and to Petition the Government for the Redress of Grievances, and all of our other rights and liberties as well (including our unenumerated ninth amendment rights to own pets and drive automobiles) -- these are the freedoms that make America the envy of the world. So when we deny them to others in order to preserve them for ourselves, what kind of a nation does that make us?
We all may enjoy the right to remain silent, but that doesn’t mean that we have to use it. More than half a century ago now Martin Luther King Jr. warned us that a threat to freedom anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere. In 1759 Benjamin Franklin observed that “they that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,” while it was Vladimir Lenin who cynically remarked that “it is true that liberty is precious -- so precious it must be rationed.” When we discover ourselves destroying our own freedoms in order to “save” them, it really is time to take a long, hard look at where we are going, and how we got here in the first place.
Notwithstanding the First Amendment’s “wall of separation” between Church and State (another phrase that actually appears nowhere in the Constitution, but instead was coined by Thomas Jefferson to describe his views on the appropriate relationship between theology and government), American historians are well aware of the role that religion played in the formulation of American democracy. The principle of a separation of church and state was originally intended to keep churches free from government interference, rather than the other way around. Precursors of the US Constitution, such as the Mayflower Compact, were likewise modeled on Puritan church covenants, by which congregations organized themselves into local, self-governing communities of faith grounded in relationships of mutual accountability and support, united by the promise “to walk together according to God’s Holy Ordinances, insofar as they should be made clear to us in His Blessed Word of Truth” (to use language typical of these documents). Or to put it another way, the congregational polity of seventeenth-century Puritanism is the god-parent of the American ideal of political liberty, and many of the same principles of participatory democracy we now take for granted were born and nurtured in Meeting Houses just like this one all across New England.
But congregational polity also has another, outlaw step-child we don’t generally hear that much about. Three hundred years ago, the swashbuckling pirates who plundered merchant shipping throughout the Caribbean and all along the Eastern seaboard also organized their shipboard communities in a manner inspired by the familiar church covenants of Puritan congregations on both sides of the Atlantic. Having chosen to live outside the law, and as sworn enemies of both civil government and civilized society itself, they created instead a law and a society all their own, which was perhaps the most democratic, egalitarian, and ethnically pluralistic social order of its era (and perhaps of any era), notwithstanding the fact that it was also based on violence and theft of the most base and brutal sort.
According to historian Marcus Rediker, these pirate crews were formed from what one contemporary official called “the outcasts of all nations.” Convicts, debtors, vagabonds, escaped slaves and indentured servants, religious radicals and political prisoners, demobilized soldiers from Cromwell’s New Model Army and refugees from French Peasant revolts, “all men of unfortunate condition” who had either migrated or been exiled to colonial settlements “beyond the line” in the West Indies.
Escaping the brutal conditions of the New World plantations, they chose “to go upon the account” -- electing their officers and drawing up ship’s articles by which “crews allocated authority, distributed plunder, food, and other resources, and enforced discipline” (such as it was). Captains were generally granted unquestioned authority only in matters of “fighting, chasing, or being chased;” all other decisions were determined by a majority vote of the “Common Council,” who also elected a second officer unique to pirate crews, known as the Quartermaster, whose powers counterbalanced those of the Captain, and who was responsible for seeing to it that both provisions and treasure were fairly and equally distributed.
Captains were generally chosen for their personal courage, fighting skill, and knowledge of seamanship, as well as for their ability to inspire those around them to follow them into battle; while the Quartermaster was typically the most trusted individual on the ship -- a “social leader” who used his personal influence and reputation in an attempt to keep harmony as best he could among a group of heavily-armed (and often intoxicated) “masterless men,” who had little patience for even the hint of privilege or arbitrary authority.
One method that pirate crews used to minimize the danger of violence among themselves was to prohibit individuals from striking one another while aboard ship. No matter what the provocation, it simply wasn’t allowed. Instead, quarrels between shipmates were to be settled ashore with sword and pistol. “By taking such conflicts off the ship (and symbolically off the sea),” Rediker notes, “pirates promoted harmony in the crowded quarters belowdecks.” Anyone who violated this rule (or any of the other democratically-determined rules governing shipboard behavior) would be made “Governor of an Island” -- marooned alone on a deserted spit of sand, with only a flask of water and a pistol containing a single charge.
Yet eighteenth-century pirates also invented the world’s first Workers Compensation system. In sharp contrast to the harsh punishment reserved for those pirates who were chronically transgressive and disruptive, Ship’s Articles typically spelled out in very precise terms exactly how much was to be paid for every injury suffered by a pirate who was wounded in the exercise of their duty. One of my very favorite cartoons is of a pirate with an eye patch, a peg leg, and a hook for a hand saying to a shipmate “I’ve got half a mind to retire.” But for the real-life Pirates of the Caribbean, each of those injuries would have been worth a specific monetary stipend, paid out by the Quartermaster right off the top before any other distributions of treasure were made.
This rudimentary social welfare system helped to reinforce crew solidarity, and contributed to the sense of shared risk and shared reward so essential to the egalitarian pirate social order. Pirates were partners “who valued and respected the skills of their comrades,” and who recognized that they were engaged in very hazardous work which required both loyalty and cooperation if they were to succeed and survive. Knowing they would be provided for if luck turned against them made it that much easier for individual pirates to face those risks, and to share the inherent dangers of their profession equally with their shipmates.
Of course, this so-called “Golden Age of Piracy” truly was a Hobbsean world where life by its very nature tended to be nasty, brutish, and short -- a perpetual war of all against all, in which the strong and the powerful routinely took from the weak and the helpless at every opportunity, regardless of which side of the law they were on. Within the world’s first emerging global economy, piracy in many ways represented a rebellion of the human spirit against the oppressively overpowering forces of mercantile capitalism, which reduced human labor to a fungible commodity to be used up and then discarded in the relentless quest for ever greater profits.
Dressed in flamboyant clothing and exhibiting a “devil may care” attitude, pirates were often as greatly admired and romanticized as “social bandits” by the members of the laboring classes from which they had come as they were despised and feared by the wealthy merchants and ship captains they preyed upon. Their brief, violent lives of libertine indulgence, which ended more often than not at the end of a rope or at the bottom of Davey Jones’ locker, was the stuff of both legend and popular ballad -- a reputation which they have maintained down to this day thanks to actors like Errol Flynn and Johnny Depp, and writers ranging from Daniel Defoe to Howard Pyle.
Yet these fanciful images of swashbucklers, freebooters, and buccaneers tends to diminish our recognition that pirates were also real men (and in some cases, women) who desperately yearned for a freedom they felt had been denied them, and who seized that freedom in the only way available to them. And like the Pilgrims who crossed that same Atlantic ocean in search of religious freedom in the New World, and the Revolutionary Patriots descended from them, who fought a war and founded a new nation in order to secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity, these pirates drew their strength and support from the covenant they formed with one another, and to which they pledged, such as it was, their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor....
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
