Fake It 'Til You Make It
Sermon by Steve Edington
February 13, 2005
If I were to ask each of you to recall a particular event from which your life took a significant turn, I'm sure that most, if not all, of you could come up with one. Since I'm the one, however, who "has the floor" here that means I get to tell mine. I hope it will get us into our topic for this morning. This one goes back about a dozen years. I had been attending a few of the monthly meetings of the committee down in Lowell that puts on the annual Jack Kerouac festival there. I was still trying to decide if this was something I wanted to become strongly involved in or not. I'd had an interest in the writer, and his "Beat Generation" literary genre, at an earlier point in my life but that interest had waned. (This admission may come as a surprise to those who have known me in more recent years, and who may well have the impression that the first two words out of my infant mouth were "Jack Kerouac." I wasn't always this way.)
As the time for the festival approached in the fall of 1993 I got a call from one of the Committee members. Would I chair a panel discussion during the weekend on "Kerouac and Spirituality." Since I'd been a no-show at most of the planning meetings in the months prior, I was surprised to be asked. But maybe they figured, what with me being a minister and all, that I was supposed to know something about the subject. Why not? Okay, I'll do it. I'm easy.
It wasn't until a week or so later that I thought to ask someone who all would be on the panel. Turned out it was a couple of local folk, plus a man named Robert Creeley - who had been a figure in what is still called the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance of the mid-1950s - and, oh yeah, Allen Ginsberg. Hold on; I'm supposed to lead a discussion with Creeley and Ginsberg? I'd always wanted to meet these guys, but to hold my own in a conversation with them in front of what we knew would be a large crowd of people - that was another matter altogether. But rather than admit I didn't quite feel up to the task, I said, "Hey, that's great."
The day arrives. The room we're using is packed. I'd deliberately dressed down for the occasion, so naturally Ginsberg shows up clean shaven and in a suit and tie - playing against type of the hairy wild-man poet image he'd cultivated at an earlier time in his life. He sits next to me. Mr. Creeley is at the end of the table. Feeling a bit overwhelmed already I look up and see on the front row one of Kerouac's principal biographers sitting there. She is generally regarded as one of the better informed historians of that whole era. She's got her note pad and pencil all poised. A few seats behind her was a woman I recognized as one of Mr. Kerouac's girlfriends from around the time in his life that we were going to be discussing.
For me it was one of those classic, "Dear Lord what am I doing here?" moments. I wondered if there was a back-door where I could slip out before everyone figured out that I was an imposter. I started to look over my "prepared remarks" that were supposed to launch the discussion and all I can think is, "This is a load of crap you've written here, man - you can't say this out loud!" Well, it was about then that I gave myself a metaphorical slap in the face, commanded myself to quit whining and summoned up a bit of wisdom I've long carried around: "Get this event underway, and just fake it 'til you make it." Really. I just figured, OK I don't quite know what I'm doing here, but I'll act like I do and see what happens. And somewhere along the way my feeling of faking it got tamped down enough at least that I began to enjoy mixing it up with those guys.
I still didn't have a good sense of how the whole event had gone until a week or so later when the planning committee had a post-festival evaluation meeting. A lot of the conversation was about how well the symposium went - for which I was frequently thanked. I decided I hadn't made a complete fool out of myself after all. Maybe I've got a future with this whole Kerouac/Beat business, I thought. Many of you know where it went from there. A major episode of self-doubt turned out to be a pivotal moment for me. So when my dwelling on this whole subject starts to get a little old - as I'm sure it does now and then - you can blame it on Ginsberg. He won't mind, as he's been dead for nearly eight years.
"Fake it 'til you make it" was the stance or attitude that got me through the experience I just described. The result was that it opened up a part of me that I scarcely knew was there. I'm guessing that a lot of you have your own version of this story. I had some hesitation, speaking of self-doubt, about going with the sermon title I'm using today. At first glance it sounds like I'm endorsing phoniness or fakery. But not really. I use the expression to describe a circumstance where you don't quite know what you're doing but know you have to act anyway; or where you don't know with absolute certainty that the stance you're taking is the right one, but you still have to take a stand. It is not about being phony or inauthentic, but rather about trusting yourself while in the midst of uncertain or difficult circumstances as you are trying to get your bearings. It's about cultivating a capacity for self-trust; it's about living by faith.
There's that word again - faith - which I introduced last Sunday, noting that it would be my sermon topic, with variations, for three weeks. I'm going to keep in mostly on the personal level today, as to what I think it means to be a "person of faith" in one's personal life, building on what I've already said. Next Sunday I'll take up the subject of what I believe it means for us to be a liberal religious community of faith in the social, cultural, religious, spiritual, and political climate in which we now find ourselves in these early months of 2005. You'll have to come back next Sunday if you want that angle on the matter.
To return, then, to our topic for today: As I recalled my symposium experience I also remembered something I'd read in a book titled And A Voice To Sing With. The book is Joan Baez' autobiography. A grammatical purist would say that the title should be "And a Voice With Which to Sing," but I figure if you're Joan Baez you can call your book whatever you want. Somewhere in this book, Ms. Baez tells of occasionally having feelings before a concert similar to the ones I just described as having before that symposium: Self-doubt, inadequacy, "what do I think I'm doing here" kinds of feelings. I was amazed to read that. She has one of the most clear and beautiful singing voices I've ever heard. It's dropped a register as she gotten older, but still... it's beautiful. Joan Baez' mantra in such situations, as she tells it, is to say to herself, "Put it in the hands of God," and pick up her guitar and walk out and do her thing.
Reading that got me to thinking (listen up now, here comes the theological part): When I say "Fake it 'til you make it" and Joan Baez says "put it in the hands of God" are we each in our own way saying the same thing? I can't say for sure, of course. I did have the pleasure of very briefly meeting this woman many, many years ago, but we didn't talk about God. [I was 23 years old and while we were conversing I was saying to myself, over and over, "Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God..." but at least I didn't blurt it out loud.] "Put it in the hands of God"; "Fake it 'til you make it." Different language for the same sentiment? Could they both be the same essential statement of faith? Could be - it depends upon what you take faith to be. To get at this point I briefly need to pick up on a thread from last Sunday's sermon.
Those of you who were here may remember that I suggested two "modes of faith" as I called them. I admitted that I could be drawing an overly arbitrary line between the two, but felt the distinction worked well enough for the sake of making a point. Mode One, as I called it, is a faith that is ultimately vested or anchored in the realm of the supernatural or in whatever a person believes is above and beyond the workings of the natural world. This is usually a willful, intentional, Supernatural Supreme Being who is ultimately in charge and who give one's life meaning, purpose and direction. In the absence of such a Supreme Being Life is devoid of any ultimate meaning. Mode Two faith, staying with my terminology, is vested in the realm of the natural world and universe - acknowledging, to be sure, that there is still much we do not know about this "realm of the natural world and universe". To be a person a faith in this mode means you trust in the human capacity for reason and in the strength of the human will and spirit, while at the same time seeking "something more" beyond that. For me, as a "Mode Two Guy" that something more is contained within the realm of the natural. It is that depth dimension to life that I call sacred or holy, and that can be touched and experienced.
Persons in both of these faith modes can and do speak of God, but they are speaking of differing realities - or perceived realities, I should say. In Mode One, as just noted, God is a Supreme Being, who exists outside of the natural realm, but who rules over the natural, and over our lives as we live in this world. In Mode Two, God is more likely seen as what Emerson and others called one's Divine Spark, or the God or Goddess Within, or the Blessed Spirit of Life, who also connects us and our lives to all that is beyond us-and Who, in so doing, strengthens and nurtures our own internal resources and bearings. So I was in "Mode Two Mode" back at that symposium when I figured I've got to let it go and let it happen and decide that by faith I'd still be on my feet when it's done. Fake it 'til you make it, that is, believing that you will indeed make it. I don't know for sure that Joan Baez is what I'm calling a Mode Two person of faith, but if she is, then her phrase for it, i.e. "put it in the hands of God," isn't too different from my own.
To take this matter in another direction for a few minutes now, living a life of faith, as I've tried to present it here, or living with a basically trustful attitude towards life and with one's ability to meaningfully encounter and deal with it, does not shield you from doubt or betrayal. It offers no protection from letting yourself down, or letting others down, or just plain being let down you - sometimes in some pretty devastating ways. Faith is not to be confused with certainty, although it often times is. More often than not when someone says they "lost their faith," what they mean is that they no longer feel certain about something or someone, in which they had previously vested absolute certainty.
Persons, for example, who believed in a God who would never allow over 175,000 people to be killed with an unbelievably huge swat from an unbelievably huge ocean wave, now have to believe that such a thing can happen - Supreme Being or no Supreme Being. What this event - this horrific human disaster, human disaster, take note - says about how we see ourselves a creatures of nature on the one hand but also as creatures who are supposed to be able to supersede the workings of nature on the other is a sermon all by itself, and one I'll take a crack at later this spring. The only point I'm trying to make here is that we all live, consciously or not, with a set of assumptions about how the world is supposed to work and how we are supposed to "be" in it. This, too, I call living by faith.
But the world in which we live, and the lives we live as a part of it, are not bound by our assumptions or our needs and desires, as necessary as those assumptions, needs, and desires are to us. What I'm trying to say, without, I hope, getting too horribly esoteric about it, it that being a person of faith, particularly in the Mode Two manner I've suggested, means be willing and able to live in a zone between what you know and trust in and believe in - both about yourself and your world - and those times when what you know, trust, and believe will leave you coming up short, sometimes painfully short. It means living in the zone between what you know, trust, and believe in, and what is unknown, unknowable, or mysterious - sometimes painfully or devastatingly mysterious. Faking it 'til you make it doesn't mean you're always going to make it; it just means believing you can. It also means that when you don't make it there's more life to go, for as long as you have breath that is. And that gets me to my last point.
Living a life of faith means embracing life as fully as you can, and as if it is fully yours - even though in the long run, of course, it's not. I got one of those "blast from the past" e-mails this past week from someone who had tracked me down through the church's website. This person had been part of a very close circle of friends I had back in the mid-1970s for the three short, but very intense, years I lived in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. We'd all pretty much lost track of one another in the years since we went our ways, but somewhere in the back of my mind-one of those life assumptions I was living by-I thought we'd re-connect again... somehow, some time.
Well, the woman who found me through cyberspace was writing to tell me that one of those in that Stevens Point circle had died at age 65 following a sudden onset of cancer. His name was Jim. I first knew him as one of my campus ministry colleagues. He was this radical Lutheran who got assigned to the campus ministry because he was a little too far out there for even a liberal Lutheran congregation. That's the same reason I was there as an American Baptist, truth to tell. Jim was a very important person in my life for that short stretch of time, as I believe I was in his. During our time together he left the ministry, saw his marriage come to an end, and began a relationship with a woman who was also a part of our crowd, and whom, as I learned last week, he married and remained married to for the rest of his life. I, too, left the ministry at the end of those three years with respect to the denomination in which I was ordained. I later came back to the ministry as a Unitarian Universalist. Jim became a university professor. We each saw the other through our respective crises of faith, as it were, and then went our ways. As I said, I figured we'd catch up to each other again at some point in our lives. I figured wrong. We didn't make it. It happens.
I learned a lot from Jim some thirty years ago. I learned something from him last week as well. It wasn't something I learned for the first time. Jim just gave me a reminder. Life happens. And it happens quicker than you know, or expect. To live it by faith mean living your life believing you can find meaning in it, that you can find people you can meaningfully and lovingly share it with, and that you can make some kind of positive difference, however great or small, before you have to give it up.
This is one of the reasons we're here - so we can offer, and be, such a faith community. We each bring our lives here in the faith and in the hope that they will in some way be transformed.. And we bring our lives here in order that we may place them in the hands of something greater than ourselves. We do not all call that "something greater" by the same name - and that's fine and as it should be for those of us who are of a free faith. But, I feel safe in saying, we sense the reality of this "something greater" amongst us as an expression of our collective life. We come not always knowing for sure if we're going to "make it" when it comes to the challenges and the some-time obstacles we each and all face at times. But we come in order to find the strength that allows us to act as if we can meet those challenges. We come in order that our "yes" to life may be ours to say for as long as we are each given our time to say it. And so, may the presence of the Blessed Spirit of Life be ours to have and ours to share as we continue to grow this community of faith.
Stephen D. Edington
February 13, 2005
Copyright © 2005 by the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved.
