From the Bottom Up
Sermon by Steve Edington
March 6, 2011
Reading:
Sometimes when the bottom falls out of our life, we are set free. We attain enlightenment, or an enlightenment of some sorts, some perspective, some clarity, some sense of reality, some sense of dealing with things as they are...
When that profound thing happens we can expect to go through a process, sometimes a long process, a painful or at least uncomfortable process, in which we let go of something and slowly learn to live again. This is true no matter what we lose: A loved one, a work, a hope, a vision, an image of ourselves, a part of ourselves. Loss makes artists of us all as we weave new patterns in the fabric of our lives.
Rev. Greta Crosby
Tree and Jubilee
A little over 30 years have gone by since I lost my father, and since his death took place around this time of year, I still find myself thinking back to it now. I'm certainly in a much more reflective mood about it at this point in my life, but remember well some of my feelings in the immediate aftermath of his passing.
My father's story - parts of which I've shared here - is largely about his struggling to make something of himself and raise his family as he came out of the back country of West Virginia in the years before and during the Great Depression, and after his service in World War II. Even as a youngster, growing up in the Charleston, West Virginia area, I was aware of how hard he worked as a self-employed house painter with an 8th grade education; and of how tight things got when jobs became scarce. He was a very quiet and undemonstrative man, while still feeling the weight of his family responsibilities on him as he and my mother kept trying to make ends meet.
So when my father died, at the age of 69, I experienced more than the feelings of loss one would expect to feel at the death of a loving and caring parent. I felt that, to be sure; but also felt that some cosmic injustice had been done.
As the year 1979 came round my parents were finally reached some measure of financial stability in their lives. My sisters and I were all married and on with our lives. It was time for my Dad and Mom to get a little back for all they'd given and sacrificed on our behalf. But it didn't quite work out that way. My Dad died, as noted at age 69. It was due to a rare kind of brain tumor that took his life only a few months after it was discovered. The most likely cause was from the many years of his inhaling the fumes of the oil based paint he used in his work, before water based latex house paint came into widespread use. In a way analogous to black lung disease, my Dad's work most likely killed him, and took away what could have been a much more relaxed time in his life.
My Edington grandfather - my father's father - lived to the age of 90, doing gardening on his small farm and seeing his grandchildren grow to adulthood. I remember wondering why my father didn't get the years his father did. Why didn't he get to tend his gardens and see his grandchildren grow up? And - as I still recall - the more I thought those thoughts the angrier I got. What happened to my Dad just wasn't fair!
This was all around the same time that I was just coming into the UU ministry, and still trying out my humanist clothing. Rationally I knew there was no one to blame for my father's passing in the way it had occurred. I knew it was pointless to shake my fists at the heavens in the way that Tevye does in Fiddler on the Roof since there was nobody up there listening, or who cared. But, as just noted, that did not stop me from asking - on some visceral level somewhere beyond the rational - why this had to be. It was a question asked out of grief and anger, and even if I didn't have a particular place or person to direct it to, the feelings behind it were very real nonetheless.
Well, questions asked out of grief and anger are just that - expressions of grief and anger; and they are legitimate as such. They are not questions for which there is a rational answer. We know that. As I got some reflective distance on my father's death I was eventually able to ask some more pointed questions of myself: Why am I demanding that life be fair and just and always work out right? Why do I demand justice in such a situation? And when I get into this mode of thought I often wind up in, of all places, the Book of Job. So let's go there for a few minutes and then we'll link back up with the Greta Crosby reading I shared earlier.
While found in the Hebraic and Christian scriptures, Job is really one version of an ancient folk tale which deals with the universal question of why good people suffer. Other versions are found in some of the other religious of the Ancient Near East; and the playwright Archibald Mac Leash even got a Broadway play out of it titled JB. You probably know the Hebraic version. God and Satan made a wager as to whether a good, righteous, and prosperous man like Job can be pushed to the point where he'll turn on God.
So Job, inexplicably since he's unaware that he's part of a cosmic bet, loses all he has - including his children - and then gets these horrible boils all over his body. He has three friends who come to visit him and each one gives a long discourse as to why Job is having to endure all he's enduring. That's not much help. There's an object lesion here: When a friend of yours is having a hard time that last thing they need from their friends are attempted explanations as to why it's all happening. All they really need is your loving and caring presence. Job's friends didn't exactly get that memo.
So Job finally does crack. He flat-out loses it, in fact. Like Peter Finch's character in the movie Network, he gets mad as hell and can't take it anymore. He lets loose, he rails at God, at the un-fairness and injustice over all that has befallen him. And God answers Job through a whirlwind. Whirlwinds seem to have been the main mode of communication the Almighty used in those days. God had this thing, apparently, about speaking through whirlwinds. And what he says to Job - through this whirlwind - was, "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the universe?"
As my world-view became less theistic and more humanistic, and as I took an increasingly critical view of the Bible that had been central to my religious upbringing, I pretty much tossed that passage aside. I decided that it was a cruel, heartless, and foolish - to say nothing of manipulative - God being portrayed in this story/legend. I mean here's poor Job crying out at his terribly undeserved plight, and all he gets from God, in effect, is "Look, I'm in charge here so shut up and deal with it." God is not one for feeling Job's pain in this story. I decided this was a God I was not much interested in, much less able to believe in.
But something kept bringing me back to that line, even though I rejected the theological context of the story which has God and Satan playing out a cruel bet on an unsuspecting mortal. Is there something I'm missing in that "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the universe?" question? And if I back out the God part, is there any kind of a coherent message still left? When I mulled all that over I eventually got a rephrased message that went something like this:
Who are you, Steve, to be demanding - or even expecting - life to always be fair and just? Where were you when the foundations of life and the workings of the universe were put in place? Nowhere, to be exact; and that's the point. Life can come to us in beauty and in fullness, like the fullness of your grandfather's 90 years, and it can just as easily bring it cruelties and unexplained losses, as it did with your father. Furthermore, you can choose and shape your destiny - to an extent. You can shape life - to an extent. And you should celebrate the choices and the opportunities you have. But in the end you don't control life; it gives and it takes away. The real challenge of living - for as long as you're given to live - lies in being able to creatively respond to what is given and what is taken. Like Joni Mitchell said, 'Something's lost and something's gained in living everyday.'
Wow, I got all that from one little verse! As you can see ,when I read the Bible I have myself a pretty free rein on how I'll interpret what I read - which is the only way I can read it as a matter of fact.
On this note, let's turn to that little meditation by Rev. Greta Crosby. It is yet another of my pieces of personal scripture. In just a few short sentences she writes in a positive and life-affirming way about living with loss, and when you're having to look at life from the bottom up. On first reading, however, I can imagine one pulling back and saying "Wait a minute, here. Hold on Greta, when the bottom falls out of my life I feel confusion and feat and grief and a loss of direction. What is this enlightenment and clarity and perspective you're talking about? Are you sure your name isn't Pollyanna?" I don't know how Rev. Crosby would respond to such questions, but I can back up a bit from her words and then come at them in a way similar to what I did with that passage from Job.
Let's try this: If I were to ask most of you what it means to have a positive, forward looking, successful stance towards life, I imagine the answer would be along the lines of being able to see possibilities for yourself and being able to act on them. It would mean trusting and believing in your ability to both take care of you most basic needs and fulfill at least some of you desires. Whether we like to admit it or not, we measure in large part what we call "success and even our sense of self-worth by what we gain - both through our own efforts and through occasional good fortune. And I'm not just talking material gain here. There are also the more human and intangible gains like a good family life, a good circle of friends, the respect of your peers, some inner peace, and a connection - however you may make it and name it - to some larger meaning or purpose to your life. Such things - such gains - are necessary, I feel, for any kind of meaningful living.
Now, alongside all this "life as good gains" business, I'll introduce a counterpoint. I think it is also healthy and even necessary, to also recognize life as a series of losses. Some of these losses can be fairly well accepted, and others will come as cruel, tragic, and unfair.
Another of my personal scriptural texts, to which I've referred from time to time from this pulpit is a book by Judith Viorst called Necessary Losses. I'm not going to get into it here except to say in very broad terms that it's about the things one needs to let go of, and be willing to lose, in the course of the life cycle in order for one's life to be reasonably whole. Being able to let go and accept loss, is as valuable for our ongoing well being as is out capacity for, and our need for, gains.
In terms of the personal example I've been using this morning - I've never felt the need to let go of the basic idea that my father's death was very unfair, given the overall context of his life. How his life ended had an air of tragedy about it that I'll probably never need to forget or deny. What I had to eventually did have to lose, however, was my need for everything to be fair and just when it came to how my father lived and died. That was my necessary loss.
Moving quickly on, I know it's just plain scary to look at life from the bottom up. I think this is why there's a certain kind of discomfort that's often experienced in being around people who have taken some hard hits. I've had more than one person tell me how losing a job, and being unemployed for a stretch, was not only tough enough to deal with in and of itself, but how some of their friends would act differently around them. There was a certain kind of uneasiness about them. It really wasn't that these friends were fair weather companions; there was something else going on. It was that the prospect of loss was personally unsettling to them; as in "this could happen to me as well."
On a weightier level I recall reading a line from a journal kept by a person whose life was nearing an end due to terminal cancer. He wrote: "I never knew what fear was until I looked into the eyes of the people who were looking at me." Maybe that's what was going on with Job's friends. It was too frightening for them to just be with Job in the midst of all he was experiencing - so they took off on all these rationalizations as the "why" it was happening instead.
To return to Rev. Crosby, then, what she's trying to do in this little meditative piece is to take what is fearful and unknown and say that it ultimately can be life-enhancing. Not right away, to be sure. Recall that she says, "When that profound thing happens we can expect to go through a process, sometimes along process, a painful or at least uncomfortable process in which we let go of something and slowly learn to live again." In those few words she describes the life dynamic that runs alongside our gain and accumulations: Letting go and learning to live again. In the case of a loved one it does not mean you ever let go of the love and affection or appreciation you felt for that person. It means, instead, letting go - over time - of enough grief so that you can re-engage with life again.
As Greta Crosby says, "This is true no matter what we lose: A loved one, a hope, a vision, an image of ourselves." Of course we have to have our dreams and visions for ourselves. We need to be able to imagine the lives we want and to which we aspire. To not do so is to not be human. Loss is experienced - in this aspect - when the truth comes home that certain things are just not going to happen, when it comes to a vision or aspiration you've had for yourself. This most likely does not mean there's something wrong with you; only that you may need to let go of a particular lost hope or dream in order to learn to live again with both a present and a future in which you can believe.
This kind of letting go is far from easy, but it can also be a freeing experience - free to be, as Ms. Crosby puts it, "artists as we weave new patterns in to the fabric of our lives."
I'll close with this: All of our gains and losses are, I believe, part of a larger mystery of living which we may not fully comprehend, but with which we still keep faith. Often when I conduct a memorial service I use a reading by a UU minister, Rev. Raymond Baughn. He says: "We belong to the eternal here and now. We did not begin when we were born. Our origin goes back to the beginningless beginning of all things. Our story is the story of the earth, the sun, and humankind. Something eternal is revealed in everything. Our minds and bodies are mosaics of the same unknown that underlies the light and the stay and the sea. We do not fully know what it is, but we live it and we call it Life. We belong to the Oneness from which we have emerged."
What Ray Baughn is telling us here is that our lives are part of some larger Chain of Being - part of a Tree of Life - whose complete meaning we may never fully grasp. As he pus it, "We do not know what it is but we live it and we call it life." True indeed. And it is also true that we do get some occasional glimpses as to what it is as we live it. Some of those more revealing glimpses occur when we are able to return to life after feeling cut off from it, when we become the artists that loss calls us to be, weaving new patterns into the fabric of our lives.
The joy is the discovery that life is still there for us, when we are ready to return to it, and become one with it again. Perhaps that is the enlightenment of which Greta Crosby speaks: That having lived the loss, we find that life is there to bless us again, and allow us to love it again.
Stephen Edington
March 6, 2011
