Hopes Realized and Hopes Lost

Sermon by Stephen D. Edington, December 7, 1997

The title of the anthem our choir just sang, "Contradiction", is a more than apt term, I feel, for capturing the essence of the season which is now upon us. On the Christian calendar, this is the season of "Advent". Advent means a time of preparation, of expectation, and of hope for what is to come. The object of all this hope and preparation and expectation during the Christian Advent is for the birth of a child who will usher in a new age of "peace on earth" and "goodwill" amongst the peoples of the earth. I can think of few things more worthy of our hoping for and anticipating after--whatever our religious faith or spiritual grounding may be--than for a world at peace, and for all of us as people of the earth to be in harmony in our relationships with one another and with the Earth itself.

The contradictions of this season present themselves in small and silly ways and in large and sobering ways as well. On the small and silly front I guess I can let it out of the bag that I the one who takes on the role of "family grouch" around this time of year. I've got it under control. I don't seriously bum anybody out. Its just that my wife and son are the one who get cranked up big time on decorating the house--inside and out. I'm the one who mutters and grumbles about why am I hauling two dozen boxes of lights and displays and Lord-knows-what-else out of the attic; and why are we moving furniture and turning the house topsy-turvy when in some 3-4 short weeks its all going back again? Can't we just chill out and keep it simple this year? Of course, as I'm reminded each year, I'm missing the point. I'm supposed to feel harried and put upon so that everything will look nice and festive; which it eventually does and I work my way out of my grouchy grinch mode and start saying things like, "Y'know this looks pretty nice." Which gets me this baleful look that says "I thought you were the one who was pissing and moaning about it all." Its just a little seasonal ritual--wouldn't be Christmas if we didn't do it.

But beyond the flimsiness of my personal moods at this time of year, there are other paradoxes in this season that have to do with our hopes and expectations, large and small. My long-time friend and one-time mentor into the Unitarian Universalist ministry, Rev. Max Gaebler, reminds us it is this theme of Hope writ large that also creates the contradictions and the frustrations and the many anxieties of this season. Max wrote these words many years ago, but they still resonate well:

"Inseparable from the observances (and hopes) of this season is the spirit of Scrooge's 'Bah! Humbug!' We all know that peace on earth is a lot more complicated than it sounds in the Christmas hymns. We all know that hatred and (mis)trust will not disappear from human relationships just because we say it ought to be so...we give voice at Christmas to extravagant hopes that are beyond the range of any possible fulfillment. They are, as we say in our more sober moments, unrealistic."

Tensions in some of the world's trouble spots appear all the more heightened in a season where one of the themes is "peace." On a more personal level, tensions and sore spots and estrangements that have been present in families years have a way of becoming heightened at this time of year, in very large measure because of the emphasis upon the festivity and good cheer that is supposed to be present in families during this season. In a season that emphasizes joy and human fulfillment, the losses--the sometimes painful losses--of the year that is passing are are brought into painful focus.

Whether one is of the Christian faith or not, the aura of the Advent spirit is hard to avoid; and part of that aura includes coming to terms with the reality gulf between our hopes and expectations--and the life we are given; and the life which in some measure at least, we have chosen to live. This reality gulf need not be viewed in an entirely negative light, however. In the passage from which I just read, Rev. Gaebler goes on:

"The real question is whether this (gap) is so bad. Perhaps the part of wisdom is to accept the reminder of the gap between the real and the ideal for what it is, a spur not only to our hopes but to our energies...So long as time endures we shall remain creatures in the making, somewhere this side of perfection. Yet there is always hope for moving beyond the tragic failures (and disappointments) of the past--if not all the way, at least a few steps farther. Our hopes are forever bound to fall to ashes; yet out of the ashes ther can always emerge new hope--again and again and yet again."

What Max is writing about here is hopes lost and hopes gained or realized, which is the theme I wish to pursue with you now. Since I'm working from the angle of irony today, lets approach the subject by looking at the hopes or expectations we will not see fully realized in this season, or in any of the other seasons of our lives. Our Words for Reflection today were written by another UU minister friend and colleague of mine, Chuck Gaines, who is just down the road a little ways from us at the UU Church in Groton, Massachusetts. Getting a lot of help from my friends today, I'm going to shift from Max to Chuck: "I have lived more than half the Christmases I shall ever see. And I know I won't get everything I want (or have hoped for)." His three hopes or expectations were, you may recall, 1) Immortality; 2) Being able to control life "so that I'd never be hurt or feel sad or afraid": and 3) "Peace on earth and a world where hunger, poverty, racism, and ignorance would be eliminated." A first take on Rev. Gaines' thoughts would be to ask "How could anyone be so irrational as to ever hope for such things to begin with?" But however rational we can be at times, we humans are far from being fully rational creatures in the manner of Star Trek's Mr. Spock. We have irrational hopes, needs, desires, and expectations. We can recognize their irrationality on one level--and still need to deal with them. So let's take Chuck's three hopes one at a time.

Immortality. We know from a very early age, actually, the reality of death. Accepting that reality is not near as difficult, I feel, as is the re-examining of our hopes and expectations as life keeps on advancing. Part of the growth process, in fact, is the casting off of some of our long held hopes and expectations in ways that can actually lighten the life journey. This is the theme, in fact, of a book written several years ago by Judith Viorst called Necessary Losses. I've dipped into it before and I use it again now. Ms. Viorst is probably best known as an author of children's books, but this one is definitely for adults--especially for baby boomers at the half century mark, as well as those younger adults who cannot altogether figure us out. The book's subtitle is "The loves, illusions, dependencies, and impossible expectations that all of us have to give up in order to grow." This is from a chapter called "Shifting Images":

"We start to feel a time of always letting go, of one thing after another. Our waistlines...our vigor..our 20/20 vision...our trust in justice. We give up hoping to read all the books we'd once vowed to read and to go all of the places we'd once vowed to visit. We give up hoping we'll save the world from cancer or from war. We even give up hoping that we will succeed in becoming underweight--or immortal"[She goes on] We feel shaken. We feel scared. We do not feel safe...All of a sudden our friends, if not us, are having divorces, heart attacks, cancer. Some of our friends--men and women our age!--have died. As we acquire new aches and pains our health care is, of necessity, being supplied by internists, cardiologists, dermatologists, podiatrists, urologists, gynecologists, and psychiatrists, from all of whom we want a second opinion...We want a second opinion that says, 'Don't worry, you are going to live forever.'"

Of course no such second opinion exists. But I don't think its so much immortality we want as it is the time we think we need to see all of our hopes realized. Realizing that we do not have that time is one of the "necessary losses" which Ms. Viorst identifies. Its a necessary loss because it makes us focus on what we really do want and on who and what we really want to be. A suggestion in this regard: Try making both a personal wish or hope list for yourselves in this season, and then one of the hopes and expectations you are ready to relinquish in this season, and in all the seasons of your lives. You may find it quite liberating. Such a list may allow you to see what is truly worthy of your hopes and desires in the days ahead.

Number two on Rev. Gaines's list: "I never asked to be God, but I expected to be able to control life so I'd never be hurt or feel sad or afraid." It is not an irrational hope or expectation to want to live with a healthy level of self-respect and self-acceptance, and to be at peace with one's personal past. Having such attributes does give you a necessary measure of control over your life. It helps keep you from being manipulated or used. The idea or hope of being able to control our lives, and Life in general, to the point of never being hurt or feeling pain or despair or anger or sadness may be an attractive hope on the surface. But the only way to realize such a hope would be to eliminate all the risk factors in your life, to never invest yourselves in the lives of others, to never care; it would mean, in effect, ceasing to be human. "A rock feels no pain, and an island never cries" as Paul Simon once reminded us. Control of life is a hope you want to see realized up to a point, but only up to a point because it is a willingness to let go and be vulnerable to such things as hurt and fear and sadness which, ironically enough, makes genuine human relationships possible in the first place.

A related matter here, and one that Chuck also alludes to, is to not expect or hope that you can make everything OK for someone else, even when its someone you love and care about very much. As he puts it: "Experience with living has confirmed that I can't make everything come out right, no matter how hard I try. Wisdom comes from learning to accept the darkness without being afraid that all the lights will go out." That indeed is a realistic hope in this season, that we can learn to bear the darkness that does come into our lives, without being afraid that all the lights will go out.

Then, the third one: "I expected peace on earth and a world where hunger, poverty, racism, and ignorance would be eradicated." There may be a bit of facetiousness on Gaines' part here since we in the liberal tradition do have a way of hoping and expecting things to keep getting better--despite a temporary setback here and there. A hope that does need to be revisited time and again over the course of a lifetime is one that concerns itself with the kind of world we will leave for those who come after us. In struggling with this kind of hope, the truth I've come to is that I was born into an imperfect world and I will leave plenty of imperfections behind regardless of how much time I'm given to try and correct them.

Some of you here, I know, still have first-hand memories of this day 56 years ago when that attack on Pearl Harbor--an event that should not fade from memory--brought this country into the most deadly and destructive war our planet has seen. It was a war that saw some of the greatest evils--in Nazism, Fascism and the Holocaust--that human beings have ever perpetrated upon other human beings. It was a war that saw the unleashing of some of the greatest weapons of destruction that human beings had ever used on other human beings. It also begat the generation of which I, and many others, are a part. Tragically, many other conflicts have followed; some of them, in my mind, defensible on moral grounds--others not. The hopes for a peaceful world are ones that we still strive to see realized; and ones that we still tragically and sometimes shamefully see lost. Peacemaking is a difficult and often complex process. People of hope and good-will differ often on how to best achieve it. But even with its complexities and ambiguities we must keep faith with our efforts, great and small, to leave a safer and more just world for those of generations to come.

To re-echo Judith Viorst, perhaps another necessary loss is to drop the idea or hope of ever living in a completely fair, sane, just, and loving world. I do not mean that as a statement of despair or of a complete loss of hope. I say it instead out of a recognition that we live in a world of human beings--humans with our brokenness and wholeness, with our dreams and our fears, with our kindness and our cruelty, with our reverence for life and our disregard for it. So long as such a conglomerate of attributes reside in me--as I know they do--and, if I may daresay, reside in each of us, then we will live in an imperfect world with our imperfect selves. Believe it or not, I mean that as a positive and hope-full statement. When we lose the expectation or hope of perfection--for ourselves, for others, for our world at large--we are then available to bring the best of who we are, both to our personal relationships and to our larger world, with the best energy we have.

I began this morning by speaking to the paradoxes and contradictions of this season. I'll move toward a close on the same note. We are in a season characterized by the loss of light and the loss of warmth-both of which have seemed to have come a little earlier than usual this year. The earth itself, to which we look for life and sustenance, now enters a period of decline and death. My sister and brother-in-law and niece have just returned from a trip to the southern hemisphere--to Australia and New Zealand--where just a few short days ago they were enjoying summer. They're now having to make some abrupt seasonal adjustments, since here in the northern hemisphere we have entered a season characterized by loss and an awareness of mortality. It is interesting that those human beings who have lived over the ages in this part of the world have created festivals and celebrations at this very time of year to rekindle hope and call us to our better selves. Some anthropologists have suggested, perhaps correctly, that the winter celebrations of the northern hemisphere were and are ways of masking and evading the fears that the signs of loss and death can strike in men and women. But maybe such celebrations are also expressions of the resiliency and the endurance of the human spirit as well. The bonfires and yulelogs of the pagans, the evergreens of the Druids, the light from the oil that miraculously burned for eight days, the babe whose birth in a stable lit up the night sky--all are symbols or expressions of light and life coming into the midst of darkness and death. They are each and all symbolic or poetic ways of affirming that loss can be gain and that hopes lost can be a prelude to other hopes realized.

Its liberating, really, to lose the hopes of immortality, of controlling all of our outcomes, and of perfection. For in such losses we then gain the freedom to live as fully as we can in the time we have. There is a peace of mind to be found in not being bound by every expectation or desire that comes into our lives; and by finding meaning in simple joys, lasting companionships, and good memories. This is what I do hope for in this season--a celebration of simple joys, lasting companionships, and good memories. As Rev. Gaines puts it: "The moments bring (holiday) cheer. In them I understand the darkness. From them I know I can still start some small fire and see those of others around me, as long as I breathe and believe in life."

"To breathe and believe in life"--this is a hope worth having and celebrating in this and in any other season. The time for the "crowning of the year" is on the way. May love, joy, and peace be present in our lives and with all of those with whom we share life. Such is our hope in this season of light and darkness. May our world be a more hopeful place for our having been here; and may we each re-dedicate ourselves to the hopes and dreams we have for this religious community which holds, sustains, and nurtures us all.

Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua

Hopes Realized and Hopes Lost