Waiting For...?
Sermon by Steve Edington
December 6, 2009
When Samuel Beckett's best known play, Waiting for Godot, began appearing in theaters in both Europe and the United States in the early 1950s one critic noted, "Beckett has achieved a theatrical impossibility - a play in which nothing happens, yet keeps the audience glued to their seats." This critic continued, "What's more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first (Beckett) has written a play in which nothing happens twice."
Some of you are familiar with this play and some not. It is part of a genre that emerged after World War II, mostly in Europe and in some parts of the United States, called the "theater of the absurd," in which certain Existentialist playwrights set forth what they saw as life's ultimate absurdity in a world that did not have any kind of ultimate meaning. Waiting for Godot became one of the more popular dramatic expressions of that idea.
For all of its apparent stark simplicity, it's really a very complex play about which, I'm sure, Masters theses - if not Doctoral dissertations - have been written. But I'll just give you a 60 second, bare-bones version here: Waiting for Godot features these two hobo-like characters, called Vladmir and Estragon, sitting and standing beside a road feeling they cannot go anywhere, or do anything, until the arrival of the mysterious Godot who will show them the way and give them a reason for moving on. A couple of other characters come along the road and claim to have knowledge of this Godot person but that's as far as it gets.
Each of the play's two acts ends with the same bit of dialogue between the two principal characters: "Well, shall we go?" "Yes, let's go." But the final stage direction at the end of each act is the same: "They do not move." They just keep waiting for Godot to arrive and show them the way along the road; but since this "road of life," has no Ultimate Guide, as it were, the two would-be travelers feel they can't go anywhere at all.
This is as far as I'm going to go with the content of the play itself except to note that its author, Samuel Beckett, claimed that he did not mean for the non-existent Godot to be a metaphor for God. In his cranky Irish way he noted, "If I'd wanted Godot to be God I'd have called my play 'Waiting for God.'" He meant, so he claimed, for his play to be about the futility of living by hope and anticipation alone, of allowing life to pass you by while you're making other plans, or waiting for someone or something to bring you some kind of deliverance.
But the playwright's protestations have not stopped the Godot/God equation from being made; and Beckett himself did acknowledge that, well maybe, on some sub-conscious or unconscious level he really was writing about the absence of God. He also knew that once you write something like this and put it out there for public consumption, then a variety of interpretations are fair game whether the writer intended them or not, consciously or not.
One of the more fascinating takes on this play that I've come across, though, is found not by a drama critic, but in a personal family story told by one of my colleagues in the UU ministry, the Rev. Michael Schuler. Michael has been the minister of the First Unitarian Society of Madison, Wisconsin for as long as I've been minister here, and our paths cross from time to time. This is his Waiting for Godot story as he recalls the strongly atheistic household in which he was raised:
"There was a good deal of routine joking and logic-chopping about God in the Schuler house, but the defining moment in our religious lives arrived each year on Christmas Eve, because that was the time when we all sat down in the living room, turned on the hi-fi system, and instead of cueing up a medley of Christmas carols, we laughed at the antics of Vladmir and Esragon as they patiently waited for Godot - the paternal God-figure who never appears in Samuel Beckett's famous play."
He continues, "This was not a convention that I, as a twelve year old child, resented. On the contrary, listening to 'Godot' made me feel superior to those benighted youngsters who still believed in a Cosmic Sugar Daddy." But then Rev. Schuler adds this punch line: "Nevertheless, it doesn't surprise me that as an adult my older brother gave his life to Christ and is now active in an Assembly of God congregation. Perhaps it isn't always wise to begin the process of demythologizing too early."
Michael didn't quite go that far. Instead of becoming a born-again Christian, he chose the route of Unitarian Universalism and eventually became a UU minister. He rounds out his story with this personal take on the matter: "I am grateful to be in a movement where belief in God is an option but not an expectation; a movement in which I can be a skeptic one day and a devotee the next. I fervently hope that there will always be a place in our (liberal religious) movement not only for the theist and the atheist, but (also) for those who cannot accept 'theist' and 'atheist' as mutually exclusive categories."
I don't know Michael real well, but I feel a spiritual kinship with him when I read these words. I, too - and you may have picked this up from some of my sermons - am one of those who do not accept 'theist' and 'atheist' as mutually exclusive categories. To reject some of the more traditional forms of theism - as I do - does not necessarily make one an atheist. Actually, if you ask me if I believe in God, in any kind of way, my answer most likely will have as much to do with what kind of a day I'm having than with any theological constructs I may have created for myself.
So it is with the stance of one who moves between being a skeptic and a believer that I approach the Christmas and Winter Holiday season - including, what is for Christians - the Advent season. The word advent, in and of itself, simply means a time of waiting, or a time of anticipation. It means awaiting or anticipating any kind of significant or momentous event that you hope will in some way transform your life. Vladimir and Estragon are actually observing their own version of advent as they sit by the road waiting for Godot. Theirs just happens to be an advent that never comes to any kind of fruition. The Christian Advent is the time of awaiting the arrival of a Savior who will transform the world and the lives that make up the world.
So, in the manner of being both skeptic and believer - or as one moving between theist and atheist - I come into this season finding myself moving between two contrasting stories or mythologies. I find a certain truth in each of them, and in the interplay between the two of them, but without fully embracing either one. I'll run with this for a bit.
The first story - Story One, we can call it - is the one we've been looking at; the story of a God, or of a Greater Meaning (call it what you will) who never shows up. The other - Story Two, just to keep track - is the story of a God who actually does arrive. Both of these stories are myths, in the best Joseph Campbell sense of the word - fanciful stories which also contain a truth.
Story Two is about a God, or a Divine Presence, who becomes humanized in the form of a first century, Middle-Eastern, Jewish teacher named Jesus; one who comes heralding the arrival of a time of hope, peace, love, and justice. I find Stories One and Two equally captivating. In coming to terms with them I sometimes feel like I'm being unfaithful to one or the other; embracing one story, that is, while casting a roving eye on the other story, which I also in turn embrace.
So I can embrace Beckett's "Story One" while also looking beyond it. While the mythological accounts of the birth of Jesus are no longer central to my religious and spiritual journey they still offer me some traveling companionship. In Story Two, the story of a God who does arrive, I do not see the arrival of what Schuler calls a "Cosmic Sugar Daddy" who will fix everything for us, but rather some crucial reminders of what it means to be human. The theology that later came to be attached to this Story Two is that this baby, who was born in the midst of rather dangerous and precarious circumstances - and without much of chance at really making it - is also "God."
I really don't even know what that last statement means in any literal sense. But if I can bear in mind the aforementioned mythologist, Joseph Campbell's, caution about not getting caught in the literal-ness of a metaphor, then I can explore a few ways in which the myth of a God-Child can be helpful and instructive.
One of the truths in Story Two, of an obscure, just-another-infant, type of baby who also happens to be God is really a human reminder that that which is often overlooked, ignored, or unseen can also be of the greatest importance. It is a reminder that even those, or perhaps it's especially those, who are born under the most precarious of circumstances are equally deserving of the opportunity to realize the inherent worth and dignity that they do possess - same as we all do.
To be sure, at some point when the child is no longer a child, what he or she does with such an opportunity becomes a matter of personal choice and personal responsibility. But is that divine spark, to use Ralph Waldo Emerson's well known term, is not affirmed and validated at an early age, it becomes harder and harder to realize as time goes by.
The second piece of insight I gain from Story Two, of an anticipated child through whom God arrives, is an affirmation of the power and potentiality of human life itself. I find it instructive that at the heart of Christian theology is the story of a God who arrives not as a Supernatural Force or Power, but instead, quite simply, as a humble human being who devotes his life - and eventually loses his life - teaching other human beings how to be more human. This is the humanist lens through which I see the Jesus Story. And some Christians have caught this point while many others have not. One of the reasons I find myself attracted to such liberal Christian theologians as Marcus Borg or Harvey Cox is because they really do "get it."
Be all that as it may, what the God/Child story suggests to me, through the lens of a religious humanist, is that all I need when it comes to finding meaning and depth and power and relationship in my life has already been given to me. I may not - indeed I know I haven't - opened up the whole package of possibility for myself; and may never fully do so during my time on earth. But it has been given to me.
The story or myth of a Child who embodies God is a way of saying that Godot actually does arrive; not, in Schuler's words again as a Cosmic Sugar Daddy, but as a fellow traveler who reminds us and encourages us with the promise and the understanding that we already have what we need for the journey if we dare to use it; that we can indeed be up and on our way.
So I am grateful to Samuel Beckett for reminding me, in his best known play, of the futility of passively and powerlessly waiting for someone or something to come and deliver me - to bring me some sort of salvation, however defined. And I'm grateful as well for the stories in the New Testament Gospels of Luke and Matthew, because the freedom with which I read them allows me to see that I don't have to wait for what I need, don't have to wait for Godot, as it were, since the fullness of live and living are already available here - here on what the poet Edwin Markham called "the common human way."
Finally, I come into this season of Holidays and Holy Days, with the knowledge of expectations that can be both lost and gained. It's far too easy, really, to be cynical, if not despairing, about the promise of the arrival, or the advent, of peace, hope, joy, and love - as the four themes of the traditional Christian Advent herald. It's easy to despair of even seeing the arrival of the fullness of justice, equity, and compassion in human relations, as our UU Principles put it; or of our ever reaching the level of respect for the interdependent web of life that will actually give us a safe and protected planet to live on. I know it's easy to lose a sense of hope and expectation that such things as these will ever come to be.
But at the same time I know that sitting beside a road, so to speak, awaiting the arrival of all these great and wonderful things will not, will never, bring them into being - not even in any small or measured way. Whatever is to come of our waiting, and of our hopes and expectations, remains in our hands and in our hearts alone. The story/myth of a God who shows up as a simple human being, under very desperate circumstances, is a reminder for me of that truth.
I suggest we take each of these stories - Stories One and Two - into our minds and our hearts as we enter into the Season now before us. Let us be up and on our way, believing in all that we can yet bring to pass.
Stephen Edington
December 6, 2009
