What's the Difference?
Sermon by Steve Edington
September 26, 2004
In the fall of 1960 the writer, and Nobel Prize for Literature recipient, John Steinbeck, set out from his home at Sag Harbor, Long Island on a cross country trip in a new GMC pick-up truck, with a camper unit attached to the truck bed. His sole traveling companion was his dog, Charley. Several months earlier Steinbeck had suffered a heart attack and a mild stroke, and he made this trip against the wishes of his wife and close friends. But he figured it might be his last crack at seeing once again, up close and personal, the America that he both loved, and had challenged, in the years he'd spent getting to know its people and its land, and writing about both. He named his pick-up/camper Rocinante, which is the name of the horse of Miguel Cervantes' satiric anti-hero, Don Quixote de la Mancha. Two years later Mr. Steinbeck's account of his journey was published in his last full length work, Travels with Charley. There's any number of passages I could read from this book that will serve as a lead-in to my topic for this morning, so I'll go with this one from the early stages of Steinbeck's journey: (This is in late 1960)
"Since I hadn't seen the Middle West for a long time many impressions crowded in on me as I drove through Ohio and Michigan and Illinois. The first was the enormous increase in population. Villages had become towns and towns had grown to cities. The roads squirmed with traffic; the cities were so dense with people that all attention had to be devoted to not hitting anyone or not being hit.
"The next impression was of an electric energy, a force, almost a fluid of energy so powerful as to be stunning in its impact. No matter what direction, whether or good or for bad, the vitality was everywhere. I don't think for a second the people I had seen and talked to in New England were either unfriendly or discourteous, but they spoke tersely and usually waited for the newcomer to open communication. Almost on crossing the Ohio line it seemed to me that the people were more open and more outgoing. The waitress in a roadside stand said good morning before I had a chance to, discussed breakfast as though she liked the idea, spoke with enthusiasm about the weather, sometimes even offered information about herself without my delving. Strangers talked freely with one another without caution.
"I had forgotten how rich and beautiful is the countryside - the deep topsoil, the wealth of great trees, the lake country of Michigan handsome as a well-made woman, and dressed and jeweled. It seemed to me that the earth was generous and outgoing here in the heartland, and perhaps the people took a cue from it."
One of my life-long fascinations has been with what I call the writers', or artists', consciousness. That is to say, the ability of certain persons to see, and convey by word or image, the same things that we all see but don't notice in the same way as they do. Whenever I drive across the Midwest I'm usually just subtracting the miles and calculating the time involved until I get to wherever it is I'm going. But with Steinbeck its: "The deep topsoil, the wealth of great trees, the lake country of Michigan handsome as a well-made woman, dressed and jeweled. It seemed to me that the earth was generous and outgoing here in the heartland and perhaps the people took a cue from it."
He connects a "generous and outgoing" earth with the spirit of the people who inhabit it. Steinbeck was able to see something different, something contained within as well as beyond the ordinary, in a landscape seen by millions of others; and he could convey that difference with his gift of language; which is why he was a great writer and most of the rest of us are who we are.
I've made enough stabs at writing myself to know that I do not adequately possess this writers' or artists' consciousness - certainly not at the level of those who really have it anyway. But I believe there is a parallel between this trait and what I call a religious or spiritual consciousness; and I think - or at least hope at this point in my life - that I might have had some experience with this way of seeing and experiencing things; and maybe I can even convey a little of it. (Well, you can be the judge of that.) So, with all this as backdrop the question I want to put forth today is "What's the Difference?" By this I mean, what is the difference in being a person of faith in a liberal religious community and tradition like ours - or like the one we are trying to be? What difference does it make in terms of how we each see ourselves as individuals, as persons in community with one another, and ourselves in relationship to it?
I'll be devoting two sermons to this topic. The one today will focus on how we might answer this question on a personal, individual, and communal level. In two weeks, on October 10, I offer my thoughts on "What's the Difference?" when it comes to how we see and relate to the world of people and events that surround us. For next Sunday, the Sunday between the two and our Open House Sunday, I've invited two of our members, Carol Houde and Steve Ladew, to speak to how they answer this question for themselves. I feel the best way we have of introducing ourselves as a religious community to others, is to have some of us speak to how being a part of this community has made a difference in their lives - on the assumption that many of those who come here seeking us out are seeking some kind of difference in their lives; otherwise, why not just stay home?
More often than not when we UUs set out to answer this "What's the Difference?" question we do so in terms of how being a Unitarian Universalist - or a religious liberal - is different from other religious faiths, like, say, the one we happened to raised in. And that's OK as far as it goes, but it doesn't really go far enough. Just being an ex-Baptist, Catholic, Methodist, or whatever doesn't really offer much sustenance and nurture. So I'm looking to get beyond that type of "What's the Difference?" answer.
Like the artistic consciousness, I believe that a spiritual or religious consciousness is one that allows a person to see something sacred, or something holy, or something different contained within, as well as beyond, the ordinary. And I believe there are a certain set of assumptions, or beliefs if you will, that undergird this way of looking at, and experiencing, reality. I want to come at these beliefs by citing a couple of questions posed in a quite provocative essay that was recently put out by one of my colleagues in the UU ministry, the Rev. Davidson Loehr, minister of the First Unitarian Church of Austin, Texas. I say provocative since the title of Dave Loehr's essay was "Is Unitarian Univeralism Dying?" as he seems to think it is. That's attention grabbing, to be sure - and Rev. Loehr is a very intelligent and articulate guy, but I'm not going to take on the content of his piece today. His basic point, very quickly and as best I can determine it, is that he strongly believes in religious liberalism, he just doesn't want to call it Unitarian Universalism. The essay is on the website of the Austin, Texas UU Church if you want to check it out.
For all of the arguing I might want to do with Rev. Loehr, however, I was in strong agreement with him when he said that there are two basic faith-related questions for religious liberals today. They are: 1) What is worth believing? And 2) Are there deep and abiding truths capable of sustaining honest spiritual quests without supernatural underpinnings?
I especially like the order in which these questions are posed. The first one is "What is worth believing?" Not what is intellectually defensible or what stands the test of reason and rationality - but what is worth my believing in. Answer that one first and then turn to, and put it to the standard of, the second one: Do these beliefs, these tenets I find worth believing in, sustain and help in me an honest spiritual quest, or on a meaningful life journey, without relying on some idea or concept of the supernatural? I'm sure that each of you could run well with these questions. I'll share with you now where they take me, even as I encourage you to go a few rounds with them yourself. As for myself, I've come to five "worthy beliefs" that do make a difference for me.
First: When it comes to the world and universe around us, and in whose web of life our own lives are contained, what we see is what we've got, and is all we've got. I do not mean by this that we know all there is to know about all of creation, or that we can literally see all that there is to see in this vast universe we inhabit. There will always be more to see and learn. It's just that I believe this is the only world and universe we have - no other realms of existence are available to us. My corollary to this is that what we have here is enough - enough to give our lives meaning and purpose and a sense of deep relatedness - which leads right into my Second Tenet or Belief:
It is how we see, and how we choose to see, what we've got that makes the difference. While the term "humanist" does not fully encompass how I define myself, I'm still enough of a humanist to believe that we, human beings, are the meaning makers. We are the ones who are called to infuse with meaning the world we've been given to live in, and to see beyond its surface manifestations.
Just one example: Remember that pick-up truck of Steinbeck's I mentioned? I've got a couple of pictures of it here. It's your basic 1960 GMC pick-up; a piece of metal and rubber and machinery that rolled off an assembly line like God knows how many other pieces of metal, rubber, machinery rolled off an assembly line back on some distant day nearly 45 years ago. This one is a bright green. That's what you see here, and that's what you've got. But this particular truck sits in a display area in the John Steinbeck National Center in Salinas, California - the town in which the author was born, raised and whose countryside he wrote about - and you actually have to pay money to see it. I know because I did. In the eyes, and through the mind, of a single human being this piece of metal, rubber, and machinery became Rocinante - Don Quixote's horse - the one who bears the quixotic seeker in pursuit of his dream of discovery. This green truck, with a camper affixed to it bed, incarnates a journey of both geography and spirit that millions of others have shared in by way of this book. And many of those readers then come to see this piece of metal, rubber, and machinery that has - by the mind, spirit, and words of one man - become much more than a piece of metal, rubber, and machinery while still remaining just that. One need not be, thank heaven, a gifted writer to see the sacred in the ordinary. I believe there is a way of seeing creation in this manner that is available to us, available for those with, as Jesus once put it, "eyes to see and ears to hear." To see in such a way makes a difference.
One caveat: I don't mean that we can see with this kind of awareness during all of our waking moments. I'll bet there were times when Steinbeck was simply counting the miles and marking the time it would take him to get from point A to point B, and wasn't seeing a bejeweled woman in the landscape of a generous earth. Even the most artistically and/or spiritually insightful folk still have to go to the grocery story, or take their car in to be serviced, or mow their lawn now and then. But to have a spiritual consciousness is to be open to revelations of the sacred within the ordinary whenever they occur.
Third Belief: I believe that life - without having to explain itself - both wounds and blesses us, and that we are called to hold fast to it in the face of each. One of my favorite Biblical stories is the myth, or legend, of Jacob getting into an all-night wrestling match with an angel, or with the Hebrew God, Yahweh, depending upon how one reads the account. Jacob, as the story in the Book of Genesis goes, is traveling at night trying to get to a certain destination. He encounters a man - or someone, or something, he can't really see since it's dark - and they wrestle with each other. In the course of their struggle the man wrenches Jacob's hip out of joint. But Jacob hangs on, to the point that, as dawn breaks, the man asks Jacob to let him go. But Jacob - figuring he's got a hold of something big here - says, "I will not let you go until you bless me." The man - or being - gives in on this point and blesses Jacob saying "you have contended with the divine and human beings." When Jacob then asks his wrestling partner for a name, he gets an elliptical kind of non-answer, and whoever it was does a Lone Ranger number and heads off, not into the sunset but the sunrise.
Taking a cue from the late Joseph Campbell that all mythology is both a commentary on, and a projection of, the human condition and experience, the belief or tenet to which I just referred is what this story is really all about. Our lives are something we more or less happen upon, not altogether unlike happening upon a stranger in the dark. By that I simply mean we didn't pre-plan our lives from some pre-existent state. There are some folk who think we each and all willed ourselves into existence, but that's more esoteric than I can deal with myself. But to really take hold of the lives we've been given - however we got them - is to be deeply wounded at times as well as strongly blessed. A life credo that says, "I will not let you go unless you bless me" is, I feel, a belief worth having and one worthy of living out. It is a way of keeping faith in the midst of both wounding adversity and great joy.
This gets me to my Fourth "thing worth believing" which I'm only going to mention now since it will be my sermon topic in two weeks. I believe this world, with all its sham and folly, with all the human imperfections and failings we visit upon it, and with all of its unhealed and un-reconciled aspects, is still worthy of our efforts - small as they may sometimes be - to make it a more humane, just, and peaceful place. It is worth our trying to make a difference. Whether it is something as close by as improving the availability of good dental care in our neighborhood, that we heard Dr. McAveeney speak to earlier, to encouraging persons to participate in our democratic political process, to being advocates for global peace and justice, the world of people and events and history is worthy of our efforts to make a difference. I'll say more on this in two weeks.
Fifth, and finally for today: I believe that "We can never contain the beauty in which we live and move and have our beings, (and) whether we live or whether we die, we are contained within this beauty." These words are not original with me. They were spoken by the late Rev. Deane Starr in an address he gave at one of our denomination's General Assemblies 10 years ago. Deane was our NH/VT District Executive when I began my ministry here in 1988. I, and I know some of you, have fond and loving memories of him. In December of 1992 Rev. Starr lost his adult son, Paul, due to conditions brought on by the AIDS virus. Paul's death was devastating to him, as the loss of a son or daughter is to a parent. In speaking of this experience, some two years after it happened, Deane said that he basically gave up on ever finding any kind of joy in his life ever again; that the best he was hoping for was some relief from the pain brought on by his son's death. And in this very moving address, which I still vividly recall sitting and listening to, Deane told of how, about a year after his son had died, he took a short boat cruise one evening off the west coast of Naples, Florida.
Here's how he described the experience: "The entire sky, from horizon to horizon, was aglow with color - reds, and purples, and pinks, and golds. Then the colors faded and that indescribable deep, deep indigo of late twilight filled the sky. The boat turned around and headed back to Naples. There on the eastern horizon was a full and glorious moon. With tears streaming down my face, I realized that even though my son's being had been scattered, he remained a part of this awesome beauty. We can never contain the beauty in which we live and move and have our beings, but whether we live or whether we die, we are contained within this beauty."
There is an uncontained beauty, a greater web of life, a larger chain of being - some even call it the Presence of God - that holds us in our temporal lives here, and that holds the continuing presence our lives have beyond our physical existence. Catching a glimpse of this Beauty or Presence did not remove the reality of the death of Rev. Starr's son. That remained with him for the rest of his life. But it did remind and reassure him that the Life with a capital "L" is bigger than any one of us, and that its beauty ultimately transcends even the greatest of human tragedy. Deane Starr passed away four years after speaking these words. His spirit, too, is now contained in the beauty in which we all live and move and have our beings. I find this worthy of believing and it does make a difference in how I relate to the process of living.
These, then, are my "five worthy beliefs" at his point in my life. They are also how I personally answer the question of "What's the difference?" And they even meet the standard of Rev. Loehr's second question for religious liberals in that they provide abiding truths capable of sustaining an honest spiritual quest without reference to, or reliance upon, the supernatural - a reference and a reliance that I find unnecessary. I offer them as beliefs that can be lived out within this natural world and universe of ours, and that allow us on our life journeys to "touch the earth and reach the sky."
Stephen D. Edington
September 26, 2004
Copyright © 2004 by the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved.
