May 11, 2003
Rev. Dr. Frank Carpenter,
D.Min.
St. John's Unitarian Universalist Church, Cincinnati, OH
The sum of all known reverence
I add up in you, whoever you are,
Those who govern are there for you, it is not you who are there for them;
All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it;
All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments;
The sun and stars that float in the open air,
The apple-shaped earth and we upon it;
Our endless pride and outstretching, unspeakable joys and sorrows;
The wonder everyone sees in everyone else, and the wonders that fill each
minute of time forever;
It is for you whoever you are -- it is no farther from you than your hearing
and sight are from you;
It is hinted by nearest, commonest, readiest.
We consider bibles and religions divine --
I do not say they are not divine; I say they have all grown out of you, and
may grow out of you still;
Will you seek afar off? You'll surely come back at last,
In the best known to you, finding the best, or as good as the best –
Happiness, knowledge, not in another place, but this place -- not for another
hour,
but this hour.
Whitman 659
The English comedian Charles Chaplin wrote and direct a film in the Great Depression called Modern Times. It was a tribute to the indomitable resiliency of Everyman and Everywoman.
As the film opens, the president of Electro Steel Corporation issues his first order of the day: “Section 5. Speed ‘er up. 4.1” A symbol of heartless authoritarianism, the president has the only audible lines in the film, barked out over a loudspeaker to his chief engineer. His face is displayed on a futuristic wall-sized video screen, part of a two way system that lets him monitor his works even when they take a toilet break.
Chaplin, our hero in overalls, frantically wields two wrenches – one in each hand – as he races to tightens nuts speeding past on a moving conveyer belt. “Section 5. More speed. 4.7.” Now Chaplain is flailing his elbows as he works the twin wrenches, desperately trying to keep up. “Section 5. Give it the limit,” the loudspeaker barks, and the belt accelerates still more.
But it has all become too fast for mere human, however nimble and conscientious he may be. In the spasms of a nervous breakdown, our poor nut-tightener is drawn by the conveyer belt into an open shaft and down into the gear-filled innards of the great machine. Finally he dizzily emerges and proceed to tighten all the nuts In sight, till his eager eyes fall on the nut-like buttons of a matron’s dress. Arrested for almost wrenching a wench, he is hauled off to a mental hospital, only the first in a series of misadventures.
In the end, Charlie discovers true love in the person of a lovely street urchin. When she tries to give up her struggle to find happiness, he urges her to keep on trying, to “never say die.” Gesturing to her to put a smile on her lips, with the strains of Chaplin’s own song, “Smile,” rising in the background, the takes her hand. Silhouetted against the dawn, the two walk down the road of life, hand in hand. [Stephen Bertman, HYPERCULTRE: The Human Cost of Speed, page 11f.]
Count subtract 453
Do we not identify with Chalpin’s hero as he tries to keep up the pace? Faster and faster we seem to run at times. So many obligations seem to press upon at this time. Because of information technology it has become hard to leave work at the office. Demands on a family with children only heighten the speed with which we try to live. Faster and faster. Let a race car driver we want more speed, we want more power to go faster. Yet we are not sure just were it will all end.
Perhaps the ever increasing speed of our culture is one reason looking for spirituality. Today we welcome new members, perhaps they are looking for a resting place, a level place on the hill path before that take to the upward path. We are speaking a spiritual home, a place where Whitman said “Happiness, knowledge, not in another place, but this place -- not for another hour, but this hour.”
One of the most unpleasant hymn in the hymnal is number 95, There is more love Somewhere. I know a number of people like it, but you won’t sing it obn a Sunday when I pick the hymns. Singing the hymn is like singing, This place isn’t good enough, so I’m gonna keep on lookin’. To me that gets into the trap that Chaplin describes in his movie. If here is not good enough, then we are condemned to keep moving faster and faster, goes the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
The great economist, John Maynard Keynes like to use a bottle of jam to describe capitalism. What is capitalism all about? Lord Keynes answered: “No jam today, jam tomorrow.” Go faster, “Section 5 Faster 4.8.1”
In the early days of industrial society, people were so taken with this attitude that it ensnared various forms of spirituality. The poet Alexander Pope expressed it in his poem, “Essay on Man:”
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be blest.
The soul, uneasy and confined from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.
Such a spirituality is based not on the soul, but on the quest for power, as Norman Mailer suggest in our reading this morning. It is not about the pleasures of the soul, but about, as he calls it, the fraying of the soul. The soul does not expatiate in the life to come, but in the green fields of today.
I take pleasure in knowing
that two of greatest contemporary poets find this lesson in the flight of geese.
Mary Oliver writes:
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild gees, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things. (RR 490)
Wendell Berry finds the same announcement in their flight:
Geese appear high over us,
Pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds
Them to their way, clear,
In the ancient faith: what we need is here.
And we pray, not
For new earth or heaven, but to be
Quiet in heart, and in eye
Clear. What we need is here.
If you fear the fraying of your soul, if you know how that feels, listen then to this different message: what we need is here. Today, this moment is enough. Can you let it be, just this moment. You do not need the power to be elsewhere.
It is not easy to say what we need is here, today is enough. Are we ready to admit our powerlessness? That is the spiritual question. Emily Dickinson wrote:
I took my Power in my Hand—
And went against the World—
'Twas not so much as David—had—
But I—was twice as bold—I aimed my Pebble—but Myself
Was all the one that fell—
Was it Goliath—was too large—
Or was myself—too small?
Dickinson’s poem exposes us to our vulnerability as all here poetry does. Much of the time we tell ourselves we are in charge, immune to life. Sometimes to maintain our denial we draw smaller and smaller circles around our life, isolating ourselves from more and more people. We fear if we accept our vulnerability we will feel helpless. Between powerlessness and omnipotence there seems little option. Thus it has been said that religion if for people afraid of going to hell; spirituality is for people who’ve been there.
Of course we try to pull the wool over our own eyes, deceive ourselves. We have to. The Jewish teacher Martin Buber wrote “One cannot life in the pure present: it would consume us if care were not take that it is overcome quickly and thoroughly. But in pure past one can live; in fact, only there can a life be arranged.” [Jensen 220] Of course we want our life arranged. Living in the unarranged present is scary, and we do not need to do it. That is, if we do not mind being hollow shells. If we live elsewhere, not here and now, we are as empty tombs, the wool over us. Yet we want the power to arrange our lives, to practice enough denial to get us through the day. Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) describes the high cost of this strategy:
That force is lost
Which shaped me,
Spent in its image, battered, an old brown thing
Swept off the streets
Where it sucked its
Gentle living.
And what is meat
To do, that is driven to its end
By words? The frailest gestures
Grown like skirts around breathing.
We take
Unholy risks to prove
We are what we cannot be. For instance,I am not even crazy
Power is what people afraid of going to hell want; soul is what people have
been there want. Our consumer culture lies to us, suggesting that our salvation
is about getting the most toys, the most household goods. The poet speaks for
the soul. The soul’s deepest pleasure, if not its only pleasure, is what
James Joyce called an epiphany. Widely overused today, Joyce was clear in what
he meant, “a revelation of the whatness of a thing.” The poet says
for a brief moment just what is the truth of things. Very minor perhaps, but
in revealing the whatness of things, our own being has a revelation.
Henri Cole writes in “American Kestrel:
Can you see me?
I am a man, No one has what I have:
My long clear hands, my bored lips. This is my home:
Woof, woof, the dog utters, afraid of emptiness,
As UI an, so my soul attaches itself to things,
Trying to create something neither confessional
Nor abstract, like the moon breaking though the pines.
Fear of this emptiness, the powerlessness, we attach the acctroutmetns of influence and success, but as it remains an evasion, we can only fell to somewhere else, trying to find some corrupting omnipotence.
The soul finds little pleasure in the flight to power. No, it find enough in what we have. What we need is here. Again in the poems of Emily Dickinson:
To be alive—is Power—
Existence—in itself—
Without a further function—
Omnipotence—Enough—To be alive—and Will!
'Tis able as a God—
The Maker—of Ourselves—be what—
Such being Finitude!
In our response reading, Mary Oliver finds also that existence is omnipotence enough. “There is still somewhere deep within you a beast shouting that the earth is exactly what it wanted.”
Sometime ago I went to Rhode Island to attend a convocation of Unitarian Universalist ministers. I got there early and so I spent some time on a cliff having over the ocean. I watched the waves rise and fall over a rocky ledge. It the distance was a surfer, incessantly trying get on top of some wave tht looked good. He was ever dissatisfied, for none was the perfect wave, which each surfer seeks.
Nearer to my perch I watch a cormorant bobbing in the waves. Waves crested about her, and she just contentedly stayed on her wave. Up and down, just resting.
Then I went to the gathering. AT a worship service one my colleagues, Frank Hall, minister of the Westport Conn, church offered this reading
The Duck
Donald BabcockNow we're ready to look at something pretty special. It's a duck, riding the
ocean a hundred feet beyond the surf. No it isn't a gull. A gull always has
a raucous touch about him. This is some sort of duck, and he cuddles in the
swells.He isn't cold, and he is thinking things over. There is a big heaving in the
Atlantic, and he is a part of it.He looks a bit like a mandarin, or the Lord Buddha meditating under the Bo
tree.But he has hardly enough above the eyes to be a philosopher. He has poise,
however, which is what philosophers must have.He can rest while the Atlantic heaves, because he rests in the Atlantic.
Probably he doesn't know how large the ocean is. And neither do you. But he
realizes it.And what does he do, I ask you? He sits down in it! He reposes in the
immediate as if it were infinity - which it is. He has made himself a part
of the boundless by easing himself into just where it touches him.
I like the little duck. He doesn't know much, but he's got religion.
It would seem that this religion, provides some pleasure to the soul. It is why the poet’s gift is an epiphany. It is not the power to be elsewhere that our souls desires, but the power of standing still. Rush here, rush there: so commences the fraying of the soul.
A poem is an invitation to be at home. Not to paradise, which barely begins to emerge from fantasy, but an invitation to this hard/soft space that holds us.