Being Human: Religious Community in a Plastic Age
by Rev. Craig M. Nowak
Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
September 13, 2015
Many of you know that before I was a minister I was an appraiser of art and antiques. One of the hardest parts of my job then was having to break the news to a client that something they owned was not what they thought or had been told it was.
Sometimes it was a case of mistaken identity so to speak... a vase they thought was Chinese was in fact Japanese or a painting that bore the legitimate signature of an unknown artist who happened to share the same last name as a more famous painter. Then there were the outright fakes, which ranged from the absurdly obvious to the astonishingly good, which, as you might imagine, are generally the hardest to detect and where sometimes even experienced experts do not always agree.
More often than not, the giveaway in the case of a superb fake is that it will frequently appear quite stiff or rigid in its execution. This is true regardless of the medium.
The reason for this is a forger is usually so concerned with producing a precise, technically perfect imitation of an original work that he or she fails to capture the creative movement and natural aesthetic imbued in the original by the artist or craftsperson who created it. The result is an object that may be perfect in form, but that feels somehow plastic or artificial in some essential way.
I’m struck and, truthfully, saddened by how often modern life can feel this way too. So many facets of life now mimic human interaction and yet feel plastic or artificial, devoid of the humanity they’re meant to imitate....
When was the last time you called a customer service line and was given the option of talking to a live person let alone actually doing it? How many of us spend most of our day interacting with a screen rather than other people in the flesh? Or buy more things online than in brick and mortar stores? Watch Youtube videos instead of attending the theater or going to the movies. Or have hundreds of Facebook friends yet struggle to think of someone we might call to have coffee or lunch with?
We’re told we’re more connected than ever and yet so many of us are lonely. In fact a recent study estimated one in five or 20% of Americans report being persistently lonely.
According to research, persistent loneliness carries a similar, if not greater risk, of premature death as smoking and obesity and increases the prevalence of conditions such as dementia, high blood pressure, substance abuse, depression, anxiety and more. Loneliness is a by-product of our plastic age, an age rooted in what writer George Monboit calls a life-denying ideology, “which enforces and celebrates our social isolation” and is marked by a doctrine of “competition and individualism”, which Monboit calls, “the religion of our time.”
In words attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, it is said, “A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will come out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping, we are becoming.”
If Monboit’s observation that competition and individualism is the religion of our time and the words attributed to Emerson are true then we would expect to be living in a world where significant numbers of people idolize celebrity and material wealth, crave it for themselves, and where winning is the ultimate goal and to be called or considered a loser is the greatest insult possible. There’d also be a lot of lonely people and a wide array of stress related illness spread throughout all ages.
Sound familiar?
Indeed, this is increasingly the world we live in, a world in which, as Monboit writes, “there is no such thing as society, only heroic individualism.”
In the face of this grim assessment of our age, I can’t help but wonder what’s at stake in such a world for us as human beings, spiritually?
I believe its our very humanity that is at stake.
Consider the central question in that most piercing of children’s stories by Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit, “What is Real?”
What a powerful question. Its a question that arises from the age old conviction that our lives are not random accidents, but instead have meaning and purpose.
Now, presumably the rabbit asks this question because intuitively he’s certain he himself is not Real...yet. As is or will be familiar to most people at some point in life, sometimes several points, the rabbit is experiencing a period of existential wondering, if not crisis.
He looks to external trappings first, “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick out handle?”
Wisdom, represented by the skin horse who has lived in the nursery for a long time, tells the hopeful little rabbit, “Real isn’t how you are made...it’s a thing that happens to you...it takes a long time and sometimes it hurts.” Most importantly, you can’t become Real by yourself.
How different this answer is from the one we’re so often given today.
Imagine, for a moment, the velveteen rabbit, instead of asking the worn, shabby skin horse, “What is Real?”, he asked the latest ipod. That ipod would be just a month or two old, not nearly enough time to understand what the rabbit was asking. Thus, the ipod might say Real is all about sleek design, lots of cool features, tons of storage space and ease of use...in other words it is about how your made, what you look like, what you have and what you can get. The ipod would say What is Real is what its marketers say is Real.
Right now we live in a world where more people hear, if not entirely trust, the ipod’s response to “What is Real” more than the skin horse and we are losing our very humanity in the process. We are becoming less Real as our connection to one another becomes more and more superficial...as how we appear and what we have becomes more important to more people... and the common good in homes, cities, towns, states and nations is sacrificed on the altar of what’s good for me, myself and I whether that “I” be a an individual person or a multinational corporation.
Certainly there are exceptions to this including ones that utilize technology which is important to note because the issue here is not ipods or Facebook or automated customer service menus and so forth, for any of our technology can be used to enhance or diminish our humanity. The issue then is not technology, but rather our convictions and how they’re formed about what it means to be human. A greater challenge than ever in a plastic age where constant messaging is the norm and we are talked at, bought and sold to by marketers, social and political institutions, even our own families at times, each vying to play the skin horse, telling us What is Real before we even ask AND for profit whether it be a healthy bottom line, social and political ambitions, or a swelled ego. Every day we’re stuffed with an overabundance of false promises, self-serving gimmicks and expectations that is in fact a starvation diet for the soul.
Earlier I noted that when I was an appraiser it was hard to tell people an object they believed to be real was fake. Often it was a blow to their ego that they were taken by an unscrupulous dealer or a humbling experience as they realized they had let their excitement over a potential monetary score override all the warning signs that the item in question was not what it appeared.
It is no easier as a minister tell any person, or as is more often the case, to bear witness to someone’s realization, that even after having listened, absorbed and tried everything we’ve been told, sold, or expected to do with our lives, and perhaps downed a fair quantity of TUMS or something more potent along the way, that nagging question still remains, “What is Real?”
Again it is a question of meaning and purpose. Once the promises of marketers and politicians, the expectations of family and so forth are shown to be lacking or all together false, we’re left wondering how, in words from the Native American tradition, to “live our lives that when we die the world cries and we rejoice.”
The skin horse tells us it is a process and not something we can do ourselves. No matter how smart, rich, self-sufficient we may be, to experience what is Real, we need an agent of transformation.
More plainly said, To become Real we need to be in relationship with others. People with whom we can be vulnerable, people we’re willing to let see us with our “eyes dropped out”, “loose joints” and “looking shabby”. People who will encourage and stand with us as we experience of growth whether it visits us through pain or joy. We need people who will help us not only hear but experience and endure the transformation spoken of by the skin horse and an alluded to in our call to worship this morning (from the Native American tradition)that we might pass it down to future generations who, will themselves one day hesitantly ask us, “What is Real?”
Where do we find such people? A good place to start is to look around you..right here. You’re sitting with and among such people...people with a mission...to support and promote the principles of this Unitarian Universalist faith and who, by nurturing spirituality, intellectual growth, diversity of belief, and our ties to one another, seek to inspire lives of passion, compassion and community for those who gather inside these walls and the world beyond. Real is the focus of religious community?
Some of us are just beginning to ask, What is Real? others have likely known for years and a whole lot of us are gradually coming into an understanding because we are part of this religious community. Those who “break easily, have sharp edges or have to be carefully kept” will come and go and always we wish them well because the only thing harder than loving your true self in this plastic age is allowing that self to be known and loved by others, including, depending on your theological view, by God.
A healthy, compassionate religious community works together to provide a safe place to be known and loved, which is the most basic and profound spiritual need of every person. A need filled as we become Real.
There’s a phrase in the antiques trade often uttered by appraisers on the Antiques Roadshow, “good wear.” meaning wear that is consistent with an object’s alleged age and intended use. It is one of the most reliable means of evaluating the authenticity of an object and something the forger is often unable to convincingly replicate.
Real we might say then, is marked by a life that exhibits “good wear”. Like a toy horse whose hair has been loved off by a child or the smooth finish on the knuckles on antique chair softened by generations of human touch, it is not something we can fake. Real happens in our own age as it as always happened: when we join our lives with others on the long, often slow, and sometimes painful process and practice of becoming and learning to be human...fully... beautifully. A journey that is now more than ever, the vital call of religious community in a plastic age. May it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be
by Rev. Craig M. Nowak
Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
September 13, 2015
Many of you know that before I was a minister I was an appraiser of art and antiques. One of the hardest parts of my job then was having to break the news to a client that something they owned was not what they thought or had been told it was.
Sometimes it was a case of mistaken identity so to speak... a vase they thought was Chinese was in fact Japanese or a painting that bore the legitimate signature of an unknown artist who happened to share the same last name as a more famous painter. Then there were the outright fakes, which ranged from the absurdly obvious to the astonishingly good, which, as you might imagine, are generally the hardest to detect and where sometimes even experienced experts do not always agree.
More often than not, the giveaway in the case of a superb fake is that it will frequently appear quite stiff or rigid in its execution. This is true regardless of the medium.
The reason for this is a forger is usually so concerned with producing a precise, technically perfect imitation of an original work that he or she fails to capture the creative movement and natural aesthetic imbued in the original by the artist or craftsperson who created it. The result is an object that may be perfect in form, but that feels somehow plastic or artificial in some essential way.
I’m struck and, truthfully, saddened by how often modern life can feel this way too. So many facets of life now mimic human interaction and yet feel plastic or artificial, devoid of the humanity they’re meant to imitate....
When was the last time you called a customer service line and was given the option of talking to a live person let alone actually doing it? How many of us spend most of our day interacting with a screen rather than other people in the flesh? Or buy more things online than in brick and mortar stores? Watch Youtube videos instead of attending the theater or going to the movies. Or have hundreds of Facebook friends yet struggle to think of someone we might call to have coffee or lunch with?
We’re told we’re more connected than ever and yet so many of us are lonely. In fact a recent study estimated one in five or 20% of Americans report being persistently lonely.
According to research, persistent loneliness carries a similar, if not greater risk, of premature death as smoking and obesity and increases the prevalence of conditions such as dementia, high blood pressure, substance abuse, depression, anxiety and more. Loneliness is a by-product of our plastic age, an age rooted in what writer George Monboit calls a life-denying ideology, “which enforces and celebrates our social isolation” and is marked by a doctrine of “competition and individualism”, which Monboit calls, “the religion of our time.”
In words attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, it is said, “A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will come out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping, we are becoming.”
If Monboit’s observation that competition and individualism is the religion of our time and the words attributed to Emerson are true then we would expect to be living in a world where significant numbers of people idolize celebrity and material wealth, crave it for themselves, and where winning is the ultimate goal and to be called or considered a loser is the greatest insult possible. There’d also be a lot of lonely people and a wide array of stress related illness spread throughout all ages.
Sound familiar?
Indeed, this is increasingly the world we live in, a world in which, as Monboit writes, “there is no such thing as society, only heroic individualism.”
In the face of this grim assessment of our age, I can’t help but wonder what’s at stake in such a world for us as human beings, spiritually?
I believe its our very humanity that is at stake.
Consider the central question in that most piercing of children’s stories by Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit, “What is Real?”
What a powerful question. Its a question that arises from the age old conviction that our lives are not random accidents, but instead have meaning and purpose.
Now, presumably the rabbit asks this question because intuitively he’s certain he himself is not Real...yet. As is or will be familiar to most people at some point in life, sometimes several points, the rabbit is experiencing a period of existential wondering, if not crisis.
He looks to external trappings first, “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick out handle?”
Wisdom, represented by the skin horse who has lived in the nursery for a long time, tells the hopeful little rabbit, “Real isn’t how you are made...it’s a thing that happens to you...it takes a long time and sometimes it hurts.” Most importantly, you can’t become Real by yourself.
How different this answer is from the one we’re so often given today.
Imagine, for a moment, the velveteen rabbit, instead of asking the worn, shabby skin horse, “What is Real?”, he asked the latest ipod. That ipod would be just a month or two old, not nearly enough time to understand what the rabbit was asking. Thus, the ipod might say Real is all about sleek design, lots of cool features, tons of storage space and ease of use...in other words it is about how your made, what you look like, what you have and what you can get. The ipod would say What is Real is what its marketers say is Real.
Right now we live in a world where more people hear, if not entirely trust, the ipod’s response to “What is Real” more than the skin horse and we are losing our very humanity in the process. We are becoming less Real as our connection to one another becomes more and more superficial...as how we appear and what we have becomes more important to more people... and the common good in homes, cities, towns, states and nations is sacrificed on the altar of what’s good for me, myself and I whether that “I” be a an individual person or a multinational corporation.
Certainly there are exceptions to this including ones that utilize technology which is important to note because the issue here is not ipods or Facebook or automated customer service menus and so forth, for any of our technology can be used to enhance or diminish our humanity. The issue then is not technology, but rather our convictions and how they’re formed about what it means to be human. A greater challenge than ever in a plastic age where constant messaging is the norm and we are talked at, bought and sold to by marketers, social and political institutions, even our own families at times, each vying to play the skin horse, telling us What is Real before we even ask AND for profit whether it be a healthy bottom line, social and political ambitions, or a swelled ego. Every day we’re stuffed with an overabundance of false promises, self-serving gimmicks and expectations that is in fact a starvation diet for the soul.
Earlier I noted that when I was an appraiser it was hard to tell people an object they believed to be real was fake. Often it was a blow to their ego that they were taken by an unscrupulous dealer or a humbling experience as they realized they had let their excitement over a potential monetary score override all the warning signs that the item in question was not what it appeared.
It is no easier as a minister tell any person, or as is more often the case, to bear witness to someone’s realization, that even after having listened, absorbed and tried everything we’ve been told, sold, or expected to do with our lives, and perhaps downed a fair quantity of TUMS or something more potent along the way, that nagging question still remains, “What is Real?”
Again it is a question of meaning and purpose. Once the promises of marketers and politicians, the expectations of family and so forth are shown to be lacking or all together false, we’re left wondering how, in words from the Native American tradition, to “live our lives that when we die the world cries and we rejoice.”
The skin horse tells us it is a process and not something we can do ourselves. No matter how smart, rich, self-sufficient we may be, to experience what is Real, we need an agent of transformation.
More plainly said, To become Real we need to be in relationship with others. People with whom we can be vulnerable, people we’re willing to let see us with our “eyes dropped out”, “loose joints” and “looking shabby”. People who will encourage and stand with us as we experience of growth whether it visits us through pain or joy. We need people who will help us not only hear but experience and endure the transformation spoken of by the skin horse and an alluded to in our call to worship this morning (from the Native American tradition)that we might pass it down to future generations who, will themselves one day hesitantly ask us, “What is Real?”
Where do we find such people? A good place to start is to look around you..right here. You’re sitting with and among such people...people with a mission...to support and promote the principles of this Unitarian Universalist faith and who, by nurturing spirituality, intellectual growth, diversity of belief, and our ties to one another, seek to inspire lives of passion, compassion and community for those who gather inside these walls and the world beyond. Real is the focus of religious community?
Some of us are just beginning to ask, What is Real? others have likely known for years and a whole lot of us are gradually coming into an understanding because we are part of this religious community. Those who “break easily, have sharp edges or have to be carefully kept” will come and go and always we wish them well because the only thing harder than loving your true self in this plastic age is allowing that self to be known and loved by others, including, depending on your theological view, by God.
A healthy, compassionate religious community works together to provide a safe place to be known and loved, which is the most basic and profound spiritual need of every person. A need filled as we become Real.
There’s a phrase in the antiques trade often uttered by appraisers on the Antiques Roadshow, “good wear.” meaning wear that is consistent with an object’s alleged age and intended use. It is one of the most reliable means of evaluating the authenticity of an object and something the forger is often unable to convincingly replicate.
Real we might say then, is marked by a life that exhibits “good wear”. Like a toy horse whose hair has been loved off by a child or the smooth finish on the knuckles on antique chair softened by generations of human touch, it is not something we can fake. Real happens in our own age as it as always happened: when we join our lives with others on the long, often slow, and sometimes painful process and practice of becoming and learning to be human...fully... beautifully. A journey that is now more than ever, the vital call of religious community in a plastic age. May it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be
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