Life and Not Life
Sermon given at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
June 5, 2016
by The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
Wisdom, I’ve learned, comes in many forms; including teacups. I recently heard the story of a woman who owned a set of very fine porcelain teacups. Though a source of great pride, they were discovered as part of her estate after she died, wrapped in a box. She apparently never used them. The reason, according to a relative…”the right moment never came along.”
As a former art and antiques appraiser with a spouse who is a full time antiques dealer, such stories are heard all the time… People with beautiful, precious things packed away awaiting the perfect moment or occasion to be unpacked and used for the purpose for which it was created. A surprising quantity of such things are never unpacked.
So, who cares? I mean, most of us have more things than we need or can use and people live far less formal lives nowadays. Objects that require special treatment or even… God forbid… hand-washing are just too inconvenient to warrant the effort it takes to use and care for them properly.
Okay. But what about all those people who approach life, as something too precious, too fragile, too inconvenient, to use…to really live? Or those people waiting for the right moment to really live? Maybe “those people” are you…and me.
Why do so many of us approach or treat life this way? Our religious forbearer, Ralph Waldo Emerson had some ideas, “…man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future.”
Emerson’s assessment rings true, does it not? How many of us get stuck in the past…hashing over events long past…clinging to regrets or mourning an often idealized memory of what used to be while the chance to shape what is slips by? And what about the future? Who among us has not yielded an hour, day, week, month or even years to thoughts, often laced with fear and anxiety about an unknown or hoped for future while the present moment with all its potential and opportunity recedes into the past?
The remedy to this age old human habit, according to the sages, seers and saints, from ancient times to Emerson to our own day, is to live in the present, through the cultivation and practice of mindfulness. Something far easier said than done…or practiced as the case may be.
Books, blogs and lectures abound with ways to cultivate and practice mindfulness. Emerson points to nature, “These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.”
Beautiful. Nature is indeed a splendid model for being, a core aspect of mindfulness. Of course it is easy for a rose to live in the present, to just be. What choice does it have? But maybe that’s the point. The rose doesn’t have a choice. But we do. What does this mean?
Henry David Thoreau, a disciple of Emerson, thought a lot about the fact that we have this choice. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
There is something powerful about Thoreau’s wish, “to live deliberately.” First, his words suggest that most people, even himself, don’t live deliberately most of the time. It reminds me of something my late mentor, a Buddhist, used to remind me of frequently. “Remember”, he’d say, “Most people are sleepwalking through life.” Secondly, there’s an urgency to his words, an awareness that our lives are finite. Lastly, there’s an expression of faith…a deep or abiding intuition or trust that there is a purpose to life.
Noting, “To be awake is to be alive”, Thoreau didn’t want to expend his life without ever having actually lived. He was not interested in sleepwalking through life and so he embarked on what he called an experiment which included building and living in a small cabin at Walden pond on the outskirts of Concord, MA.
Walden, Thoreau’s account of his time in the woods living deliberately, has been taken by some as something of a “how to” manual. A quick perusal of the returns generated by searching “living deliberately” in Google demonstrates the widespread appeal of Thoreau’s intention.
Articles with titles like “A Four-Step Path to Deliberate Living” and “15 Ways to Live Deliberately” blanket the screen, each offering more or less the same advice…Take care of your mind and body, simplify (a point seemingly lost on the person offering 15 ways to live deliberately)… get some adventure in your life…and have/write goals for yourself. Its not bad advice. Much of it is really good, in fact. But reducing Thoreau’s ideas and thoughts into something of a recipe for how to live, risks turning something deeply profound into an exercise of swapping a really bad habit for a more benign one.
Habits are by definition, mindless behaviors or reactions to stimuli. Thoreau wasn’t seeking to replace one habit with a new one. He wasn’t trying to learn how to live, but instead, what it means to be alive. More than knowledge, he sought wisdom.
Socrates called wonder the “seed of wisdom.” And perhaps that’s why Thoreau, like Emerson, turned to nature with its power to elicit wonder. Simultaneously simple and complex, the natural world is more a mirror reflecting our true nature than a window into a world we merely inhabit.
Emerson intuits this and directs our attention to the roses beneath his windows. Thoreau takes this intuition further in stating his desire to live deliberately.
Yes, there is the literal aspect of living deliberately, which Thoreau covers in great detail, but there is also a spiritual concern here. Like Emerson’s rose, we did not choose to be born. Unlike Emerson’s rose, at home and alive in the world, human beings, to Thoreau, seem lost. We have trouble being who we are or living our purpose in life. To make matters worse, we’ve accepted one or more of the common explanations of the meaning of life given to us by our culture and its institutions and as such live, as he also wrote, “lives of quiet desperation.”
Thoreau, noting, “It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things,” clearly rejects the reasons most commonly accepted in his day (and still in our own) as the reason or purpose of human existence…the accumulation of material goods and/or to “glorify God and enjoy him forever”…practice for the afterlife.
Thus, for Thoreau, to live deliberately was not only to literally live simply and as unencumbered by unnecessary things as possible, but it was to also cleanse the mirror of our perception that we might see more clearly into the nature of our existence. It was both a practical and spiritual exercise in discerning what is life and not life.
Thoreau emerges from his experiment with the following insight: “…if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” And he encourages us not to be afraid of lofty dreams. “If you have built castles in the air,” he writes, “your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
Thoreau, aware that we all share a common destiny, invites us to into a practice of preparation, not for another life to come, nor for living a life others have imagined for us, but to be, as Emerson’s rose, for what we are. He invites us to inhabit our humanity, by discerning life and not life…our life…and to engage and thereby choose with intention and attention, the life to which we are called.
To the cynic Thoreau’s invitation might seem utterly impractical, a relic of 19th century romanticism. Others may, and indeed, have criticized Thoreau’s invitation as self-centered.
Rather than impractical, it is threatening. Threatening to people and a culture that has their own purposes in mind for our lives, who care little for who we are, but see value only in what we can do for them. As for the charge of selfishness, I’m reminded of an insight by the late, great theologian Howard Thurman, who said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
And indeed, in the woods, Thoreau discovered life is not as a process of accumulation, of getting and doing more… but one of distillation. A process of drawing out what is most essential that we might awaken, connect to and live from the life coursing through our veins.
Thoreau’s lesson…his gift, really, to us who live in a world far more complicated than the one he knew is this: the purpose of our lives is to discern and live a purpose. Not just any purpose, but one we know as our own, not our parent’s or teacher’s, however well intentioned, not our nation or culture’s however noble, but our own. The purpose that will ensure that when we come to die, we will not discover that we had not lived, like teacups for which the right moment never arrived, but that we in fact lived, fully, as Emerson’s roses, our nature satisfied, and satisfying to nature.
Amen and Blessed Be
Sermon given at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
June 5, 2016
by The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
Wisdom, I’ve learned, comes in many forms; including teacups. I recently heard the story of a woman who owned a set of very fine porcelain teacups. Though a source of great pride, they were discovered as part of her estate after she died, wrapped in a box. She apparently never used them. The reason, according to a relative…”the right moment never came along.”
As a former art and antiques appraiser with a spouse who is a full time antiques dealer, such stories are heard all the time… People with beautiful, precious things packed away awaiting the perfect moment or occasion to be unpacked and used for the purpose for which it was created. A surprising quantity of such things are never unpacked.
So, who cares? I mean, most of us have more things than we need or can use and people live far less formal lives nowadays. Objects that require special treatment or even… God forbid… hand-washing are just too inconvenient to warrant the effort it takes to use and care for them properly.
Okay. But what about all those people who approach life, as something too precious, too fragile, too inconvenient, to use…to really live? Or those people waiting for the right moment to really live? Maybe “those people” are you…and me.
Why do so many of us approach or treat life this way? Our religious forbearer, Ralph Waldo Emerson had some ideas, “…man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future.”
Emerson’s assessment rings true, does it not? How many of us get stuck in the past…hashing over events long past…clinging to regrets or mourning an often idealized memory of what used to be while the chance to shape what is slips by? And what about the future? Who among us has not yielded an hour, day, week, month or even years to thoughts, often laced with fear and anxiety about an unknown or hoped for future while the present moment with all its potential and opportunity recedes into the past?
The remedy to this age old human habit, according to the sages, seers and saints, from ancient times to Emerson to our own day, is to live in the present, through the cultivation and practice of mindfulness. Something far easier said than done…or practiced as the case may be.
Books, blogs and lectures abound with ways to cultivate and practice mindfulness. Emerson points to nature, “These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.”
Beautiful. Nature is indeed a splendid model for being, a core aspect of mindfulness. Of course it is easy for a rose to live in the present, to just be. What choice does it have? But maybe that’s the point. The rose doesn’t have a choice. But we do. What does this mean?
Henry David Thoreau, a disciple of Emerson, thought a lot about the fact that we have this choice. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
There is something powerful about Thoreau’s wish, “to live deliberately.” First, his words suggest that most people, even himself, don’t live deliberately most of the time. It reminds me of something my late mentor, a Buddhist, used to remind me of frequently. “Remember”, he’d say, “Most people are sleepwalking through life.” Secondly, there’s an urgency to his words, an awareness that our lives are finite. Lastly, there’s an expression of faith…a deep or abiding intuition or trust that there is a purpose to life.
Noting, “To be awake is to be alive”, Thoreau didn’t want to expend his life without ever having actually lived. He was not interested in sleepwalking through life and so he embarked on what he called an experiment which included building and living in a small cabin at Walden pond on the outskirts of Concord, MA.
Walden, Thoreau’s account of his time in the woods living deliberately, has been taken by some as something of a “how to” manual. A quick perusal of the returns generated by searching “living deliberately” in Google demonstrates the widespread appeal of Thoreau’s intention.
Articles with titles like “A Four-Step Path to Deliberate Living” and “15 Ways to Live Deliberately” blanket the screen, each offering more or less the same advice…Take care of your mind and body, simplify (a point seemingly lost on the person offering 15 ways to live deliberately)… get some adventure in your life…and have/write goals for yourself. Its not bad advice. Much of it is really good, in fact. But reducing Thoreau’s ideas and thoughts into something of a recipe for how to live, risks turning something deeply profound into an exercise of swapping a really bad habit for a more benign one.
Habits are by definition, mindless behaviors or reactions to stimuli. Thoreau wasn’t seeking to replace one habit with a new one. He wasn’t trying to learn how to live, but instead, what it means to be alive. More than knowledge, he sought wisdom.
Socrates called wonder the “seed of wisdom.” And perhaps that’s why Thoreau, like Emerson, turned to nature with its power to elicit wonder. Simultaneously simple and complex, the natural world is more a mirror reflecting our true nature than a window into a world we merely inhabit.
Emerson intuits this and directs our attention to the roses beneath his windows. Thoreau takes this intuition further in stating his desire to live deliberately.
Yes, there is the literal aspect of living deliberately, which Thoreau covers in great detail, but there is also a spiritual concern here. Like Emerson’s rose, we did not choose to be born. Unlike Emerson’s rose, at home and alive in the world, human beings, to Thoreau, seem lost. We have trouble being who we are or living our purpose in life. To make matters worse, we’ve accepted one or more of the common explanations of the meaning of life given to us by our culture and its institutions and as such live, as he also wrote, “lives of quiet desperation.”
Thoreau, noting, “It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things,” clearly rejects the reasons most commonly accepted in his day (and still in our own) as the reason or purpose of human existence…the accumulation of material goods and/or to “glorify God and enjoy him forever”…practice for the afterlife.
Thus, for Thoreau, to live deliberately was not only to literally live simply and as unencumbered by unnecessary things as possible, but it was to also cleanse the mirror of our perception that we might see more clearly into the nature of our existence. It was both a practical and spiritual exercise in discerning what is life and not life.
Thoreau emerges from his experiment with the following insight: “…if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” And he encourages us not to be afraid of lofty dreams. “If you have built castles in the air,” he writes, “your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
Thoreau, aware that we all share a common destiny, invites us to into a practice of preparation, not for another life to come, nor for living a life others have imagined for us, but to be, as Emerson’s rose, for what we are. He invites us to inhabit our humanity, by discerning life and not life…our life…and to engage and thereby choose with intention and attention, the life to which we are called.
To the cynic Thoreau’s invitation might seem utterly impractical, a relic of 19th century romanticism. Others may, and indeed, have criticized Thoreau’s invitation as self-centered.
Rather than impractical, it is threatening. Threatening to people and a culture that has their own purposes in mind for our lives, who care little for who we are, but see value only in what we can do for them. As for the charge of selfishness, I’m reminded of an insight by the late, great theologian Howard Thurman, who said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
And indeed, in the woods, Thoreau discovered life is not as a process of accumulation, of getting and doing more… but one of distillation. A process of drawing out what is most essential that we might awaken, connect to and live from the life coursing through our veins.
Thoreau’s lesson…his gift, really, to us who live in a world far more complicated than the one he knew is this: the purpose of our lives is to discern and live a purpose. Not just any purpose, but one we know as our own, not our parent’s or teacher’s, however well intentioned, not our nation or culture’s however noble, but our own. The purpose that will ensure that when we come to die, we will not discover that we had not lived, like teacups for which the right moment never arrived, but that we in fact lived, fully, as Emerson’s roses, our nature satisfied, and satisfying to nature.
Amen and Blessed Be
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