Twitter and Covid and Wall Street, Oh My!
Sermon given at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
March 21, 2021
The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said….” Well, you know the rest. Six days later, BAM! What had been a formless void was now an orderly world God created and it was, “good.” On the seventh day, this busy god took a well deserved break.
A break, which thousands of years later, deists envisioned extending well beyond that seventh day into eternity. It seemed the once busy god described in Genesis and throughout the Bible had, by the 18th century- the Age of Reason, stopped discernibly meddling in everyday human affairs. Thus was born the concept of the watchmaker god, who created then set in motion natural laws by which the universe could operate free of any further intervention by the deity.
Fast forward to 1979 and the Bond film “Moonraker”, where, at the film’s climax, villain Hugo Drax reveals the ultimate aim behind his plan to destroy then repopulate the world with people he’s hand selected for the task.
“From their first day on Earth”, he says, “they will be able to look up and know that there is law and order in the heavens.”
It seems we humans have a thing for structure and order. We want - perhaps need- for the world and this life to make sense. And religious texts, scientific inquiry, social and political forms, even popular culture have long spoken to this need and sought to provide the evidence, explanations, and formulas to convince us of its reality or advise us on how to achieve it. Drawing on any one of these sources or the conflation of several we might be lulled into an assumption of stability that works quite well. That is, until it doesn’t.
I gather, for example, that on December 31, 2019, most people assumed the world would hum along in 2020 just as it had the year before. Sure, there’d be the garden variety of global, domestic, and personal challenges and conflict at levels we consider and accept as normal, but a pandemic that engulfed the planet and put the brakes on life as most people knew it? I doubt many saw that one coming.
And I imagine on January 5, 2021, most Americans went to bed assuming armed insurrections are something that happens in other countries only to see the United States Capitol stormed by a violent mob the next day. So much for that delusion.
Then there are the innumerable, more personal examples from almost any life, the closure of a plant and loss of a job, an unexpected, serious diagnosis, a damaging argument or break up and the like. All of which carry the potential to expose the gulf that often separates our assumption of stability from reality. The reality, as writer James Baldwin observed, “That there is nothing stable under heaven.”
Yet, at BUUC we recite each week, as part of our affirmation, that here or together, “We nurture stability for our daily lives.” But I wonder, what does that mean? And how do we do this? Indeed, if there is, as Baldwin observes, “nothing stable under heaven”, then what hope have we in this age of Twitter and Covid and Wall Street, an age an age rife with daily, multiple avenues of potential global, local, and personal destabilization?
Interestingly, Baldwin’s observation notes there is no stability “under”, that is, outside of “heaven.” Setting personal belief or disbelief in heaven aside, I think it is fair to say the concept of heaven, whether a literal destination or a state of mind, is generally associated, at least in part, with gaining release from the vicissitudes of life, a place or state where stability, particularly in the form of changelessness, is the norm.
Entry into a literal changeless realm we might call heaven has typically carried a steep price, namely life itself. And even were entry into such a place possible absent that big price tag, the late Rev. Dr. Forrest Church notes in his book, “Entertaining Angels”, “…An eternity of anything would be nothing less than an intolerable bore.” “Just think.”, he writes, “of your favorite pastime, one you love more than anything else in the whole wide world. Imagine a millennium of lying on the beach reading a good book, or an eternal game of bridge, or having your back scratched forever. The last of these does have its possibilities, but even they would wear out long before your back did.”
I’m not sure we’d fare much better were we to gain entry into a heavenly realm of changelessness confined to the borders of the mind either. For it too carries a staggering cost, our authenticity. Here the eternal pursuit is not one’s favorite pastime, but psychological adaptation to the world…the very world that sent us searching for some other realm in the first place…the crazy world of Twitter and Covid and Wall Street and more. There’s a whole industry dedicated to getting one into this version of heaven, generating a steady stream of books, blogs, podcasts, magazines, and seminars to help us “adapt”. But as Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul asks, “Who wants to adapt to a world that is crazy?”
It seems changelessness, either literal or via adaptation to the ways of the world is neither the most realistic nor desirable form stability might take to qualify as “heavenly.” There are, of course, other alternatives.
In just forty words “ Vinegar and Oil” by Jane Hirshfield manages to paint a stunning, recognizable portrait of the human condition. A condition marked by vulnerability, a nagging sense of incompleteness and fear of insignificance and in which time with ourselves carries the potential to sooth and sting our wearied soul.
Hirshfield’s portrait of the human condition seems primed for advocates of diluting experience or intervention by adaptation to achieve stability. But she takes a different view. In a written response to a 10th grader who shared his appreciation for the depth of her poem “Vinegar and Oil”, she writes, “Vinegar and oil are interesting. Yes, they are separate, but if you put them into a bottle and shake them, they emulsify, and become one thing, at least for a while. Our wanted experiences and our painful experiences are like that, I think. If we can feel them as part of a single, emulsified life, each becomes something more interesting, more desired. A salad dressing of only oil is boring. A salad dressing of only vinegar stings the tongue.”
Hirshfield then would have us mix rather than fix by diluting or adapting, the various experiences that arise out of the human condition. Mixing, she notes, emulsifies, deepening our experience and connecting it to a larger whole. The result is not stability achieved by the resolution or elimination of the complexity and paradox of the human condition, but a grounded-ness that emerges from increasing its palatability. A palatability gained via perspective.
Perspective also features prominently in our second reading, “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver.
Right out of the gate, Oliver lovingly addresses one of the core afflictions unique to human beings and which tends to laser focus our attention on ourselves, the striving for perfection. She writes, “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.”
Perfectionism, which manifests itself in many forms and to various degrees, is another means of trying to resolve or eliminate the complexities and paradoxes that are part of the human condition and with which we human beings struggle. It is a fearful response, deeply embedded and reinforced culturally. Oliver knows this well and offers some welcome wisdom, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”
This, of course, is the opposite of perfectionism. It is a call to accept and live into the human condition. An invitation to embrace our vulnerability, to allow ourselves to love life’s complexity and paradox rather than anxiously strive to resolve, rationalize, or eliminate it.
As if anticipating those who would respond, “Okay, fine, but what about suffering?”, she continues, “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.” Like Hirshfield, Oliver doesn’t deny the reality of suffering or promise a life free of it. Instead, she offers a different perspective on life itself. A perspective that is decidedly expansive in depth and breadth and which sees and seeks the potential to nurture stability in the full embrace of creation, including the human condition, which, to echo Gerhard Von Rad from our call to worship, “…not only exists, it also discharges truth….and…requires a surrender, verging on the mystical, of a person to the glory of existence.”
The human condition, then, is not something to fix, jettison, or overcome in favor or pursuit of some imagined, changeless conception of heaven as some religious and secular people and institutions past and present insist. It is something to live into. A mystery to be appreciated rather than solved. For it is itself deeply grounded in creation.
Hirshfield presents the idea of an emulsified life, containing both the wanted and painful experiences of life as one way to do this, while Oliver directs us toward the natural world. “Meanwhile the world goes on.”, she writes. Reminding us the world is much larger and time deeper not merely longer than our individual lives and that this larger world continues even when our focus is narrowed to the disturbances of our smaller lives. But she ends, assuring us, tenderly, that we are in fact a part of this larger world that goes on, not apart or separate from it. “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, The world offers itself to your imagination, Calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –Over and over announcing your place In the family of things.” With these words she points to the radically accessible heaven always in our midst.
Here, together- “We nurture stability for our daily lives.” May it be that we do so not in the striving for perfection, nor seek it in an unknown, changelessness realm beyond life, nor pursue it in adaptation to a world that asks we surrender our authenticity. May we instead do so by living into the human condition, planting ourselves deeply in the rich soil of creation itself, that larger life of which we are a part and goes on even as we, in our more vulnerable moments, pursue entry into other realms. May it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be
Sermon given at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
March 21, 2021
The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said….” Well, you know the rest. Six days later, BAM! What had been a formless void was now an orderly world God created and it was, “good.” On the seventh day, this busy god took a well deserved break.
A break, which thousands of years later, deists envisioned extending well beyond that seventh day into eternity. It seemed the once busy god described in Genesis and throughout the Bible had, by the 18th century- the Age of Reason, stopped discernibly meddling in everyday human affairs. Thus was born the concept of the watchmaker god, who created then set in motion natural laws by which the universe could operate free of any further intervention by the deity.
Fast forward to 1979 and the Bond film “Moonraker”, where, at the film’s climax, villain Hugo Drax reveals the ultimate aim behind his plan to destroy then repopulate the world with people he’s hand selected for the task.
“From their first day on Earth”, he says, “they will be able to look up and know that there is law and order in the heavens.”
It seems we humans have a thing for structure and order. We want - perhaps need- for the world and this life to make sense. And religious texts, scientific inquiry, social and political forms, even popular culture have long spoken to this need and sought to provide the evidence, explanations, and formulas to convince us of its reality or advise us on how to achieve it. Drawing on any one of these sources or the conflation of several we might be lulled into an assumption of stability that works quite well. That is, until it doesn’t.
I gather, for example, that on December 31, 2019, most people assumed the world would hum along in 2020 just as it had the year before. Sure, there’d be the garden variety of global, domestic, and personal challenges and conflict at levels we consider and accept as normal, but a pandemic that engulfed the planet and put the brakes on life as most people knew it? I doubt many saw that one coming.
And I imagine on January 5, 2021, most Americans went to bed assuming armed insurrections are something that happens in other countries only to see the United States Capitol stormed by a violent mob the next day. So much for that delusion.
Then there are the innumerable, more personal examples from almost any life, the closure of a plant and loss of a job, an unexpected, serious diagnosis, a damaging argument or break up and the like. All of which carry the potential to expose the gulf that often separates our assumption of stability from reality. The reality, as writer James Baldwin observed, “That there is nothing stable under heaven.”
Yet, at BUUC we recite each week, as part of our affirmation, that here or together, “We nurture stability for our daily lives.” But I wonder, what does that mean? And how do we do this? Indeed, if there is, as Baldwin observes, “nothing stable under heaven”, then what hope have we in this age of Twitter and Covid and Wall Street, an age an age rife with daily, multiple avenues of potential global, local, and personal destabilization?
Interestingly, Baldwin’s observation notes there is no stability “under”, that is, outside of “heaven.” Setting personal belief or disbelief in heaven aside, I think it is fair to say the concept of heaven, whether a literal destination or a state of mind, is generally associated, at least in part, with gaining release from the vicissitudes of life, a place or state where stability, particularly in the form of changelessness, is the norm.
Entry into a literal changeless realm we might call heaven has typically carried a steep price, namely life itself. And even were entry into such a place possible absent that big price tag, the late Rev. Dr. Forrest Church notes in his book, “Entertaining Angels”, “…An eternity of anything would be nothing less than an intolerable bore.” “Just think.”, he writes, “of your favorite pastime, one you love more than anything else in the whole wide world. Imagine a millennium of lying on the beach reading a good book, or an eternal game of bridge, or having your back scratched forever. The last of these does have its possibilities, but even they would wear out long before your back did.”
I’m not sure we’d fare much better were we to gain entry into a heavenly realm of changelessness confined to the borders of the mind either. For it too carries a staggering cost, our authenticity. Here the eternal pursuit is not one’s favorite pastime, but psychological adaptation to the world…the very world that sent us searching for some other realm in the first place…the crazy world of Twitter and Covid and Wall Street and more. There’s a whole industry dedicated to getting one into this version of heaven, generating a steady stream of books, blogs, podcasts, magazines, and seminars to help us “adapt”. But as Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul asks, “Who wants to adapt to a world that is crazy?”
It seems changelessness, either literal or via adaptation to the ways of the world is neither the most realistic nor desirable form stability might take to qualify as “heavenly.” There are, of course, other alternatives.
In just forty words “ Vinegar and Oil” by Jane Hirshfield manages to paint a stunning, recognizable portrait of the human condition. A condition marked by vulnerability, a nagging sense of incompleteness and fear of insignificance and in which time with ourselves carries the potential to sooth and sting our wearied soul.
Hirshfield’s portrait of the human condition seems primed for advocates of diluting experience or intervention by adaptation to achieve stability. But she takes a different view. In a written response to a 10th grader who shared his appreciation for the depth of her poem “Vinegar and Oil”, she writes, “Vinegar and oil are interesting. Yes, they are separate, but if you put them into a bottle and shake them, they emulsify, and become one thing, at least for a while. Our wanted experiences and our painful experiences are like that, I think. If we can feel them as part of a single, emulsified life, each becomes something more interesting, more desired. A salad dressing of only oil is boring. A salad dressing of only vinegar stings the tongue.”
Hirshfield then would have us mix rather than fix by diluting or adapting, the various experiences that arise out of the human condition. Mixing, she notes, emulsifies, deepening our experience and connecting it to a larger whole. The result is not stability achieved by the resolution or elimination of the complexity and paradox of the human condition, but a grounded-ness that emerges from increasing its palatability. A palatability gained via perspective.
Perspective also features prominently in our second reading, “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver.
Right out of the gate, Oliver lovingly addresses one of the core afflictions unique to human beings and which tends to laser focus our attention on ourselves, the striving for perfection. She writes, “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.”
Perfectionism, which manifests itself in many forms and to various degrees, is another means of trying to resolve or eliminate the complexities and paradoxes that are part of the human condition and with which we human beings struggle. It is a fearful response, deeply embedded and reinforced culturally. Oliver knows this well and offers some welcome wisdom, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”
This, of course, is the opposite of perfectionism. It is a call to accept and live into the human condition. An invitation to embrace our vulnerability, to allow ourselves to love life’s complexity and paradox rather than anxiously strive to resolve, rationalize, or eliminate it.
As if anticipating those who would respond, “Okay, fine, but what about suffering?”, she continues, “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.” Like Hirshfield, Oliver doesn’t deny the reality of suffering or promise a life free of it. Instead, she offers a different perspective on life itself. A perspective that is decidedly expansive in depth and breadth and which sees and seeks the potential to nurture stability in the full embrace of creation, including the human condition, which, to echo Gerhard Von Rad from our call to worship, “…not only exists, it also discharges truth….and…requires a surrender, verging on the mystical, of a person to the glory of existence.”
The human condition, then, is not something to fix, jettison, or overcome in favor or pursuit of some imagined, changeless conception of heaven as some religious and secular people and institutions past and present insist. It is something to live into. A mystery to be appreciated rather than solved. For it is itself deeply grounded in creation.
Hirshfield presents the idea of an emulsified life, containing both the wanted and painful experiences of life as one way to do this, while Oliver directs us toward the natural world. “Meanwhile the world goes on.”, she writes. Reminding us the world is much larger and time deeper not merely longer than our individual lives and that this larger world continues even when our focus is narrowed to the disturbances of our smaller lives. But she ends, assuring us, tenderly, that we are in fact a part of this larger world that goes on, not apart or separate from it. “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, The world offers itself to your imagination, Calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –Over and over announcing your place In the family of things.” With these words she points to the radically accessible heaven always in our midst.
Here, together- “We nurture stability for our daily lives.” May it be that we do so not in the striving for perfection, nor seek it in an unknown, changelessness realm beyond life, nor pursue it in adaptation to a world that asks we surrender our authenticity. May we instead do so by living into the human condition, planting ourselves deeply in the rich soil of creation itself, that larger life of which we are a part and goes on even as we, in our more vulnerable moments, pursue entry into other realms. May it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be
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