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Reading: “Expect Life!” by Elizabeth Tarbox
Do not live too far in the past or the future. Live now.
In each
moment expect a miracle: ten kinds of birds at the feeder, and the
tracks of a fox in the snow.
Pick up a magnifying glass and scrutinize that crocus. See the pollen at
the center of the daffodil, life’s dust, death-defying life. Be
astonished at the flower, arrested by its beauty.
Run naked through the garden early in the morning and hope the wild
geese fly by.
Get silly and laugh loudly with your grandchildren or your grandparents.
Refuse to leave the dead behind, but bring their memory to all your
chores and games and corners of quiet, warm tears.
Know always that joy and sorrow are woven together, one cannot be
without the other. If you love, know that sometimes your love will bring
you tears; if you grieve, know it is because at some time you were
willing to love.
Sermon
 mong
the dozen or so books I try to re-read on a regular basis is Victor
Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. This reflection on life’s meaning
followed from Frankl’s horrific imprisonment in a Nazi concentration
camp. It’s one of those books that can change your life, over and over.
Yes, today’s politically correct book editors would probably opt for a
title something like ‘Humans’ Search for Meaning, but in the spirit of
honoring an author’s original, I encourage you to include Man’s Search
for Meaning in your regular reading.
This past summer I had an opportunity to read the book again in a
particularly apt setting: up at 13,000 feet in the San Juan mountains of
central Colorado. During a week of hiking in this extraordinary terrain,
I carried my lightweight paperback edition with me on one of our
day-hikes. When we reached 13,000 feet on that sunny, totally-blue-sky
August day, I found a grassy spot to sit and wait for my hiking
partners, who had gone on to explore a higher ridge and adjoining
lake.... OK, I admit it, that final ridge was up a very step trail
filled with loose rubble and other climbing challenges. Since I had
never hiked at that height before, 13,000 feet was about my comfortable
breathing limit, so I welcomed the chance to stay behind. But I also
relished the chance to have some time alone to read. And really, I was
not alone, so close to ‘god’ and ‘mountains’ and ‘love.’ I relished the
chance to read again and experience again Frankl’s moving essay about
life’s meaning, sitting there in that outdoor cathedral at 13,000 feet.
Frankl was a psychiatrist, and this powerful study is deeply
psychological. But it is also deeply religious and expands our worship
theme of ‘mystery’ for November. The mystery of existence --- of
realizing that we exist, and that we will all someday die --- is the
core of the religious quest. Faced with the reality of dying, we ask
what then is the meaning in living: an ageless question explored by
countless generations of humans.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl asks specifically why he
survived the concentration camp, and proposes one answer: that his
having maintained a sense of purpose and meaning while in the camp no
matter how terrible conditions were, gave him the will to live. His
purpose for staying alive was to continue loving his wife. He didn’t
even know if she were alive, but his love for her was, and that gave him
meaning and purpose. Once freed from the camp, he focused his
psychiatric practice around this basic premise that he learned from the
camp experience, that we humans cannot avoid suffering. The squalor in
life is inescapable, part of the human condition. We cannot avoid it,
but we can choose how to cope with suffering. Looking for meaning in the
suffering can help us move beyond it.
Central to finding meaning for Frankl in this mysterious cycle of life
and death was the belief that there is something outside ourselves ---
for him, there were several somethings, the most important being love,
that he also called God --- that gave his life purpose. Frankl learned
to expect life --- as our reading by Rev. Elizabeth Tarbox also call us
to do. What both Frankl and Tarbox mean by this phrase is to expect not
just existence, but life, as in vitality and joy and a sense of purpose.
Both Tarbox and Frankl call us to be present in the moment, so that we
may authentically focus on the smallest to the most profound experiences
in this amazing process called ‘life.’
Victor Frankl came to understand how attitude influences reality: that
is, how purpose is central to meaning. Frankl quotes Nietzsche: “He who
has a WHY to live for can bear with almost any HOW.” Tarbox said the
same thing in her poem: if we have a sense of purpose, why should we
then not expect miracles, miracles like seeing the tracks of a fox, or
pollen in a daffodil, or wild geese, or the capacity to be silly, or
connections with those who have gone before us. Why should we not expect
life to be fulfilling. In the words of today’s sung postlude, why should
we not ‘believe in life, and in the strength of love.’
I suspect Frankl’s message of purpose makes total sense to many of us.
Have you known anyone whose will to live seemed to be the only
explanation for their on-going survival.... The cancer patient who wants
to see her son graduate from college.... or his daughter walk down the
aisle in marriage..... or Victor Frankl’s longing to see his wife again.
The summer my son was born his paternal great-grandmother was gravely
ill. That she continued to live defied explanation. My son was her first
great-grandchild, and the first child of Grandma’s favorite grandson. My
son was born on August 18, and Grandma died three days later. She hung
on --- she expected life --- in order to be sure that her
great-grandson’s life was secure, that our new baby was safe, and then
she let go. Having purpose can be a powerful call to life.
By contrast, Frankl wrote about a prisoner in the camp who told him one
day about a strange dream, in which a voice told him that he could wish
for something. So he wished to know when the camp would be liberated and
their suffering over. The dream happened in February 1845 and the answer
from the dream voice was March 30. The prisoner remained full of hope
throughout March, but at the end of month approached and it seemed
unlikely that freedom was imminent, he fell ill with symptoms that
presented as typhus. The prisoner died on March 31.
Likely few of us would refute Frankl’s premise, that meaning and purpose
make life worth living. However, for many of us --- I’ll speak for
myself --- the overriding question becomes, ‘so, how do we do that, how
do we create meaning, how do we define and shape what matters?’ I’ve
mentioned my Unitarian Universalist minister colleague, the late Rev.
Forrest Church, several times in the past few weeks, and I do so again
today because his ministry addressed so powerfully these ‘mystery’
question we are exploring this morning. In one of his many publications,
Rev. Church labeled this creation of meaning and purpose ‘Lifecraft.’ To
have a sense of control over how our lives are shaped, that is the
greatest of gifts, that is what Rev. Church called ‘Lifecraft.’ Or as
Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, ‘It is something to be able to
paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few
objects beautiful, but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the
very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can
do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.’ Does
Thoreau resonate with you: do you hope to affect the quality of your
day, and how do you do that?
Rev. Forrest Church identified many ways that Lifecraft as he understood
it helped him create meaning in his life and thus affected the quality
of his days. His Lifecraft was grounded in a deep searching of the human
heart, and he was also very well aware that meaning is not absolute:
each of us works out our own Lifecraft for ourselves. For him, love was
most important for shaping life’s meaning --- love that is sustained
through relationships with others: other humans, other life forms, and
the natural world. Love is the highest Lifecraft value, a means of
reaching wholeness and salvation. For many, relationship is the
substance -- the tangible substance --- of life. Through relationships
with others, we draw inspiration for our own actions and feelings and we
realize how our existence matters to others. Relationships create a
sense of belonging, and belonging gives meaning to life.
Rev. Church also found meaning through the natural world, through beauty
created by a force outside himself, whether or not at 13,000 feet. I
suspect the natural world of this beautiful state of Colorado is an
important door to meaning for many of us. I’ve already told you about a
particular peak up at Copper Mountain ski area (outside Denver) that
renews me every time I see it: it’s ‘my’ mountain. Sometimes I call it
‘god;’ other times ‘mountain,’ or ‘goddess,’ or ‘beauty.’ The majesty
and self-assurance of this peak and the many other ‘fourteeners’ around
it awe me. These peaks focus me on the meaning of living. When I am in
the presence of ‘my’ mountain, I know that in that moment my life
purpose is to take in the beauty of that peak and the many other
fourteeners around it.
Similarly, the artistic world is Lifecraft for many of us: the beauty
that is intentionally created by human hands and minds and bodies. In
some theological systems, such as explained by Henry Nelson Wieman, the
holy is creativity itself.
Forrest Church also identified another Lifecraft component as
‘projects.’ By ‘projects’ he meant engagements that we have passion for,
that compel us forward, that when brought together shape a life, much as
individual cuts of glass create a stained glass window. One project he
hopes we don’t dismiss he called the ‘God Project’: that is, being
involved in something outside ourselves, bigger than ourselves, with
greater purpose than ourselves. It’s not only theists he was talking to.
All of us can be involved in the God Project. He invited atheists to
describe to him the god they don’t believe in, because it’s likely he
didn’t believe in that god either. That is, by ‘God’ he didn’t mean
God’s name. ‘God’ is our name for the mystery that dwells within and
looms beyond the limits of our being,’ he said. This sense of something
outside ourselves --- some ground of all being --- enhances our faith in
life and contains the potential to restore the brokenness of this
planet.
For Forrest Church, as for Victor Frankl, possibilities abound for
helping ourselves shape meaning and purpose, so that we can indeed
‘expect life’ every day of our lives.
Somewhat hesitatingly I move this sermon to another question. I want to
explore briefly what the opposite of ‘expecting life’ looks like, not to
urge you to go there to some negative place, but perhaps to expand
awareness of what the darker side of Lifecraft is like. If, as they say,
the purpose of a sermon is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the
comfortable, then I suppose I ‘owe’ it to this sermon to ask this other
side of the Lifecraft question: do you ever look at the world through
dark glasses. Is your Lifecraft ever challenged by depressed
expectations, so that you expect merely existence, rather than vitality?
Do you ever become hope-challenged, short on believing in life, limited
in seeing the geese and the pollen and the fox trail? Does it ever
happen that you allow inescapable squalor to become the norm, the shaper
of your lens onto the world?
I suspect there is not one of us who has not gone into such negative
tombs from time to: likely tombs of different sizes and durations. We
move into tombs, into negative expectations about life, for many
reasons. They may be places to hide, to protect ourselves from pain or
suffering or defeat or change. Some tombs may be so cluttered with noise
and hubbub and addiction that the real world does become closed off,
drowned out, dropped away from our realm of possibility and thus all the
easier to avoid. Tombs may be the places where we stockpile excuses to
engage in life because of the risk or the hard work it takes to engage.
Tombs may be the places where we go to keep things the way they are
because we survived that way once, so if we keep on the old path, good
chance we survive again. We choose tombs, rather than risking the
different way, the new path, the expanded vision, the new combinations
of glass cuttings to create a new window on life.
Forrest Church called us to keep our visions broad. If we trivialize
love, our vision narrows and we can easily fall inward toward darker
places. If we do not keep a sense of something outside ourselves ---
call it by whatever name --- we can easily get caught up in
self-absorption, and the world is no larger than the end of our own
being. As Rev. William Sloan Coffin, former minister at Riverside Church
in Manhattan, said: “There is no smaller package in the world than
someone who is all wrapped up in himself.” Self-absorption keeps us from
seeing the bigger picture, the community of humanity that lies all
around us. Self-absorption keeps us from experiencing the potential for
how ‘We Would Be One’ (hymn #318 in this service) with others.
Not only must we keep visions broad, we must be open to the
transformation that we can find in even the smallest life experiences.
We must be open to keeping our options open for a different way of
being. I like jigsaw puzzles: they are a clarifying diversion after a
challenging day of ministry, or when I experience a writing block as I
craft a sermon. This week I was putting together a puzzle of a harbor
scene: a sailboat next to a dock, waves, a multi-colored sunset, and
more .... I had assembled a chain of about eight pieces that I was
convinced depicted a breaking wave coming in, but try as I might, I
could not fit that wave into any horizontal space on the emerging image.
Certainly I’d been given the wrong picture to illustrate the puzzle I
was assembling, I thought. Until I looked at my ‘wave’ again for the
hundredth time and realized it was indeed the vertical mast of the
sailboat in the picture ..... Keeping options open for how the pieces of
Lifecraft will come together, we can find meaning in every new way, from
even the smallest events of life.
But still, it’s easy to get hung up, to be stuck in a place where it is
hard to expect life.The good news is that there is also much we can do
to help ourselves, to bring us back to connections, to relationships, to
meaning and purpose. Sometimes it may take professional counseling help,
or intentional spiritual exploration or retreating. Many times, however,
we can shape our Lifecraft ourselves.
Think about how many positive tips for Lifecraft our free theological
grounding offers us. This liberal, chosen faith of Unitarian
Universalism can help direct us away from those tombs and self-centered
packages. For starters, the first principle of Unitarian Universalism
affirms the inherent worth and dignity of each person. Each of us is
deserving of positive meaning in life, each of us can expect life. The
seventh principle affirms our interconnectedness, our access to loving
connections. The Universalist side of our heritage is grounded in a
theology of hope, hope that comes through the inherent goodness of life.
Universalism helps me believe that in the end all will be well: in the
end there will be meaning --- positive, joyful, meaning --- even if we
are in the middle of high bumps on the road that is the life journey.
Victor Frankl was not ‘officially’ a Universalist, but his heart and his
soul certainly were.
Sometimes helping ourselves return to purpose and meaning comes through
seeing a friendly face, or a hugging arm from a friend or even a
stranger. Sometimes we can find renewed forward direction, through
exercise, or being in nature, or artistic creativity, or contemplation
and prayer, or reading. Forrest Church especially enjoyed expanding the
stained glass of his Lifecraft through foreign travel. Lifecraft need
not be complicated. We just need to stay open to any possibility:
sometimes an ocean wave is really a ship’s mast.
It is a miracle that there is any life on this planet, a confluence of
coincidences beyond comprehension. It is also a miracle that any of us
exists as part of this miraculous universe. Being part of this
mysterious process called ‘life,’ we have come into a world full of
beauty, freedom, and relationships. It is our Lifecraft to stay open and
alert to this life, to the rich gardens of purpose and direction that
lie all around us. ‘For all life is a gift’ (a reference to hymn #128 in
the service). Let us come with thanks and praise and keep ourselves open
to the most fulfilling meaning possible. Staying open, let us ‘expect
life’ in abundance.
MAY THIS BE SO.
Please do not copy or quote without permission of the author.
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