"What I Learned Over My Summer Vacation"

Rev. Dr. Joshua Snyder, September 9, 2001

It is good to be before you preaching again.  Some colleagues had told me that it is hard for ministers to go on vacation.  One reason, which is true for most people; when you go away for a couple of weeks you just come back to a pile of things on your desk that have sat there since the day after you left.  But beyond the usual catch up, ministers, including myself, have this nagging curiosity about what is exactly going on back there while I am here enjoying myself?  Now that the cat is away, what are the mice up to?  And so I think I must have been in such a frame of mind when I selected my summer reading list.

I tried to go for all novels on vacation, but I gave into temptation and took a couple of religion books along “just for fun.”  So as my family and I set up camp in Western Ontario, just outside the city limits of Toronto with no TV or movies, only some books and the pleasure of each other’s company, I pulled out my second novel of my vacation.  For years now I have wanted to read the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, and I thought this would be a good time before the movies come out in a few months and ruin it for me.  So I brought along the first book of the series, only to discover that in my haste of packing that I had in fact brought the second book of the trilogy!  Disheartened by this discovery, I turned to my religion books for my week’s entertainment.

I brought three books of relatively short length.  The first was a book I had started a while ago and was intending to finish When All You Have Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough by one of my heroes, the famous Rabbi Harold Kushner.  The second was a book of meditations by the Buddhist writer Thich Nhat Hanh entitled, Present Moment, Wonderful Moment.  And finally I ended with a true gem Born Again Unitarian Universalism by F. Forest Church.  Having read these three books, by religious professionals of three different traditions back to back, I was struck by the obvious theme that ran through them.  It struck me as one of those bad jokes that starts out, “A Buddhist, a Jew, and Unitarian Universalist all go into a bar…” and they seem to be concerned about one thing: How to live a life of meaning and satisfaction.

Harold Kushner’s book is an examination of the Book of Ecclesiates.  Like the author of that book of the Bible, Kushner searches for the meaning of life.  No small matter in a volume not even two hundred pages!  He notes that some people try to find some thrill out of skydiving or bungee jumping.  This gives them a surge of adrenaline that makes the rest of their lives look mundane and boring by comparison.  Indeed, many people seek out skydivers to escape this daily tedium of existence.  Everyday living has no thrill for them, and their days are filled with dissatisfaction and the never-ending search for happiness.  Kushner often quotes Carl Jung in Modern Man in Search of a Soul where he writes, “About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives.  This can be described as the general neurosis of our time.”

Instead of living in a culture that attempts to address and to heal this emptiness and senselessness, we occupy a culture that exploits it.  The culture of advertising, and possibly the entire economy, is built upon dissatisfaction with life.  In order to get me to buy the latest beer, or car, or tennis shoe, advertisers have to convince me that the things I already own do not make me happy.  This is likely true because most things we have provide happiness about as long as the wrapping paper on Christmas morning.  We may or may not be pleased with our stuff, but advertisers promise us that we will be cool, or get the pretty girl, or be the envy of our friends if we buy the newer better and shinier thing.  

But those of us who are a bit more mature and critically examine our lives soon se that this is not the case.  I am not telling you all that you should feel guilty because you went out to buy yourself the new satellite dish or car.  There is nothing wrong with something new.  But when we think that the only way to escape from the malaise of life is to go out and buy something bigger and better, then we will be disappointed.  Kushner, and the author of Ecclesiastes, claim that this is foolishness and vanity.  In fact, this continuous push for more and better stuff may be a form of denial about what our lives are really about.  Always desiring more is built around the future.  I will someday buy the new computer.  Instead we should be focused upon our life as it is right now.  What is it about my life that touches me deep down?  Is it my relationship, my family, or my community?  Or is it the mortgage payment, the lower back pain, or the general anxiety and neurosis of our time?  Whether it is good or bad, that is life as it is right now, without denial, without a story, without a naïve wish that the Great Pumpkin will come.  Kushner says that if we are not emotionally open to these ups and downs, if we anesthetize ourselves from our own life, then we are like zombies, not really alive, but not really dead.  To be alive, and to find the true joy of living, is to be in touch with what is really going on within and around us, be it joyful or painful.  That is life in the present moment, and the further we remove ourselves from it the less we really are participating in the drama that is our life.

If this line of thinking sounds familiar to you, it is.  Thich Nhat Hanh picks up this insistence of being aware of the present moment, but from a very different perspective.  It is all well and good to say, “be aware of your life in all of its richness and particularity at all times.”  It is the truth, at least I believe that it is the truth, but how do you actually do it?  These are meaningless words if we are not able to put them into practice.  One of my favorite quotes by Aristotle is “We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”  Virtue is what we do everyday, not merely on one occasion.  Thich Nhat Hanh’s book Present Moment, Wonderful Moment is a collection of meditations intended to do just this.  
These meditations are reminders of the present moment. By reciting particular verses for various daily activities, Thich Nhat Hanh helps us to bring our attention to the present moment.  By continually doing this, we see the wonder and mystery of perfectly ordinary things that we would have missed in our self-obsessed world of dissatisfaction and consumerism.  Too often we take our lives for granted, and saying things to ourselves reminds us of the inherent wonder we could experience if we could only open up to life.  This is done by monks living in a monastery, and Nhat Hanh’s book is intended to be a series of meditations more applicable to modern and lay life.  Perhaps an example could illustrate this.  
In Present Moment, Wonderful Moment, Thich Nhat Hanh provides the reader with verses or gathas to recite or remember while doing something.  These include: getting dressed, washing your feet, looking at your hand, and taking the first step of the day.  When getting dressed, he suggests this verse, “Putting on these clothes, I am grateful to those who made them and to the materials from which they were made.  I wish that everyone could have enough to wear.”  Right there you have a practice of something that you do everyday (or at least I hope so!) and probably don’t think much about.  But by reciting this verse one’s attention is brought back to what you are dong right now.  Life only happens right now, and that is the only place it can be experienced.  
Being aware of the clothes we wear puts us in touch with the larger world.  We may think, ever so briefly about the people who make our clothes, and the sheep or other textile industries that assemble them.  And with this understanding arises the heart of compassion that all people could have enough to wear.  I remember reading a story that someone sent me over the Internet.  Apparently Nike shoes were promoting a special kind of customized shoe.  The deal was that if you write or e-mail Nike, they would sew something onto the side of your shoe.  It could be almost anything; your name, your favorite basketball player, whatever.  Well almost anything.  There was a clause, and I forget how it was worded, that said that Nike would not print anything obscene or inappropriate on the side of the shoe.  Well one guy wrote in, and I hope he was Unitarian Universalist, to request that they put the word “sweatshop” on the side of his tennis shoes!  The e-mail I was sent was a series of exchanges between this fellow and the Nike Corporation explaining why they were not going to do this.  He argued that it was not an obscene word and should be included.  However Nike, which is well known for using sweatshop labor in Indonesia to make its shoes, refused to grant his request even after a number of e-mails.
This is mindfulness about what we wear.  This man knew where his shoes came from and wanted to use these very products to protest the company who exploited people.  It is a rather clever form of protest, but it is also motivated by compassion.  By not taking our clothes for grated we are given a new spiritual awareness we did not have before.  This awareness is not easy because it connects us to the pain, and the joy, of others.  But it is necessary, because if we ignore it too long, we run the risk of not really living a life of depth and meaning.
And it is this spiritual awareness that Forest Church refers to when he writes of a Born Again Unitarian Universalism.  But here again we see that Forest Church, the minister at the All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City, starts with a very different perspective from Thich Nhat Hanh or Harold Kushner.  He begins his book with an attempt to define Unitarian Universalism and the liberal religious tradition in which we exist.  His starting point is the general existential dilemma that confronts every human being; death.  Church defines religion this way, “Religion is the human response to the duel reality of being alive and having to die.”  This was the experience of the Unitarian Universalist man who converted on his deathbed, whom Paul Carnes introduced us to in today’s reading.
Fundamental to any understanding of Unitarian Universalism, both of how we came to be and of who we are today, is the idea of freedom.  For me, for many of you, and for many of our UU ancestors, freedom from the idolatrous constraints of orthodoxy propelled us into this Church.  Here we have no creed, no requirement of what you must profess to believe in order to be a member or participate in our religious body.  We are free to examine with our minds and hearts our beliefs without an outside authority telling us we are heretics or sinners.  That is a freedom for which Michael Servetus was burned at the stake, Francis David rotted in prison, Norbert Chapek was tortured by Nazis, and James Reeb was killed by racists.  It is not a freedom to be taken lightly.
And yet it is not sufficient in and of itself.  I am a big believer that for every freedom we have there is a corresponding responsibility.  Freedom of speech brings with it the responsibility to listen.  Freedom to vote brings with it the responsibility of accepting the winner no matter who the Supreme Court elects that year!  The freedom of belief brings with it the responsibility that we actually have to believe in something.  We have the responsibility to actually engage the world in a search for what we believe to be true and meaningful.  Each of us is our own Council of Nicea—deliberating on matters of faith and morals that we can commit our lives to.  It is an especially urgent search when we consider the finite amount of time we have allotted for it.  Church writes, “In short it is not enough to reject the convictions of others.  We must formulate and live by convictions of our own.”  This is what the man who converted out of Unitarian Universalism on his deathbed failed to see his entire life.
In order to accomplish this Church turns to Thoreau, “I wish to live ever as to derive my satisfactions and inspirations form the commonest events, everyday phenomena, so that what my senses hourly perceive, my daily walk, the conversations of my neighbors, may inspire me, and I may dream of no heaven but that which lies about me.”  Thich Nhat Hanh or Ecclesiastes could not have said it better.  The holy is all around us in our lives and we need only have the ears to hear and eyes to see to make all that lays around us our heaven.  Our time is limited and awakening to this reality is urgent.
Forest Church describes this spiritual awakening that Thoreau and others have had as “Born Again.”
“I shall tell you what I aspire to, howsoever often I may fail.  I aspire to live my life as a born-again Unitarian Universalist.  Born again in this sense: when we are brought into this world at birth, everything around us is perceived as nothing more than an extension of our own being.  From our first breath and well before, the life force that animates and sustains our being is taken for granted; it is a given.  As we grow through the pains of separation and ego-development, as we find ourselves having to compete for attention, the complexities of the human condition become more and more manifest.  But throughout, one thing remains; we tend to go on taking life for granted.  We may discover painfully that the world does not owe us a living.  Yet we continue to rebel against this fact.  We begrudge life’s limitations, especially death as its inevitability steals into our consciousness.

The secret to born-again Unitarian Universalism is simply this.  At some point it may dawn upon us that life is not a given but a gift.  It is not something to be taken for granted; it is an undeserved, unexpected gift, holy, awesome and mysterious.  That it will one day be taken away, even as it was given to us, is one of the conditions placed upon this gift.  The gift of life comes not without the condition of death attached.  Take away death and you must then take life itself away.”

As I wrestled with these large issues over my vacation, I came to see that although Thich Nhat Hanh, Harold Kushner, and Forest Church, all come from different traditions and start from a different place, they all seem to end somewhere in the middle and meet each other on one important point.  That is, that all of us need to be born-again; to awaken to the preciousness of existence.  Forest Church, at one point in his book, claims that this is the same sort if awakening that the Buddha, and other religious greats, have experienced.  Thich Nhat Hanh urges us towards it by using his verses and meditations as we brush our teeth and get dressed.  There is a famous saying in Zen Buddhism that goes, “Awake, awake each moment!  Do not waste this life!”  And it could well have been this exhortation that seemed to push Kushner to seek for a life full of meaning; to open us up to the emotional realities of life.  He found that only in the simply things, the “commonest events” and “everyday phenomena,” are the surest sources of our life’s satisfaction.  Only here can we find the joy of being and truly be born again.  Amen, Blessed Be.