How to Become Big and Strong

30 November 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

Instead of a prayer this morning, a kind of guided meditation, best heard in an attitude of prayer:

Imagine a great circle, a great dance. It is the circle of Humanity: countless people, holding hands, moving and dancing through life. They often don’t seem to be aware of one another, yet they dance on in that great circle, as they have been doing since before time counted.

Occasionally, parts of the circle pass over a deep chasm, or a natural disaster like an earthquake, tornado or lightning would strike, and some dancers are lost. But immediately, the loose hands seek each other out, the circle is closed, and the dance goes on. After each loss, the dancers recite their special stories to explain why they were spared. “It was God,” said some, “looking out for us.” For others, it is a kind of cosmic energy that safeguards them. Others have their own explanations: guardian angels, Fate, and more exotic plots. There are disagreements over just what it is that keeps the dancers safe – they seldom speak of those who are lost from time to time. There is no pattern to the periodic losses and accidents: they usually just happen. And each time the circle is broken it seems to heal itself, and the dance goes on. Yet the question hovers: with so many different stories, what should dancers believe? In what, if anything, should they put their faith? Is it their stories, or the dance?

SERMON: “How to Become Big and Strong”

One way that the difference between conservative and liberal religions has been put is to say that conservative religions offer life-preservers while liberal religions offer swimming lessons. I have conservative friends who say they become big and strong by knowing that they and the whole universe rest in the hands of a God who is big and strong. Liberals, for all our cocky talk about swimming lessons, have to admit that we don’t have answers as solid and certain as that.

We are, all of us, a lot like Sheherezade, the woman who invented stories for 1001 nights to save her life. We’re all under the spell of Sheherezade; we all tell stories in order to live.

Still, I’ve always thought that all efforts to make it seem like we have life wrapped up in a sufficient story are just whistling in the dark. I want to take you to some of those dark places this morning, against the background of that question of how we really become big and strong.

Last month, I gave a sermon derived from Jon Krakauer’s best-selling book Under the Banner of Heaven, about some of the dark stories contained in Mormon teachings, and the violent form they have taken among some Mormon fundamentalists (19 Oct 2003).

This morning, I want to use another of his books, called Into the Wild. It is a book showing the self-deception of one of our favorite stories, which Joseph Campbell called The Hero’s Quest. It’s the plot of most adventure stories. An ordinary person finds themselves plucked from the safety of life and plunged into dangerous adventures, whether physical or psychological. If they succeed in slaying their dragons and winning their adventures, they develop a heroic character, and return to life bigger and stronger than most around them. The great gift of heroes is that they earn an authenticity that helps rejuvenate the world.

It’s hard to think of a great adventure story that doesn’t have this plot, from The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars and Indiana Jones, to Frodo and the Lord of the Rings. It’s the small and weak characters whose moral courage and strength of character make them victorious over the forces of evil and elevate them into heroic stature.

This is the story that Jon Krakauer took on in his 1997 book Into the Wild, about a young man named Chris McCandless, who was an honor graduate from Emory University, and could have become a success at about anything he chose to do. But inside of him were these ancient voices that used to torment the classic heroes. They were dangerous voices, calling him to emerge from the conventional limits of his world, to bring to life the powerful will to live inside of him that had to be fought to be freed – it’s a plot any mythmaker would recognize.

McCandless’s extreme character needed the most extreme ordeals. He gave away the $15,000 trust fund set aside for his graduate school, and simply disappeared. He wanted to test himself against all of Nature, and spent two years learning how to survive in cities and in deserts with nothing but his wits. These first two years were his self-training like training for the knighthood, as he learned about how to survive in the wild.

Finally, he was ready to run the ultimate gamut, to win his heroic soul, to earn his sacred name, and he went to Alaska, to survive the Alaskan wilderness.

He went prepared, and in fact he did defeat the elements of the Alaskan wilderness. He survived, with only a knife and a .22 rifle, for about five months in an Alaskan winter wilderness that would have killed nearly anyone else. He hunted and trapped and fished, he gathered plants. He had studied plants for two years, knew which were edible and which were not. He even had a copy of the most authoritative book on plants from that area, and had marked in it to identify the plants he found around the abandoned school bus where he lived.

After about four months, the transformation inside McCandless seemed to be complete. He had finished his hero’s journey, and prepared to return home. The wild urges and demons that had driven him to the edge of life and death had been mastered and, in the most ancient style of heroes, had won his soul. And so he left the wild to return to the world.

This is the point in hero stories that carries so much excitement, so much promise. This is Buddha emerging from under the Bo Tree, Jesus returning from his wild scene of resisting the devil’s temptations. This is every hero who has finally gained enough mastery over their own inner powers to defeat the lesser voices, to rise above the ordinary fears of us ordinary people, and begin the return to the world. When they return, they bring back the gift of life with them. They bring a hard-won authenticity with them, an immense power of integrity and character, capable of rejuvenating their world.

The seasonal thaw had flooded the nearby river, and McCandless couldn’t cross, so returned to the bus to wait for the waters to subside. He was hungry: the life of a hunter-gatherer is always just a few days from desperation and starvation, and he was dangerously thin. He consulted his book, and raided the surrounding plants for the few things left, some potato seeds his book identified as edible and safe. But the book was wrong. The most authoritative book on plants was wrong. The potato seeds were poisonous. Before long, Chris McCandless realized it, and wrote out some notes identifying them as the deadly culprits, a few days later, he died.

That’s not the way the Hero’s quest is supposed to end. There’s supposed to be a cosmic kind of reward at the end. McCandless played the extreme game by its extreme rules; he became big and strong like a classic Greek hero, and he won. He did everything he was supposed to do. He learned, he did his homework, he went through two years of methodical and rigorous training. He confronted and defeated the inner and outer demons that had to be defeated. He won. Then he died. It isn’t fair.

If it had been a Greek story, the gods would have admired his character, and come to his aid – at least Athena would have, as she did for Osysseus and so many other male heroes. But there were no gods in this story, and no salvation. He risked all, he won, then he died.

When I read the book six years ago, Chris McCandless’ hero’s quest reminded me a lot of what my best friend was going through. Todd wasn’t bizarre or extreme like McCandless, he was more like most of the rest of us. But he had that heroic kind of courage and daring, in his intellectual way.

Todd Driskill had been a minister for a dozen years. He’d switched from the Methodists to the Disciples of Christ, and the switch was part of a much deeper struggle going on inside of him. He struggled against all the theology taught by the churches, because he thought most of it was demeaning nonsense.

He had no superstition left in his Christianity. He didn’t believe there was a Fellow living above the sky, and he didn’t believe that after he died he would show up somewhere else to go on living forever. These were myths, and he knew it. But beneath the myths, he saw some deeper, down-to-earth truths, and those deeper truths called him to serve them.

I saw Todd struggling with these inner voices during our weekly lunches together. He was trying to give birth to a larger religious vision, a larger truth, a larger self, and the struggles really took him to the mat.

Finally, in 1991, five years after I met him, Todd took a bold step and resigned from the ministry. He told me he could no longer preach the things he believed, no longer believed the things his church members were pressuring him to preach, and said he would lose his soul if he stayed.

So with his son in Jr. High School, Todd quit his job and the family moved to New Jersey, where he began Ph.D. studies at Drew University. His wife found a nursing position nearby. In our phone conversations, letters, and finally e-mails, Todd wrestled with the huge chasm between the wisdom he found in the Bible and the drivel he said the churches teach.

Through his intelligent reading of the Bible, Todd found wisdom and insight into the depths of living a more authentic life, and that was the “good news” he wished people would hear, rather than the supernatural nonsense they got instead. He would say, “If only Christians would learn how to read this book like grown-ups, Christianity could transform their lives and the world!”

I thought it was too bad he was never going to return to the ministry, and he certainly wasn’t likely to earn a living by teaching people how to read the Bible intelligently.

Then, as he was finishing his Ph.D. dissertation, he got a call. The voice at the other end wondered if he would be interested in interviewing to become the Director of the Society for Biblical Literacy for the Disciples of Christ churches worldwide. The job would involve traveling around the country and around the world, teaching both ministers and lay people how to read the Bible intelligently. The former director had died, they had already interviewed several candidates, but a minister who knew Todd had called them to say he thought the job was made for Todd Driskill. Todd flew to Atlanta, and they offered him the job at the end of the first interview.

As Todd said, this was a script written in Heaven by God and the angels, too good even to make a believable movie.

So six years ago at just this time of year, Todd was loading a truck for the move to Atlanta, more excited and more alive than any of us who knew him had ever seen him. He loaded all those boxes of books. Then he lifted an air-conditioner into the back of the truck, slumped forward and died of a heart attack at the age of 46.

We have hundreds of stories about heroic quests. We hardly ever talk about stories of heroic failures. But they are all around us. The year I read Krakauer’s book and preached the eulogy at Todd’s funeral, the movie “Titanic” came out. It was presented partly as a story of the arrogance of rich industrialists who thought they could build an unsinkable ship, and sped through a huge field of icebergs.

But there are other stories there, too. There are the stories of 1500 people, mostly 3rd class passengers, who died in the North Atlantic 92 years ago. Many or most of these people were poor working people from all over Europe. They were leaving everything and everyone they had known, risking everything they owned for the chance of a better life in America. Wasn’t this a hero’s quest? Hadn’t they done everything they were supposed to do? And weren’t they coming to the New World filled with the zeal and determination we try to teach through our hero stories?

And what of the millions of students, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and other successful Cambodians who were hunted down and killed by Pol Pot’s armies during the time of Cambodia’s “killing fields” twenty years ago? What of the intellectuals, the patriotic and devoted Jews, homosexuals and others whose efforts were rewarded in the Nazi death camps nearly sixty years ago? What of all the innocent deaths of history, where the undeniable message is that life isn’t fair? What does it all do to our stories of justice, fairness, the rewards for hard work and sacrifice, the great and abiding gift brought by a good character?

There is something frightening about admitting the role that Chance plays in life. The Greeks saw that even the gods were the playthings of the fates, as we also are.

It can be put more bluntly: once Chance is acknowledged, all the gods lose all pretense to being in charge of anything at all. The only existence left for them is as ideas, concepts within our minds, limited to the kind of power ideas can have.

The best of religious writings have always known that even our most profound and necessary stories are fictions. That’s what the book of Job is about in the Hebrew Bible: that there is no cosmic justice, no God in charge of making sure everything will work out well. We don’t reflect enough on the fact that in the Jewish ordering of their bible, the book of Job is their last word on the subject of God. Buddhists teach that no one is really spiritually mature until they no longer need to be lied to – something my friend Todd despaired of ever being able to teach as a minister. Like Sheherezade, we tell our stories in order to live. And the greatest paradox of religion and of life is that, like Sheherezade, our lives are sustained in part by stories that we really know are not true.

It’s like a picture of all humanity, in a big circle holding hands. We dance, we sing, we work and play, live and die, always in that huge circle of humanity, and as we go through life, we tell each other our stories. We tell our stories about God and his Providence, how his eye is on the sparrow and on us as too, about how all things happen as part of his divine plan, and the plan is good. We tell our stories about truth and goodness and doing the right thing. We say in a hundred ways that there is a kind of cosmic justice underlying everything.

These are the stories we tell, as we hold hands in the big dance of life. And once in awhile we pass over a chasm, and someone falls through and is lost. Chris McCandless, Todd Driskill, hundreds of hopeful people aboard the Titanic, millions of innocents in the Nazi death camps, the Cambodian killing fields, thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq, millions of Africans dying of AIDS. They fall through, they’re lost, and we rush to close the holes, to grasp the nearest hand and complete the circle again, so life’s dance can go on.

We pretend that our stories explain all about life: how we’re safe because God is watching, or because there is a cosmic justice on the lookout or because what goes around comes around or because death isn’t real and we’ll all come back in some other form, some other time. But they’re just the stories we tell ourselves while we’re still safe. They’re the necessary fictions we tell while holding hands and spinning in the dance of life, above an Abyss we seldom mention.

Then, on those few occasions in life when the circle breaks and we lose someone we shouldn’t have lost, the inadequacy of our stories is momentarily exposed. But just for a moment. For then we feel that tug, and we respond to it. It is the tug of the hands holding our hands, the hands of the others in that huge circle of humanity reaching out instinctively to pull us to them, to cradle us while we cry and heal and gain the faith to go on again.

So how, really, do we become big and strong in life? Is it by adopting a religious story that has all the answers and assures us that everything will be all right? Or is it, instead, by learning how to reach out and feel the touch of the hands next to ours, of the whole circle of humanity, how to respond to them, how to trust, and how to dance?

This is one of those sermons that preachers aren’t supposed to give. They’re too much like the scene in “The Wizard of Oz” where the little dog Toto pulls the curtain away, showing the illusions for what they were.

But we began by talking about some of the differences between religious conservatives and liberals, so I will leave the question with you: When you know that, like Sheherezade, we live by telling brave and hopeful stories that we know aren’t always true – when you know this, does the knowledge make you feel smaller and more afraid, or does it make you, as I hope it will, bigger and stronger?