Something, Anything More

Aaron White

August 10, 2008

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

A few years ago I heard the story of a woman named Rue. Rue had recently decided to purchase a home in what was becoming the very expensive location of Sag Harbor, New York. When she thought her luck was exhausted, she found what could be described as the deal of a lifetime. But there was a catch. The home Rue was looking to purchase was listed under two different prices. The more expensive price for the home included as she expected “a house, a shed, and a little garden.” The less expensive price for the home ($110,000 less expensive) included “a house, a shed, a little garden, and Ned.”[1]

Ned was the former owner of the home, an older man who was growing quite ill. In exchange for the drastic reduction in price, Ned could live in his larger downstairs portion of the home for his remaining days, while Rue would inhabit the two rooms upstairs. Jokingly, Rue refers to him as the “man who came with the house.”[2]

When Rue first bought the house, it seemed no problem to her. She didn’t take up too much space, was single, and Ned would surely not be around for too long. Within the year, though, she had “[acquired] a puppy, a husband, and a baby.”[3] And Ned was still very present. Now she feels somewhat bad about even talking about the situation, as everyone involved knows, a significant part of her is waiting for Ned to die. “I never expected to live that long,” said Ned. “I’m aware that the other side can’t be thrilled that I’m still here.”[4]

I can’t help but think that a lot of us share an experience similar to that of Rue. Here is a woman, cramped in her own home, feeling as if something drastic needs to change before she can start really living. How many of us here have felt, or are feeling, the same way? So many of us spend our time waiting for something to be different – for something to be over – waiting for something to leave us before we really start to live.

I figure I’ll just throw out a few of the things I know I have thought or said in my life and see if they resonate with anybody else here: “Just after this project is over, then I’ll start really spending time with my partner again – I’ll be in better touch with my family when this crazy month winds down – I’ll have time to be a good person again when this to-do list is a little smaller – I’m just too busy to have a spiritual practice.” And yet I am somehow consistently surprised that the to-do list is never empty, there’s another project after the one I finish, and my spiritual practice doesn’t practice itself. Anyone else? I once heard a Christian monk say that he prayed every day for one hour, and if he was going to have an especially busy day, we would pray for two hours. I don’t know about you, but I’m definitely not there yet!

The rhetoric we hear so often about our modern lives is that we are fast-paced, over-booked and constantly busy. But busy doing what?

I refer to a line by the Quaker author, Parker Palmer, quite often because it resonates with me so much. He says there are “moments when it is clear – if I have eyes to see – that the life I am living is not the same as the life that wants to live in me.”[5]

There is often so much life that wants to live in me, and instead of living it, I’m waiting for Ned to die and leave the house before I get started! I can only speak for myself, of course, but so often I feel like some part of who I am needs to be different or be gone before I can start living like I want to live. How often are we waiting for that perfect moment in life or that perfect version of ourselves to be present before we start living like we want to live?

The truth in my experience, though, is that there is no perfect moment in the future to start really living, that no flawless version of me is ever going to show up that can take risks for me – Ned is never going to leave, and if he does, he’ll be replaced by someone or something very similar. If we wait for that “perfect” moment, it will be too late.

Theologically, most of us as UU’s assert that heaven and hell are not places but states of mind that we experience here on this earth. We talk about believing in “life before death.” But how many of us miss it? Often, it is not the external busyness of life that has me waiting to live, but the busyness of my mind. It is so easy to get caught up in remembering times in the past when I took a risk and failed, or work out the most detailed scenarios of all the things that go could go wrong in the future.

The Buddhists refer to this aspect of our being as our “monkey mind,” and scientists would identify the part of our brain that does this as our neo-mammalian brain. We can be very thankful that our ancestors millions of years ago developed it – it is exactly what helped them to make sense out of patterns and make choices between options. But that doesn’t means it is always easy to live with it now.

We even do this as a religious community. I’ve heard it said that we can’t make the difference of a “real” religious community until we’re bigger than we are, or that we need to all agree on some more things before we get started making communities of justice. I hear all the time that people want their church to grow, but not to look different than it is right now. We can easily spend much of our time as a people worrying about what a newer future would look like with us as a vital voice in our society, but if we wait for that to happen on its own, we will have missed the opportunity of a lifetime.

We spend so much of our lives waiting to live, so much of our lives worrying about the past or the future. But as we know, we have such a brief time to live the life that wants to live in us.

It doesn’t take much to remind us of our finitude, our mortality: a close call in an accident, a scary diagnosis, the loss of a friend or family member. But in the midst of this reality, it is sometimes hard to really believe that one day we will not exist!

One of my favorites musical groups, Spiritualized, summed this notion up in a song, from which I got the title of today’s sermon. Here are a few lines from the song:

“Though my body gets tired, my mind does it no favors at all

And there’s so little time, to do something, something, anything more

And there’s no use in crying about the damage that you’ve done inside

And there’s so little time, to do something, something, anything more

…Don’t cry, baby, cry – as long as you and I

Do more than just survive, don’t cry, [we’ll] have a real good life

…There’s so little time, so do something, something, anything more.”[6]

It brings me some comfort to know that we’re certainly not the first people in history to live with this tension. We may feel busier than ever – our bookstores are filled with texts helping people to live in the present moment, dealing with worry and anxiety, but this has been the human condition for a long, long time.

Spiritual teachers have been addressing this concern for millennia. In the language of the early Christian writings, Jesus reminded those around him that the Kingdom of God was present here and now, not somewhere else! Just as now, this teacher knew that much of our human life is consumed waiting and worrying about our problems around food, safety, money, status, etc. It is almost as if the authors of this text could have been writing today. In the book of Matthew, the text has Jesus saying, “Isn’t life more than food, and your body more than clothing…Can all your worries add one day to your life?”[7] He charged those around him to live their lives now. Verse 34 of the same book reads, “So don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”[8]

An author of one of the Psalms in the Hebrew Scriptures says something I feel all the time, just in a little different language. He writes in Psalm 35, “Oh Lord, you know all about this, Do not stay silent. Do not abandon me now…Rise to my defense…take up my case…Then I will proclaim your justice, and I will praise you all day long.”[9]

And yet here we are again: I’ll be happy and grateful for life, just after these good things happen to me. I know I feel this urge to live a life of peace and justice within me – I just need to get all my affairs in order first. There’s so much that could go wrong! I just need enough money to be secure first, have the right job first. Once that happens, I’ll definitely start living the life that wants to live in me.

This issue has not gone unnoticed in our own historical tradition of Unitarian Universalism. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay titled, Prudence, noted this same problem in his own time. “Life wastes itself while preparing to live,” he says, “…How much of human life is lost in waiting?”[10]

In a letter to a friend, Henry David Thoreau also noticed that people seemed too busy to live. He writes, “It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?”[11]

My friends, what is it that you are busy about, and what is it that you are waiting for? What great dream of yours, what type of life and love have you wanted to live that you’re waiting on? There is so little time to do something, anything more.

For me, this challenge is not an expression of only one side of liberal religion, that side which continually calls for freedom of conscience and personal expression. This is a vital part, but only one part. It is not the whole story. A true understanding of our finitude calls me to serve life and others as only I can while I am here. I owe it to the life that I affect to live more nobly and lovingly in the time that I have. There is no one exactly like you, never has been, and never will be again.

Here’s one way of putting the length of our time on earth in perspective. If the entire history of the Universe was compressed into 100 years, every day would equal 400,000 years, and each minute would be 250 years long.

In this cosmic timeline, all hydrogen in the universe is created on day two. Our solar system comes into existence in year 67. On this timescale, the dinosaurs died out in May of year 99, and we Homo Sapiens appear on December 31st of the 99th year. Rev. Michael Dowd had this to say about the timeline, “If we show up on the last day of a 100 year process, maybe it’s possible that the whole thing wasn’t meant for us.”[12]

We are so big and yet so small at the same time. Some of this information is very humbling for me. I think, “You mean to tell me my ego is not the most important thing in the universe? But I spend so much time defending it!” This perspective also helps me when I think about my screw-ups. In cosmic time, they are pretty small. Some of this information lets me off the hook a bit for the mistake that I thought was the end of the world, and especially for that load of laundry that went undone last week and caused me so much stress. It just puts things in perspective.

This doesn’t mean, though, that each of us does not matter. We know that what we do lives on, that we make a make upon life itself, each of us affects lives. All of us in this room share a common ancestor somewhere way back. I’m able to speak here today because millions of years ago, some individual primate had the gumption to move out of the way of that falling branch, or thought it was better to gather in community to face an opponent. So don’t let anyone ever tell you that you can’t make a difference! Who knows what life will live because of you?

My point here is this, we have so little time, yet so much is possible. In his book, Canticle to the Cosmos, the physicist, Brian Swimme says, “Four billion years ago the planet Earth was molten rock; now it sings opera!”[13] Friends, in the last 2 minutes of this cosmic time-line I described, we have experienced the coming into being of harnessed electricity, social democracies, the protestant reformation, airplanes, the internet, vaccines, Beethoven, and of course, the IPod. What will the next minute look like because you were alive?

We’re not very big in cosmic time, but we know that in this history of the Universe, shared common interest has driven complexity and cooperation among elements and living things. When there was crisis, it was the cells that joined together, the animals that cooperated, the societies that served one another, who survived to live life. We UU’s affirm that reality is interdependent, that no part of existence exists separate from another – that we can’t easily draw boundaries around one part of reality and call it sacred and that profane. As Emerson noted in The Over-Soul:

“…there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul where [a human], the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away…”[14]

We know that what we do makes a difference. If we do share a common home and a common good, then what your life has to offer this process can be given by no one but you. It does not always have to be grand or seemingly ground breaking, just the life that wants to live in you. What are you waiting for?

It is sometimes hard for me to even think in these massive cosmic terms, how my life fits into the history of the universe. It’s a little overwhelming to tell you the truth. So it sometimes helps me to scale it down a bit.

How many more times will your friends smile because you have lived? Who will learn something they did not know because you were there to teach them? What stranger might be convinced that people can be good because of your small acts of kindness? What song, poem, painting, family, garden, church, community, would not exist in the same way without you? And what great piece of life have you yet to express?

What are you busy about, and what is it that you are waiting for? What is keeping you from living, as Christians might say, as if the Kingdom of God really is present here on earth, or as our Buddhist friends might say, what is it that keeps you from living in the only moment that is, this present moment?

Friends, in this life, we have so little time. So much of what we focus on in our anxieties of the past or future – so many of our worries – bind us to imperfections or mistakes that remain so small in perspective. Yet at the same time, we are able to change lives; we are able to affect the course of life itself.

It is up to us to offer what we can while we are here. It will be made up of the common elements of life: One more conversation, one more smile, one more song, one more act or forgiveness, of kindness, one more act of justice.

May we realize that there will be no more perfect moment that now to begin living the life that wants to live in us. May we join together, finding the strength of community and friends to build the life we wish to see on earth. As the song says, “there’s so little time, so do something… anything more.”

What better time than now?

Amen.

——————–

[1] This American Life, “It’s Never Over.” Produced by Alex Blumberg (Chicago: Chicago Public Radio, June 23,2006)

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 2.

[6] Jason Pierce, “Anything More.” Spiritualized. From the album Let it Come Down. BMG, 2001. Audio CD

[7] Matthew 6: 25-27

[8] Matthew 6:34

[9] Psalm 35:22-28 (Paraphrased)

[10] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Prudence – http://www.rwe.org/works/Essays-1st_Series_07_Prudence.htm

[11] Henry David Thoreau, Personal Letter to Harrison Blake. November 16, 1857. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau

[12] Michael Dowd, Beyond Sustainability: A Hopeful, Inspiring Vision of the Next 250 Years, online video broadcast – http://www.wie.org/unbound/media.asp?id=57 (Accessed August 6, 2008).

[13] Brian Swimme, Canticle to the Cosmos, quoted in Michael Dowd, Thank God for Evolution (Tulsa: Council Oaks Books, 2007), 121.

[14] Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Over-Soul – http://www.rwe.org/works/Essays-1st_Series_09_The_Over-Soul.htm