Under the gaze of eternity

Davidson Loehr

26 May 2002

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

OPENING

“Our souls are restless till we find our home in Thee.” The sentiment was from St. Augustine, 1600 years ago. “Our souls are restless till we find our home in Thee.”

We gather here from many places, bringing many needs. Joy, sadness, depression, energy and optimism: all those emotions and more are present here today. Perhaps it is at least true to say that our souls are restless till we find our home somewhere, in something that feels adequate to our yearnings.

It is good to be together again, to become absorbed in these abiding yearnings.

It is a sacred time, this

And a sacred place, this:

a place for questions more profound than answers,

vulnerability more powerful than strength,

and a peace that can pass all understanding.

It is a sacred time, this:

Let us begin it together in song.

CENTERING: Psalm 90 (mixed translations)

For our Centering, I”ve chosen a psalm written by a poet who lived under the gaze of God. This is taken from Psalm 90:

Lord, you have been our refuge forever.

Before the mountains were born,

before the earth and the world came to birth,

from eternity to eternity you are God.

You bring human beings to the dust,

by saying, “Return, children of the earth.”

A thousand years are to you

like a yesterday which has passed,

like a watch in the night.

…In the morning we are like growing grass:

in the morning we are blossoming and growing,

by evening we are withered and dry.

” You have seen our guilty deeds,

our secrets are open to your eyes.

Teach us to number our days,

that we might come to the heart of wisdom.

Let your favor be upon us,

and establish the work of our hands upon us,

yea, the work of our hands,

establish thou it.

SERMON

I first heard of the idea of “living under the gaze of eternity” in graduate school. A professor said that’s how to understand the ancient Roman advice that noble people should live sub specie aeternitatis.

At first, I had this picture of pretending I was living while everyone who had ever lived was watching everything I did. That was not an appealing idea! I had had a few experiences of feeling watched when I didn’t want to be watched, and I didn’t like it.

For some people, that’s what it’s like imagining that God sees their every action. This has never seemed like such a good idea, either. When I was a little boy, I heard that Santa Claus did this – you know that terrifying song, “He sees you while you”re sleeping, he knows when you”re awake, he knows when you”ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness” sake!” Well, I never liked the idea of his knowing all that. I wanted to deny him access – set up a password or something.

It is an odd idea, living under the gaze of eternity. I can’t imagine that it’s very attractive to very many people anywhere. You”ve probably had some experiences of this, too.

The earliest I can remember feeling like someone invisible was watching me came when I was in the 8th grade, living in Colfax, Iowa, a town of about 1800 people twenty miles from Des Moines. Each year the Girl Scouts sponsored a Sadie Hawkins Day Dance, named after a very assertive character in the Lil” Abner comic strips, where the girls asked the boys for a date, and if asked you had to go. The most obvious thing wrong with this plan was that in 8th grade nobody knew how to dance, the girls didn’t know how to communicate with boys, and the boys hardly knew how to communicate with anyone.

I hoped and prayed that I”d be spared, but Helen van Elsen invited me to the Sadie Hawkins Day Dance, and I had to go. It was the kind of dance you could see in a movie about small towns in the 1950s. The girls sat on one side of the room, the boys sat on the other side of the room, the music played, we listened, and once in awhile a couple girls would get up and dance together since the boys were pretty useless.

After the dance came to a merciful end, Helen and I walked downtown to the Rexall Drug store and sat in a booth, drinking chocolate or cherry Cokes and talking. We talked and talked, until the owner of the drug store came over to tell us we had to leave because he was closing. It was midnight! That was a lot later than we”d planned on, so I walked Helen home then walked to my own house.

Monday morning, English class was always first. But on this next Monday, the teacher came into the class on a mission. She glared at me from the minute she entered the room, walked over to her desk, dropped her books and papers on it, pointed straight at me in front of the whole class and said “Young man, what do you mean getting Helen van Elsen home at 12:17 Sunday morning?!”

And I thought to myself, “I”ve got to get out of this town!” It felt like everyone was watching you in a small town, and I didn’t like it.

A more recent memory of getting caught by someone’s gaze came about a dozen years ago. It’s much shorter and wasn’t embarrassing, though it was still uncomfortable.

I was a minister in Michigan in a town of about 250,000. I was in line at the grocery store thinking about something else, when I became vaguely aware of a woman coming to get in line behind me. I had a full cart, she had just a couple items. Almost absentmindedly, I motioned for her to cut in ahead of me, and immediately wished I hadn’t done it because I was hungry and wanted to get home. But it was too late.

Then as she steered her cart in front of mine, she turned to me and said “Thank you. It’s nice to see a minister who practices what he preaches.”

I had never seen this woman before. I don’t think she attended my church. But I was on a weekly television show there, and might have been seen without knowing it a number of places.

While I was suddenly glad I had acted absentmindedly instead of thinking about it and keeping my place in line, it still felt like another voyeur had been watching my life while I was unaware, and I didn’t like it.

These experiences probably explain why I use a Macintosh computer.

I bought my first Mac in 1985, I’m now on my fourth. But some of you will remember the TV ad that announced this new kind of computer. It appeared at half-time during the 1985 Super Bowl, and was one of the classic ads in TV history. Back then, IBM was the only real competition, and this Macintosh ad portrayed the IBM computers and their horrible MSDOS system as Big Brother, up there on a screen, watching all of us, making sure we all conformed and did it His way, remember? Then some heroic savior figure threw a big hammer through the air and shattered that screen with Big Brother on it, and this quirky little Macintosh computer stood there, with something drawing squiggly lines on it saying “Hi!” I bought mine just a few months later.

While my experiences are bound to be different from yours, I think a lot of people have very negative associations with the idea of being under the gaze of others. Whether it’s Santa Claus or God, there’s something intrusive about it, like a kind of divine Peeping Tom at the window of your life where he has no place being. It can feel like we’re expected to conform to the expectations of others, and many of us equate that with losing our own lives. We live in such an age of individualism, the whole idea seems foreign.

Of course, living under the gaze of eternity doesn’t have to mean being watched by all the dullest people who have ever lived. It could mean trying to look at things against a background of the most, the best, that can be expected of us.

It could mean the noblest eyes that have ever lived, or being judged by the highest, the most enduring or eternal standards. It could mean living under the charge of becoming the best and most that we could be.

For a lot of young Christians, it can mean asking WWJD? I have a Unitarian colleague who didn’t like Jesus that much, but who liked the idea. So she had a bracelet made saying “WWXD?” She knew all the episodes of Xena, the Warrior Princess, and consulted her image of Xena just as the others wondered what Jesus would do. When I was a boy, I remember clearly that Superman and Captain Marvel were my own personal superheroes. I would wonder what they would do, or what Clark Kent and Billy Batson would do – and I occasionally snuck off where no one could hear me and practiced saying ‘s hazam!” just in case it really could call forth the magic lightning bolt that could turn me into Captain Marvel. It’s an important way for kids to try and call forth an image of someone of absolute courage and perfect moral compass: what would they do here?

Besides my negative experiences of being gazed at, I also have a very positive and powerful one. It came during the graduation ceremony when I received my Ph.D. degree. It was the first graduation ceremony I”d attended since high school, but a classmate said I didn’t want to miss it, because of this one line the president of our university said to the doctoral students. It came after all the undergraduates and Master’s Degree students had received their diplomas, and the president had called all the Ph.D. recipients up on the stage. She said a few routine things and a few ordinary sorts of congratulations, before she finally said this one line, which I memorized on the spot: “I welcome you,” she said, “to the ancient and honorable community of scholars.”

Just eleven words: “I welcome you to the ancient and honorable community of scholars.” For me, they were worth the trip. I had this sudden overwhelming feeling of being surrounded by all of the best scholars who had ever lived, all those ancient and modern thinkers I had spent seven years reading and struggling to understand. They were all there with me. The philosophers, from ancient Greece to modern Europe, England and America. All the theologians, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and all the rest of them. It felt like all of their eyes were on me, and I would be living under the gaze of both their approval and their judgment for the rest of my life. In that instant, I knew what it felt like to live “under the gaze of eternity,” and how empowering, frightening and transformative that could be.

I still imagine these gazes when I’m working on a sermon or a column. I think one of the lasting benefits of a good education is the quality of the ghosts that haunt you: those voices, those eyes. That’s also one of the lasting benefits of a good honest religion: the quality of the spirits that become present in your imagination. The quality of the transcendent ideals and values that “gaze” at you, that hold you accountable.

It has helped me get used to the idea of being watched by this invisible community when I realize that they”re not always watching. These eyes, these gazes, are an imaginary audience you can call forth when you have a tough moral or ethical decision to make, and want to feel yourself in the presence of people with wisdom and courage – WWJD? WWXD? It’s empowering and ennobling, like standing in the presence of an ancient and honorable community of scholars, or a community of saints. It’s the kind of feeling St. Augustine was after when he said “Our souls are restless till we find our home in Thee.”

My 8th grade English teacher was a blessing, not a curse. She represented, and reminded me of, an important set of social mores, expectations about how decent people behave.

And that anonymous woman in the grocery store was a blessing too, a reminder that it does matter whether we practice what we preach, whether we feel like it or not.

We live in strange and mixed times, like all times. We are living in a society of too many drugs of all kinds, too much selfishness, too much dishonesty in both high and low places. It’s true. But we are also living in an invisible community of poets and saints, heroes and lovers. They are the better angels of our nature. And by keeping them in mind, and learning to grow comfortable under their gaze, these noble souls can become even more. The God we keep in our mind and heart becomes our God, available to comfort and strengthen us. And all those poets and saints, heroes and lovers become our people. Our people, our angels, our community – and the home we have sought so long for our restless souls.