Life as a Work of Art

18 May 2008

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Let us not tell paltry stories about ourselves. We don’t just work at a job, we have a mission that is part of the cosmic effort to improve and perfect the world.

We’re not just sweeping the floor, throwing out stuff and trying to get this place cleaned up before guests arrive. We are a modern incarnation of the goddess Hestia, the one whose sacred gift is to transform a house into a homey place, to let those who enter feel cared for. We’re not just a doctor sewing stitches into the fourth patient to cut himself this hour. We’re healing the sick, caring for them in the spirit of old Aesclepius, the patron saint of physicians. We’re not just taking a lawsuit to court so we can stick it to whoever we have in our sights. we’re agents of fairness and social trust, working to help the powerless balance the scales of justice. We’re not here just to whistle little ditties, but to sing small spiritual symphonies with our lives.

We are, whatever we are, so very much more than we have given ourselves credit for being. Our biggest failures are failures of imagination. We need a story worthy of us. We need the largest story that wraps us in the most imaginative tapestry of life lived skillfully, caringly.

Let us find a story worthy of our spirit, and tell it. Salvation can come through telling and believing the right stories about ourselves. It may be the only way it does come. Let us become spirited parts of stories that are worthy of us.

Amen.

SERMON: Life as a work of art

Life as a work of art: what does that mean? I want to begin with a quotation that Catholic theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, wrote over eighty years ago:

“Every person, in the course of his life, must build – starting with the natural territory of his own self – a work, an opus, into which something enters from all the elements of the earth. [She] makes [her] own soul throughout all [her] earthly days; and at the same time [she] collaborates in another work, in another opus, which infinitely transcends, while at the same time it narrowly determines, the perspectives of [her] individual achievement: [that greater work is] the completing of the world.” – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu (1927)

He used the word opus for the work of a life. That word opus is also used for a musical composition or an artist’s total production. We are also works of art. We are partly the artistic designers of our own life, and it is the most important work we will ever do. (Thomas Moore, A Life at Work, p. 2)

Boy, does that sound easier said than done! How to make a life? When most people hear this, their first thoughts are probably more economic, like how to make a living.

Some of the older folks here will remember how much this has changed in the last half century. In the 1950s, the object was to get a job with a good company, work for them your whole life and they’d take care of you. You”d have health care and a good retirement. For women, the work options were severely limited – most were steered to becoming nurses or teachers or stewardesses (and in the 50s only young women could be stewardesses, and there were no male flight attendants). For all, the goal was to get married (heterosexual only – nobody was “out” in the 1950s), have kids, raise them to be good Americans. America was the most respected nation in the world after WWII and its Marshall Plan to help Europe recover. We were generous and just, trusted by almost everyone.

It’s amazing how much of that has changed now. Our nation is no longer respected by many. There’s little or no job security – I think I read that people entering the work force today should expect to have eight different jobs in five different fields during their career. Job benefits keep getting cut, unions have largely been disempowered, and it’s been widely reported that this is the first generation that can’t look forward to a higher life style than their parents. The divorce rate is about 50% – so many people have neither a job nor a partner for life.

There is a lot more competition for good schools and jobs, school loans put people into far greater debt. Twenty-five years ago, I spent seven years in a very expensive graduate school and graduated owing a total of $17,500. Today, Unitarian ministers leave a three-year seminary owing between $50,000 and $80,000 or more, and I’ve talked with at least one student here at UT who’ll owe $100,000 for a four-year Ph.D. program in Latin American studies. And it can get much worse. I have a niece attending medical school in Israel through a Columbia University world medicine program, who”s also getting a Master”s in public health from Johns Hopkins. When she’s done in two more years, she’ll owe about $300,000. She had wanted to be the next Albert Schweitzer, devoting her life to helping needy people in Africa – but not with student loans like that.

So it’s harder to make a living today than it was fifty years ago.

It’s easy to get depressed, or go into a rant.

But the job of making a life – as opposed to the job of making a living – really isn’t fundamentally different now. It’s still a religious task, though today we use the word “spiritual” more, and it doesn’t need to involve churches or even gods.

Many churches still talk about this life as though it were just a meaningless prelude to some life in heaven forever – if we obey a certain concept of God or church. But I don’t believe the world is built that way. I think we do it here and now. So in many ways, it matters even more, to try and make a good life. What’s it mean?

By a good life, I really mean something as simple as a life that lets you stand in front of a mirror in ten or fifty years and be able to say, “If I only get one shot at this, I’m glad I lived the life I’ve lived.” In your whole life, there’s hardly anything you could say that’s more important. It may not be the life someone else would choose, but you’re not supposed to live other people’s lives. You’re supposed to live your own. And to some extent that involves making it, crafting it, like a work of art. And while I think that’s a little more complex than it used to be, it isn’t fundamentally different.

We need the sense that we are here for a reason, that life wants something from us, that life grants us honor, and a task. Being part of a larger purpose can give meaning to our smallest acts and helps create a strong identity. (Thomas Moore, A Life at Work, p. 17)

If I were an old-fashioned preacher talking in old-fashioned ways, this is when I could say, “Come to Jesus! Come to Jesus and be saved!” I think very few people here think or talk that way, but there can be a powerful kind of truth to that Come-to-Jesus invitation. It means, “Recast your life as a beloved part of a larger reality, as a child of God rather than just one more lost person stumbling through life. Then it can be about the larger you precisely because it’s no longer primarily about you, but about your part in a bigger story, a transcendent scheme. You’re no longer just doing the kind of fairly menial work we all do; your work has now become part of the plan of the creator of the universe. So come to Jesus, and be saved!” There’s both poetry and power there.

What’s right about it is that we need to be able to cast our lives as parts of a bigger and more enduring story than just making it through another day.

But we have to try to say it in less parochial terms today. Fewer and fewer people are learning to talk about their lives as though they were about Jesus or God. The fastest-growing “faith groups” in the country are not evangelicals, but non-believers, even atheists, as I’ll talk about more in two weeks. But no matter how we put it or what we call it, we need to call forth this image of our life as part of something greater. And it isn’t hard, though we’re not taught how to do it. I want to give you some examples of recasting life as part of a bigger story, in a few different styles, both with and without gods.

One is a story that Rev. David Bumbaugh read to you three weeks ago, and it’s worth repeating.

In the 12th century, when the great cathedrals were being built in France, a visitor went into one of these huge buildings. Over to the right were carpenters, and he said to them, “What are you doing?” They looked at him like he was an idiot, and said “Can’t you see? we’re carpenters. we’re building pews!” Then he went to some stone masons. Again he asked, “What are you doing?” They laughed, and said they were members of the masons’ guild, the finest of all the guilds. They acted like just belonging to that group meant they didn’t actually need to be doing anything at all.

On the other side of the room there was a peasant woman with a broom, cleaning up after the carpenters, the masons and the others. Of her too, he asked, “What are you doing?” This woman stopped sweeping, stood up to her full height, and announced proudly to him, “Me? Why I am building a magnificent cathedral to the greater glory of God!”

We could look at her job and say it was the least important of the three, just sweeping, cleaning up. But it gave more to her than the jobs of the carpenters and stone masons seemed to give to them, because she had made her life part of a much larger story, in which even cleaning up was helping to build not only a magnificent cathedral, but a magnificent cathedral to the greater glory of God! It’s hard to beat that. There’s a simple life transformed into a work of art through an imaginative story. We all have simple lives, and we all need that kind of transformation.

Many Hindus can still do this through their belief that their soul is part of the soul of the universe, their spirit is part of the creative spirit of everything. And that’s not just a belief; it’s true. All of our lives are parts of that bigger picture. But it’s so hard to see them that way. I think that’s why “Come to Jesus” is so appealing. It sounds so simple, so quick. No waiting in line, Just BAM! You’re saved!

I often envy the ancient Greeks, who knew these spirits were eternal, and turned most of them into gods. And so craftspeople and artists weren’t just making pews or doing stonework; they were serving the gods of art, music and beauty: Hephaestus, Apollo, Athena. They were doing sacred duty in their work. Parents planted seeds of tomorrow, and nurtured them, as part of the creative force of the universe. They were the current incarnations of the spirits of Zeus, Hera and Demeter, as the Greeks would say. Homemakers, those with gifts for making a house feel like a home, or making a church service feel like a worship service, were serving the invisible goddess Hestia, the goddess of that feeling of being deeply at home.

Thinkers weren’t just ivory-tower eggheads, overeducated chatterers – look at some of the ways we describe ourselves! Mechanical, cold, condemning, not loving. But in Greece, thinkers were those who helped bring fire, bring light into the darkness, modern incarnations of Prometheus. Soldiers weren’t just murdering foreigners. They were serving the dangerous but sometimes necessary god Ares. Even politics could be transformed – even today”s politics. A Hillary Clinton could be recognized as the spirit of the goddess Athena, and maybe Artemis, and Obama could be seen in the role of Hermes, the messenger of the gods who carried the message beyond comfortable boundaries, because the message was more holy than the boundaries. Heraclitus once said that everything is filled with gods, and in his world it was. You didn’t have to come to Jesus. You didn’t have to go anywhere because the gods were everywhere. You just had to understand your gifts and your passions as gifts from the gods, callings, duties – because they were.

Look how this could transform human lives! It still can. Arianna Huffington is a Greek, born in Athens and educated at Cambridge, and the ancient Greek gods still help frame her life. She wrote that as an ambitious single mother of two daughters, she saw her life as a constant dialogue between the demands of Artemis and Demeter. How much more dignifying, and also descriptive, that is than just calling herself an ambitious single working mother with two girls. It’s so much easier to view our life as a work of art when we think of ourselves as incarnating eternal spirits. But today, our spiritual vocabulary is so sparse, we hardly know how to talk about it. Talking about gods leaves many people cold today – even ancient Greek gods. It sounds so “otherworldly,” in a bad way.

So let me share part of my own story with you, two of my own “Come to Jesus”-type moments that transformed how I defined myself and my job as a minister, as your minister. I’ve told parts of this before, and I’m not doing it to talk about myself, but to offer you more ways to talk about your own life.

I went to one of those elite graduate schools, worked as hard as the others there, and earned my Master”s and Ph.D. degrees. I saw it as a pretty solitary adventure. You go to seminars, you read, you read some more, you discuss, you read, you write, eventually you graduate. Graduation ceremonies have never meant much to me, and I’ve avoided them. But a classmate told me I had to go to the ceremony to be given my Ph.D. “Why?” I asked. “They can mail it.” “You don’t understand,” he said, “You have to hear what President Gray says to all the Ph.D. graduates.” Hannah Gray, who was then president of the University of Chicago, was the first woman president of what they called an elite university. I admired her, and was on a committee with her. But come on – commencement addresses are like political speeches: all predictable rhetoric, no significant substance. My classmate assured me I was wrong and I trusted him, so I bought the cap, rented the gown, and went.

It was a come-to-Jesus moment. I’ve never been the same since that day. When the other degrees had been awarded, she called the doctoral students forward, and she said those magical words which were burned into my memory instantly. She said, “I welcome you into the ancient and honorable community of scholars.” It was transformative. Suddenly, we were no longer just a few more unkempt graduate students hiding out in libraries working on papers and dissertations nobody but our three readers would ever be likely to read. No, now we were part of something grand: an ancient and honorable community of scholars, of which I hadn’t even been aware until then. Plato, Aristotle, and us! You try not to dwell too long on Plato, Aristotle and those at their level, or the magic would wear off and it would just feel really embarrassing. But for the first time, I believed I was part of an ancient tradition of millions of people who had been so curious and passionate about something that we wanted to devote years to its study, and lives to its service. I knew it was obsessive – but I didn’t know it was also sacred.

The other come-to-Jesus moment had happened a few years earlier, during some of that reading. I read a book by a very influential 20th century conservative theologian (Karl Barth), where he was addressing a group of young ministers. David Bumbaugh and I talked about this when he was here, and he said he also memorized this the first time he read it over forty years ago, and also took it as a sacred commandment. The theologian had said, “Your people expect you to take them more seriously than they take themselves, and they will not think kindly of you if you fail to do so!”

I think of this every Sunday, every week when I’m preparing a sermon. It isn’t about me, it’s about that ancient and honorable community, that sacred duty to take people perhaps even more seriously than they take themselves. In my mind, those ancient and honorable people are watching me; I can feel their eyes. That isn’t always a good thing. I don’t always succeed at this, as you know. Nobody does. But those two statements transformed my life from the life of a single fairly unimportant Unitarian minister to someone who feels empowered and commanded by an ancient tradition far larger and more enduring than I am. These are the same feelings as coming to Jesus, but without the Jesus, the gods, or the dogma.

Now this isn’t your story, so you might say, “Oh, come off it. You’re just a preacher at a church most people in Austin have never even heard of, preaching to less than one-tenth of a percent of the population!” And that’s true. Just as it’s true that the peasant woman was only sweeping the floor, or Arianna Huffington is just a driven woman with two kids. But these larger callings – whether her seeing herself as incarnations of the spirits of Artemis and Demeter or my believing I’m part of an ancient and honorable community of scholars charged with helping people take their lives more seriously – these larger callings transform solitary lives into little works of art, because they reconnect us with those enduring, perhaps eternal spirits that we serve.

And what about you? After all, that’s the point of all this. How would you describe your life? In ways that make you seem isolated and small, or in ways that connect you with a life force that transcends, empowers, and commands you? Are you just insignificant little you, or are you one of the masks of God, an incarnation of holy spirits, a small but significant part of a cause, a belief, an ideal that is timeless and incredibly necessary? Sweeping the floor, or building a magnificent cathedral to the greater glory of God? Putting a few bucks in the collection plate here, or becoming the church rather than merely attending it? It’s your choice. I”d like you to discuss these things this week with your friends, your family, somewhere you can feel safe and won’t get put down for dreaming. You can choose the story of which your life is a part, whether small or large, and that choice makes all the difference in recasting your life as a work of art.

And so. What about you? As happens so often in this church, it’s your move.