Secular Wisdom

27 November 2005

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 make life any harder than it is, by pretending that its meaning lies hidden in some faraway secret place, or that life’s secrets are heavily guarded, and we can’t know how to live without them.

Nothing is hidden. The fact that love is better than hate is not a secret; nor that people of good character are called, commanded, to follow a loving path.

And the fact that we are as precious as the next person, means the next person is as precious as us. This simple fact has implications for how we must treat one another and how we must live.

It is not a secret that truth must trump deceit, or that justice must play the tune to which all decent people want to learn how to dance.

These things may be rare; they may be hard. But they are not hidden, not secret.

The truth that can set us free is that everything we need is within and around us, hovering between us as a magical force field inviting us to touch its energy, and to be touched and transformed by it.

Life has many real problems we must solve: what to do for a living, how and where to work, what gifts we must offer to make a connection with our world. But the bigger questions of whether we are worthwhile and how we should treat one another – here, nothing is hidden. Here we stand like all others, needing to give and receive love, needing someone to need our gifts, needing to learn how to recognize and cherish the gifts being offered to us from those whose love or affection we cherish.

Here, nothing is hidden; nothing is hidden at all. Let us learn to live in this land without secrets, and let us learn to live with one another. For we are all children of God, the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself, and we need one another.

Amen.

SERMON: Secular Wisdom: Thoughts between Holidays

Most sermons are like treasure hunts. We look through religious writings for the few things worth bringing home: the gold nuggets scattered around in the compost.

Since we can find some golden nuggets in every religious tradition, preachers feel confident that their religion – whichever one it is – is a gold mine. And of course they are right: every religion has served, among other things, as a kind of magnet that draws together some wisdom, and some wise commentary on that wisdom.

But the truth is that you don’t have to go to religious traditions for this wisdom or these nuggets. They are everywhere, if only we’ll look for them. On the one hand, that’s a good thing because nearly 80% of Americans do not go to church regularly. On the other hand, this hunt for gold nuggets still requires that we be serious about the search, and look for the right things.

One of the things you find when you look for religious themes in folk sayings, secular parables and quotations, is that there is a widespread distrust of religion, churches, and ministers! It’s everywhere.

Benjamin Franklin said that “Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.” A German proverb says that “In the visible church the true Christians are invisible.” A French proverb echoes this when it says “He who is near the church is often far from God.” The French also observe that “Many come to church to air their finery.”

God doesn’t fare well, either. A century and a half ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that “The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.” But more than two thousand years before him, the Greek Xenophanes had observed from his travels that black people create black gods, while the gods of red-haired people have red hair, and blond races create their gods in their image, as everyone else does.

If neither churches nor gods fare well in the public arena, neither do preachers. Germans say, “There are many preachers who don’t hear themselves.” That’s almost kind. But a Yiddish proverb takes the gloves off: “It was hard for Satan alone to mislead the world, so he appointed rabbis.”

And religion itself is often seen as a bad thing. Over two thousand years ago, the Roman Lucretius wrote with disgust about the evil deeds that religion could prompt (Lucretius, 96-55 BC, De Rerum Natura). More recently, the New York Times quoted a modern Lucretius saying that, “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” (Steven Weinberg (1933 – ), quoted in The New York Times, April 20, 1999)

And while I spent several years reading many theological books on the way to a degree in theology, I have to love the barbed wit of the American critic of religion H.L. Mencken (1880 – 1956) when he wrote that, “For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the not-worth-knowing.”

So today, on this day between holidays, I have decided to do something I’ve never done for a sermon before. As you may already have gathered, I won’t be searching through religious scriptures for wisdom today. Instead, I’ve gone treasure-hunting through the non-religious wisdom of the kind of common-sense we find in some of the thousands of sayings and proverbs floating around every culture in every era.

I’m not hunting randomly. I’m not looking for the goofy or the cynical. I’m looking for the same kind of nuggets I look for in religious traditions. I want to see what wisdom there is on the human condition, what the enduring problems are that we seem to face, and prescriptions for what we should do. But even limiting the search in this way, it is a rich field with a lot of gold nuggets.

Here are some sayings I suspect we’d all agree on, from a wide range of times and places:

Each day provides its own gifts (American Proverb). Noble and common blood is of the same color (German Proverb). Good advice is often annoying, bad advice never (French Proverb). And “As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand” (Josh Billings).

We would resonate with the Latin proverb, “Live your own life, for you will die your own death.” – Though it isn’t yet clear just how we should live it. But we would agree with Abigail Van Buren – “Dear Abby” when she said “The best index to a person’s character is (a) how he treats people who can’t do him any good, and (b) how he treats people who can’t fight back.” By Dear Abby’s standard, our country wouldn’t register a very good character now, either at home or abroad.

I read sayings like “What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us,” or that “It’s faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living,” and I agree (Oliver Wendell Holmes). And I think we’d all agree with Thomas Jefferson when he writes that, “The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few to ride them.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson can still make us uncomfortable when he writes, “Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves” – but we know he’s right. Surely Abraham Lincoln was right too, when he said, “Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” And it’s worth writing down Gandhi’s formula: “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.” Then we read the line, “As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.” and think Well, that Leonardo de Vinci could think as well as he could draw, paint and sculpt!

We might not agree with American comedian George Burns (1896-1996) when he says that “Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.” But surely the great Frenchman Victor Hugo nailed it when he said that “Life’s greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.” (Victor Hugo, 1802 – 1885, Les Miserables, 1862)

And we dearly hope, and usually believe, with the 19th Century Unitarian William Ellery Channing, that “Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influence to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach.”

And what role does our character play in our happiness? A modern philosopher says “Our character…is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be. (George Santayana, 1863 – 1952, “The German Mind: A Philosophical Diagnosis”) And there he echoes the ancient Greek Heraclitus, who 2500 years ago simply said “Character is destiny.” (Heraclitus, 540 BC – 480 BC, On the Universe).

We might not agree with Emerson when he says, “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” But when he says, “Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you,” we want to write it down – unless we prefer 20th Century Rock philosopher Janis Joplin’s shorter version: “Don’t compromise yourself; you are all you’ve got.”

The Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh says “People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But … the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” We read this, and we’re glad he raised the discussion up a level.

But it isn’t enough to sit and admire ourselves or stare at the world all moon-faced for long. We’ll bore everyone to sleep in five minutes. “What [we] actually need is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of [us]. What [we] need is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by [us].” (Victor Frankl)

And like Leonardo de Vinci, Albert Einstein also grew beyond his own science when he said, “Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.” How do we do that?

Psychotherapist Victor Frankl said,”If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load that is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So, if therapists wish to foster their patients’ mental health, they should not be afraid to increase that load through a reorientation toward the meaning of one’s life.”

And the late movie actor Christopher Reeve wrapped it in poetic language when he said, “I think we all have a little voice inside us that will guide us. It may be God, I don’t know. But I think that if we shut out all the noise and clutter from our lives and listen to that voice, it will tell us the right thing to do.”

So far, we can find as much relevant wisdom from secular sources as from religious ones.

But somewhere around here, fear enters – or as one woman put it, “Now comes a sobering thought: what if, at this very moment, I am living up to my full potential?” (Jane Wagner)

You can’t talk about idealistic pictures of life without talking about fear. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes believed that fear of the unknown is the source of all religion. Even if we won’t go that far, we would agree with the Swedish proverb that “Fear gives a small thing a big shadow.” “Fear is that little darkroom where negatives are developed (Michael Pritchard).”

Fear is costly both on individual and national levels, for as Edward R. Murrow once said, “A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.” Some have said that there are two kinds of people: those who are alive, and those who are afraid (Rachel Naomi Remen). And the truth is, “Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live (Dorothy Thompson).”

Henry James, the 19th century novelist, said “Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.” We want him to be right. The fear usually comes from feeling inferior to the task before us. Then we’re reminded that Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. Never give it.”

We cannot lose hope. For “If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all.” (Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Trumpet of Conscience”) We “must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.” (Mohandas K. Gandhi)

But for now I’ll end these thoughts on fear with a wonderful paragraph written by Marianne Williamson – and often mistakenly attributed to Nelson Mandela, who also used it: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you NOT to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people won’t feel unsure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. As we let our own Light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

What possibilities beckon to us from beyond the walls of fear? One is the possibility of loving – which can itself dispel fear. The comedienne Lucille Ball once said, “I have an everyday religion that works for me. Love yourself first, and everything else falls into line.” Something about that feels right, doesn’t it?

She’s joined there by the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who took it much farther: “Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.”

Some would just call this a religious awakening. But, “A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.” (Jessamyn West, The Quaker Reader, 1962).

So one answer that lies beyond fear, and can lead us beyond fear, is love. And many have found it the secret of a worthwhile life. For others, it is not just love, but love turned into service, that is the secret to a life we will be proud to have lived.

They say, “Service is what life is all about,” that “Service is the rent we pay to be living. It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time.” (Marian Wright Edelman), and that “Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.” (Albert Einstein).

Albert Schweitzer said, “I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.”

And while Helen Keller wanted to accomplish great and noble tasks, she thought it was her “chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along,” she said, “not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.”

Somewhere along here, even though I’m using secular writers, we come to the question of faith, of what we shall or should believe. The psychotherapist Carl Jung once famously wrote, “Among all my patients in the second half of life … there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.” But these aren’t priests talking. They don’t need to defend religion, gods or orthodoxy, and they don’t.

The French writer Anais Nin says “When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.” Thomas Jefferson would have agreed with her, for he said we should “Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear,” and that “It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.”

This doesn’t mean their religion was atheism. “Calling atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color.” (Don Hurschberg) But it does mean that their religion is profoundly liberal, drawing from anywhere they find healthy wisdom. Ralph Waldo Emerson said to “Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in your reading have been like the blast of triumph out of Shakespeare, Seneca, Moses, John and Paul.” And Jefferson did make his own bible, by working from Greek and Latin versions of the New Testament to cut out all the supernaturalism, leaving just a book of the ethical teachings of the man Jesus.

And see if you don’t like this short definition of religion: “This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.” That may sound like Carl Sagan, but it’s actually His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Religion is a fairly simple and straightforward thing for these people. Lincoln said, “When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.” That sounds like Emerson, who said, “Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble”; or Einstein, for whom “True religion is real living; living with all one’s soul, with all one’s goodness and righteousness.” And these aren’t new ideas. The ancient Roman Marcus Aurelius’s advice for living was short and to the point: “If it is not right, do not do it; if it is not true, do not say it.”

Eventually, all faith must be turned to actions that direct our life, because “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. (Paulo Freire).” You can put it in one short sentence: “Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is.” Those aren’t my words: they’re Gandhi’s.

A few of these thoughtful secular people wrote more about the faith that gave their lives meaning, and that are worth sharing here. The socialist Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926), an early 20th century champion of workers’ rights:

“Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

And Bertrand Russell, who was a famous intellectual, atheist, libertarian and anti-war activist, wrote these lines that are almost poetic:

“Three passions have governed my life: The longings for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind].

“Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness. In the union of love I have seen in a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.

“With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of [people]. I have wished to know why the stars shine.

“Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth; cries of pain reverberated in my heart: Of children in famine, of victims tortured, and of old people left helpless. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

“This has been my life; I found it worth living.” (Adapted)

And two other short comments were too profound not to include, on topics as important as any in the world. George Bernard Shaw wrote that “Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to this country and to mankind is to bring up a family.” And Bill Cosby said that “For two people in a marriage to live together day after day is unquestionably the one miracle the Vatican has overlooked.”

Finally, a few words about the end of it all, and thoughts about death.

First, the author W. Somerset Maugham’s wonderful advice about death: “Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.”

Then there is this kind of looking back, so musical it almost wants to be sung:

“And now the end is near

And so I face the final curtain,

My friends, I’ll say it clear,

I’ll state my case of which I’m certain.

I’ve lived a life that’s full, I’ve travelled each and evr’y highway

And more, much more than this, I did it my way.” (Paul Anka, written for Frank Sinatra)

That’s really not much different than Harriet Beecher Stowe saying “The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.”

Perhaps it is true – we hope it is true! – that “The truth which has made us free will in the end make us glad also (Felix Adler).” It does seem true that “People living deeply have no fear of death (Anais Nin).” And the lovely thought that “Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others, cannot keep it from themselves.” (James M. Barrie) We pray this one’s true!

And words from the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC demand inclusion: “Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.”

“A lot of people are waiting for Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to come back — but they are gone. We are it. It is up to us. It is up to you.” (Marian Wright Edelman)

Yet this can’t end with guilt or judgment. So I’ll end it with the words of a theologian, though one who spent much of his career trying to present the case for responsible religion in plain language. His name was Reinhold Niebuhr, who was my teacher’s teacher. Here’s what he said:

“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. [And] no virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.”

“Forgiveness” – the first really religious word in the sermon. And just in time.