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Lee Legault, Ministerial Intern
July 19, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Stoics were warriors of the mind who trained to build unbreakable will and character. Roman emperors, enslaved persons, and Vietnam POWs alike have dealt with challenges using Stoic techniques. What might we learn about surviving in this day and age from the ancient mindset of the Stoics? Are your habits helping you build your Inner Citadel, and do you even want one?
Chalice Lighting
This is the flame of our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine on systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.
Call to Worship
LABYRINTH
By Leslie TakahashiWalk the maze
within your heart: guide your steps into its questioning curves.
This labyrinth is a puzzle leading you deeper into your own truths.
Listen in the twists and turns.
Listen in the openness within all searching.
Listen: a wisdom within you calls to a wisdom beyond you and in that dialogue lies peace.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Meditation Reading
INVICTUS
William Ernest HenleyOut of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
Sermon
The other night, as I was getting ready for bed, I broke two of my persona! rules for spiritual health–rules I have broken too many times these past few months: (1) I consumed news after four PM, and (2) I consumed news on a portable electronic device. In doing so, I encountered a story about a boy from Mongolia who had died from Bubonic plague after eating an infected marmot. Then I jumped to other stories about a squirrel in Colorado who tested positive from the plague, the current global statistics on death and disability from the bubonic plague, and what the heck a marmot is.
I think this is what is called doomscrolling, and it prevented me from doing the next right thing for my soul, which was to get a good night’s sleep and recharge my wells of love, hope, and compassion. I found myself muttering, “I have Got to get back to Stoicism.” I said this much the same way I mutter to myself most Januarys that I have GOT to get back to the gym.
Stoicism is an ancient philosophy that offers timeless tools for cultivating our will by turning obstacles into opportunities to exercise virtues. Virtues like compassion, courage, patience, and resilience. Stoicism started around 300 BC in Greece. For about three hundred years, Stoicism dominated the philosophy of tile Roman Empire, thanks to the teachings of notable Stoics such as Seneca, Epictetus, and Emperor Marcus Aurelius.
Stoicism is about using mindful vigilance of thoughts to maximize the empowered agency of action. Obstacles change with the times and vary from individual to individual, but the general response of undisciplined minds to adversity remains the same: fear, helplessness, frustration, anger, confusion. The energy we spend on these emotions depletes us. Weakens us. Burns us out. By contrast, stoicism urges cultivation of virtues that empower us: strength, service, humility, flexibility.
Stoics were warriors of the mind, using hardships, insults, problems, pain–anything and everything–as fuel for the inner fire of their will The friction of struggle serves Stoics as catalysts for their chemical reactions of character, propelling them to new, higher levels of functioning and empowerment. Through training and practice, they honed what they called the Inner Citadel, a kind of internal stronghold that each of us must build over the course of our lives that houses our unbreakable will and character. Imagine the Inner Citadel as a kind of a soul fortress that protects your will and character, that no amount of external adversity can mar.
There are three steps in the Stoic Process of creating the Inner Citadel. First, to strengthen this soul fortress. We focus only on what is under our control. What Stoics called Externals are NOT within our control. Now, externals are a big bucket in the stoic mind. All actions of other people are externals. What happens to you is an external. How people react to what you do is an external. BIG bucket.
What we can control–internals as Stoics call them — fit into a considerably smaller container: Our own words, our own thoughts, and our own actions.
The second step in building the Inner Citadel is focus on right action. For the Stoics, right action is choosing the most empowering action available Right Now,. Flex your agency however possible. When faced with a seemingly impossible boulder of adversity, break it down into pebbles of discrete possibility. What task lies before us that we Can accomplish? Choose to do that one small thing. Do it well and then move on to the next pebble of possibility that is within your control.
Third, accept what comes. Stoics call it the art of acquiescence. We don’t control outcome (that is an external); we only control our own internal process. Stoics believe that, once we’ve used our will, agency, and character to the best of our ability, tranquility and joy follow. The art of acquiescence does not mean giving up going forward, only that, in that individual moment on that individual battlefield, we find a spot of peace–knowing, regardless of external events, we built Our Inner Citadel. In the next moment, turn back to the work. Repeat the process. As golfers say, play it where it lies.
When a situation arises that is truly, unchangeably awful, the Stoics show us how to transform it in the fire of the Inner Citadel. Transform it into a learning experience. Transform it into an opportunity to army our empathy. Transform it into a chance to comfort others.
The late Admiral James Stockdale provides a remarkable contemporary example of the Stoic Inner Citadel You may remember Admiral Stockdale from his time in 1992 as Ross Perot’s vice-presidential running mate. Whatever your feelings about his politics, we can see the awesome practical power of Stoicism in Admiral Stockdale’s story of his seven years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
In his essay, Courage Under Fire: Testing Epictetus’s Doctrines in A Laboratory of Human Behavior, Stockdale tells us he came to philosophy at middle age, when the Navy sent him to graduate school at Stanford. Stoicism spoke to Stockdale, particularly the compilation of Epictetus’s teachings called the Enchiridion. Enchiridion means “ready at hand”, so we would probably call it the Stoic handbook, but the Stoics meant it in the sense of a tool or weapon, available to be used quickly in any situation.
Stockdale’s Stoic hero, Epictetus, was born an enslaved person and spent years working in the palace of the infamous Roman Emperor. Nero, before he became a free person and Stoic teacher. Stockdale says he particularly admired Epictetus because Epictetus “gleaned wisdom rather than bitterness from his early flrsthand exposure to extreme cruelty and firsthand observations of abuse of power and self-indulgent debauchery.”
In 1965–three years after leaving Stanford — James Stockdale was shot down over Northern Vietnam and parachuted away from the wreckage of his airplane, floating down into enemy territory. Stockdale vividly recalls, “After ejection I had about thirty seconds to make my last statement in freedom before I landed in the main street of a little village right ahead.” “And so help me, I whispered to myself: ‘Five years down there, at least. I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.’ “
Admiral Stockdale’s essay also tells us that, when he crashed, he understood that he would be the highest ranking US military officer in the prison, that the enemy would know this and single him out for extra copious torture and reprogramming, and that his single goal was to give his fellow prisoners the best leadership he could provide as long as he survived.
His initial assessment proved accurate. As soon as he hit the ground he was badly beaten and left with an injured leg that never healed properly. Stockdale said he would later take comfort in the fact that Epictetus had a disability and wrote in the Enchiridion, “Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the will”
Before he even gets to his experience at the prison, Stockdale has offered a powerful articulation of the Stoic process of forging the Inner Citadel. He’s acquiesced to external consequences over which he has no control (that he’s going to be a prisoner, probably for five years, which was his personal opinion of how much longer the war would last). He has broken down the overwhelming obstacle of imminent imprisonment into small parts over which he can exercise empowered action and agency. And he’s set a goal for his internal condition that is worthy of his Inner Citadel: He vows to use his years in imprisonment to help the other prisoners.
Once he arrives at the prison, which he describes as a cross between a psychiatric facility and a reform school, Admiral Stockdale sees that the most effective; torture technique his enemy has is the fear, anxiety, guilt, and helplessness that the captured soldiers felt about the possibility they might give up information under duress. He says,
“It was there that I learned what ‘Stoic harm’ meant…”
Epictetus [said] ‘Look not for any greater harm than this: destroying the trustworthy, self-respecting, well-behaved man within you.’
Admiral Stockdale seems frustrated in his essay that other people do not immediately grasp the gravity of Stoic Harm, and insist on asking about lesser issues, like what types of physical torture he endured and what the food was I like. He wrote that he got questions about the food all the time. Drove him crazy.
To help alleviate the psychological and spiritual harm suffered by his four hundred fellow soldiers, Stockdale established a system of coded communication between the prisoners, set up a chain of command, and most importantly, he gave them orders. Orders like “Unity over Self:” which translated practically into avoiding accepting favorable treatment at the expense of a fellow soldier. His system of shadow orders allowed the soldiers to minimize their anxiety and guilt and maximize their empowered agency. Stockdale’s orders normalized that they would probably all give up some information under torture, but allowed the soldiers to take action to build their Inner Citadels by exercising their discretion to follow Stockdale’s Unity over Self directive as best they could, given the external circumstances. That small amount of agency brought the soldiers a measure of peace and freedom inside prison.
Admiral Stockdale writes poignantly of a note left for him by a fellow soldier when Stockdale returned from a long bout of solitary confinement. (He spent four years in solitary confinement, all told) “Back in my cell, after the guard locked the door, I sat on my toilet bucket–where I could stealthily jettison the note if the peephole cover moved—and unfolded Hatcher’s sheet of low-grade paper toweling on which, with a rat dropping, he had printed, without comment or signature, the last verse of Ernest Henley’s poem Invictus:
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll,
I am the master of my fate.
I am the captain of my soul”
Sometimes the triumph of Stoic inner citadel over adversity bears little resemblance to traditional victory. Sometimes it manifests instead as spiritual survival. You cannot see spiritual survival on the outside. Not externally. But the presence of a person whose Inner Citadel is strong enough for spiritual survival illumines for countless others the Internal worth and dignity of every person, regardless of External circumstance.
As we walk in our Unitarian Universalist faith through this time of adversity, there will be opportunities to use the wisdom of the Stoic sages: to break challenges down so their hugeness does not paralyze us, to exercise our empowerment muscles by tackling actions within our control to preserve energy by wasting as little as possible on unproductive reactions to externals, and to transform obstacles into opportunities to build compassion and resilience.
Amen and blessed be.
Benediction
May our Inner Citadels shine brightly as beacons that ignite spiritual survival in all who see them.
Peace be with you.
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