The Meaning of Life

3 March 2002

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

This is the first of two connected sermons, and should be read in conjunction with the sermon “The Morality of Abortion,” delivered 10 March 2002.

OPENING:

For about 30 years, America’s cultural liberals have understood abortion as a secular matter of individual rights where the mother, but not the baby, is seen as a rights-bearing individual. Conservatives have framed it as a moral issue based on the assumption that life is sacred in and of itself and everyone has a right to it. Under Roman Catholic teaching, when push comes to shove the baby has a greater right to life, since it stands to get a bigger quantity of life.

I expect the Roe v. Wade decision to be overturned during President Bush’s term, and I think the majority of our citizens do believe abortion is primarily a moral issue.

If this is the case, America’s liberals now need to begin doing what we should have done thirty years ago. We need to reframe abortion as a moral issue rather than an issue of individual rights. And if we believe abortion is morally justified, we need to develop moral arguments for it that can be persuasive not only to us, but eventually to a majority of the voting public. I have believed this could be done since I first preached on abortion over 15 years ago.

Now, this week and next week, I will try to persuade you, and hope the picture I sketch is solid enough to begin persuading others.

To tackle such a big issue is to risk failure, and you may not be persuaded, you may decide I fail at it. Still, it is too important a subject to ignore. A new discussion must begin somewhere, and this is a good place to start.

CENTERING:

Is life sacred? Always? If so, what makes it so? Can we ever assume the authority and the right to say No to life? Through birth control, family planning, abortion, capital punishment or war? Ever? If so, how? When? Why?

These are questions more profound than answers. Let us not approach them lightly or we will do a great disservice to them and to ourselves. Let us first be humbled by the subject before us: Life.

Is life sacred? Always? If so, what makes it so? Who are we to pronounce on it, and how? We are here through the accident and gift of life. If we would deny the gift to others, how, when, and why would we do it? Let us begin by letting the questions settle in and being humbled by them, during the silence.

SERMON: The meaning of life

Aristotle said the meaning and purpose of a life was to grow into its own characteristic kind of excellence, to become an example of that particular life at its best. Each species, and each person, has its own unique potential, and the purpose of its life is to blossom into that – for the greater good of its society and world, he might add.

It’s easier said than done, though I think it’s the right answer.

But it takes a lot. It can’t be done alone. As Aristotle also knew, it takes a good community, good friends, a life that offers us the likelihood of this kind of development. Statistically, few people become what they could or should become. So many people with great gifts of art, intelligence, who never develop it, never become the one person that they and only they could become. The obstacles include poverty, toxic home life, mental illness, psychological aberrations, wars, or accidents of life.

So the primary duty of societies is to establish and nourish the conditions within which their citizens can become the best kind of people and society – in the slogan of the US Army, to become all they can be.

This simple insight into the meaning and purpose of life is something we can all agree to, but it has profound implications for all areas of living. I want to explore some of these implications this morning.

But the first thing I want to say is that we all know almost everything I’ll be saying this morning. We know that we are supposed to grow and develop our potential, to become the best sort of person we can, for ourselves and our larger world. It’s what we admire in other people, and in ourselves. We know this.

For example, think of people who breed and show dogs or horses. I was married to a woman who bred and showed a rare kind of French sheep dog called a Briard, and spent about six years attending dog shows and programs put on by breeders concerned with serving and improving their breed.

In dog shows, the breeders of each breed write the standards by which their breed is to be judged. These standards are the best that can be expected of this breed in each area. The dogs are only expected to be what they can be, not what some other breed can be. Greyhounds don’t get any extra points for being able to herd sheep, and sheep dogs get no credit for being able to retrieve a wounded pheasant. Each breed can and can’t do certain things, and the breeders say, as Aristotle did 2400 years ago, that each breed is capable of a certain distinct kind of excellence. The purpose of its life is to strive toward its own kind of excellence.

Horse breeders operate the same way. An Arabian stallion needs to have a certain scoop, or “dish,” a curve from its eyes to its nose. Its nostrils should be flared in official photos, showing an alertness and energy. Its ears should be forward; its body should conform to certain standards. The ideal is the essence of what an Arabian can be at its best, and it is that standard that judges and breeders use to guide them in breeding and training those magnificent animals.

The meaning of each creature’s life is to strive toward its own particular form of excellence. Those who care for the breed try to create the situations within which that might best happen. And they are quick to protect the animals they love from conditions that can harm them – bad food, unhealthy surroundings, cramped quarters or brutal trainers.

With our species, it’s more complicated and more demanding. Ancient writers used to describe us as being caught midway between the beasts and the gods. And the quality of human excellence – the meaning and purpose of our lives – was something available neither to the beasts nor the gods, they said.

We have a degree of consciousness, self-awareness and articulateness that is, as far as we know, not shared by any other species. In that sense, we’re at a higher stage of potential than the other animals. We stew over who we are and how we should live in ways that chimps don’t seem to. We know we will die, and that’s the ever-present background against which we live. We have high existential anxiety compared with dogs or horses.

So we expect more of ourselves than we expect of dogs, horses or chimps, and we judge ourselves failures in ways they don’t seem to care about.

Yet we’re not gods. We aren’t omniscient, omnipotent, or undying. We can articulate more than we can actualize. We can see more than we can be. We yearn for more than we can earn. We yearn for peace, love, justice, a world where the content of our character trumps the color of our skin. And these yearnings are among our noblest traits.

We fail; we fail at almost all of these. It’s a continual battle between high aspirations and low inspirations. And we are marked as human by this odd, frustrating combination. We do not respect people or governments that sell out to low and mean motives. We do not respect those who side with the stronger against the weaker. Something essential is missing in people who do that, something we think is necessary to becoming fully human.

Yet we continually fail. And our history can be seen as the struggle between a glorious vision and an often-vainglorious reality.

The meaning and purpose of human life is to live toward that level of awareness, that level of responsibility, to know the difference between fairness and greed, altruism and narcissism, between treating people as fellow children of God, and treating them merely as things, things that do not even engage our tender mercies or make Lady Justice insist that the scales be balanced and the games played fairly.

And I suggest to you that you know all of this whether you”ve ever articulated it this way or not. You know it.

If you doubt that, try this mental experiment:

Imagine that some benevolent aliens land here, are trying to assess what kind of creatures these humans are. They say “Point to the people, alive or dead, who exemplify the best your race has produced, all that you can be.”

I have a long list of candidates, you probably do to.

I would include Mahatma Gandhi who, even though his revolution in India failed, continued to live by the highest ideals he could see, rather than selling out to the lower interests all around him. This great Hindu heard and answered a higher calling, as we expect our best people to do.

I would include Martin Luther King Jr., who had a vision of Americans as children of God and inheritors of the American dream, and preached that we should, that we must, accept the responsibility to bring this kingdom of God down to earth where it belonged.

I would include Einstein, Darwin, Picasso, Mozart, Bach, Homer, Shakespeare and others as examples of the human imagination and understanding at its finest.

I would include the firemen from September 11th, who died going up the stairs that others were running down, because a sense of duty and compassion called them upward, a compelling link to the suffering of others.

And I would include whole long lists of public school teachers, doctors, nurses, lawyers, clerks and cops who have lived, each in their own way, to be agents of love rather than hate, understanding rather than prejudice, compassion rather than greed.

I would point to these and say here, here is what we can be, if only we will. Here is that kind of excellence that is uniquely human. Here are people who exemplify the meaning of human life, whose lives and examples I try to learn from.

Make your own list, but see if your nominees aren’t people who exemplify this very human struggle to become, and help others become, the best they can be, to establish the just society, the kingdom of God, the possibility of a true democracy, honest and responsible government, and a sense of fairness that pervades all.

Now look at some of the implications of this. Look what is required for people to become fully human, to act like children of God, to be true to the calling of a species with as much potential as ours has.

It can’t be done alone. It takes more than a village to raise a child. It takes a culture: a healthy and courageous community. Because societies and laws that oppress people – that force the game of living to be played by rules that empower the strong and cripple the weak – are societies and laws that are the enemy of our possibility of becoming human. Morally, those conditions are evil which imprison the weak within small or selfish visions imposed on them by the strong or the morally blind.

Quantity versus Quality

There is one simple rule that points toward whether we have set up rules to foster life at its highest or to frustrate it. And this too is true of many species of animals. The question to ask is whether we are exalting the quantity of life or the quality of life. The meaning of life is about rising to our highest potential quality, not just existing. Are we set up to encourage more births, or more excellence?

I’ve seen the results in dog breeding. Briards are still a fairly rare breed, because that’s the way the breeders want it. They have seen what happens to breeds that become too popular, when irresponsible breeders begin accenting quantity over quality in order to sell puppies. Irish setters are now plagued with a whole host of genetic flaws because they were so poorly overbred. German shepherds, Old English sheepdogs and others have had hip dysplasia bred into them, so their mature years will be painful and crippling. Doberman Pinschers, Rottweilers, even Pit Bulls have seen their breeds degraded through breeding for quantity rather than quality, producing lines of mean and dangerous animals.

Quantity is the value of much lower forms of life, forms that depend on breeding large numbers in order to survive. I’m thinking of insects, sparrows, rats and roaches. We seldom speak of an excellent mosquito or a really exemplary fire ant. We just note whether ants, roaches or mosquitoes are present, whether they”ve survived. And in order to survive, they must breed in sufficient quantities. Several centuries ago, and in desperate times, the same was true of humans in some places. When infant mortality was high, when few lived to adulthood, humans needed to breed in large quantities in order to have a few survive to breeding age. That, of course, hasn’t been true for a long time.

With show dogs or horses or humans, emphasizing numbers isn’t a mark of success, but of failure. For the higher and more complex an animal gets, the more we judge it by quality, by how or whether it lives up to the highest that can be expected of that kind of life.

You know this, we all know this, we just seldom speak of it this way.

Serving our daimon Some observers raise the bar of expectations for our species quite high. One of those is worth mentioning because he’s respected, and because his theories are both complex and interesting. This is psychologist James Hillman, whom some of you have read and others may have heard of.

In a book called The Soul’s Code, Hillman suggests that we have within us, from birth, a kind of spirit or “daimon” as the Greeks called it, that urged us toward a specific form of life for which we were made. I won’t follow him all the way, but I follow him part way, maybe you will too.

He cites the stories of a few exceptional people – geniuses, as we”d usually call them – because he believes that in geniuses these daimons, these fires of destiny, burn brighter than they do in most of us.

He tells the story of Manuel Manoleta (1917-1947), the Spanish bullfighter many still regard as the greatest matador who ever lived. As a young boy, Manoleta was shy, afraid, and regarded as a mama’s boy because he would hide behind his mother’s apron, and seemed generally afraid of the world. That all changed when he was eleven years old, and was suddenly interested in nothing but bulls. From that point, he was afraid of nothing. In his first bull fight, he stood his ground and suffered a groin injury, but refused help and walked out of the ring under a new kind of power and a new kind of identity. He had, as a boy, grown into the destiny to which he had been called.

Freudians might interpret his life behind a red cape as a manifestation of early neuroses, where the red cape took the place of his mother’s apron. Hillman says it’s more interesting to turn it around, and suggest that he hid as a child because he was not yet ready for the dangerous challenges for which he had been made.

Let’s take a less bloody, less macho story. The great violinist Yehudi Menuhin also saw his calling at an early age. When he was just three, he heard a great violinist play a difficult cadenza in a concert, and was transfixed. He later said that he knew from that moment that he must become a violinist. He asked his father for a violin for his fourth birthday. A relative gave the young child, instead, a toy metal violin with metal strings. But the four-year-old Menuhin threw the toy on the floor and would have nothing to do with it. His calling was to play a Stradivarius, not a toy. The fact that, at age four, he was too small to hold or play a regular violin made no difference. The young boy had received an adult’s calling, and struggled to grow into it. But the guiding spirit, the daimon, was there very early.

The word “genius” is a clue to this way of thinking. It means someone who is possessed by a spirit, or “genie,” and who serves that genie with their life. The genie gives them great powers, but it also directs their life. I’ve known a few geniuses, and this describes them better than anything else I can think of does. I don’t mean to imply some kind of supernatural mechanics, just a poetic metaphor for an intensely focused sense of purpose and destiny in a few of our most exemplary people.

Or finally, take the story of Golda Meir, the former president of Israel. As a young girl growing up in Milwaukee she was outraged – as a fourth-grade student – at a school policy requiring students to purchase their books, which she felt manifestly unfair to poorer students. This young girl organized a protest, rented a hall, and arranged for classmates to speak, adding her own unwritten speech. At the age of 11, Golda Meir was already a Labor Party Prime Minister.

These stories seem to imply that there is something in us almost like a spirit, a holy spirit, that holds our calling and destiny. We must hear it, respond, and be in an environment that can nurture this aspiration so that we may grow into our own distinctive kind of excellence. That would mean that things which thwart this development are enemies of the holy spirit. And that’s raising the idea of our calling, or the meaning of our life, to a whole new level.

To put it in God-language, it means that not only are we children of God, but that if we will listen, God has a plan for us. There is this ‘s till, small voice” inside us that we need to listen to in order to know who we need to become.

To put it in natural language, it is saying that life gives us not only our genetic packages, but also a certain style of character, a style of being, and our gifts uniquely equip us for certain callings, through which we both grow into our fullest humanity, and nourish the world around us.

Either way, it raises the question of the meaning of our lives to a higher plane, where it becomes our sacred duty to become who we were meant to become, and the sacred duty of our communities and societies to provide the kind of social and legal structures that enable and empower us to do so.

If that is so – and I think it is at least partly so – it is a new way of looking at ourselves, and at human life in general. And seen this way, the prospect of bringing new human life into the world carries with it a tremendous amount of responsibility. Now breeding isn’t a high calling for our species, only excellence is. And this, I’ll suggest, changes the whole moral structure of our views on life and death.

But this isn’t just about what I think. I want to engage you too. This week and next week I want to challenge all of us to think in a very new way about life, and about birth control and abortion.

So take these thoughts with you for a week, and turn them over. Think about the difference between forms of life where quantity is paramount, and forms where quality is paramount. And think about the implications of all this for thinking about abortion, both as individuals and as a society.

I’ll end in mid-air because we are in mid-air on this. Let yourself be stirred, even disturbed, and form your own opinions about the morality of abortion and how you would explain it to yourself, or to a city government. It isn’t supposed to be easy; after all, we are striving to serve human life, which we regard as sacred – and to serve it in the way its unique kind of sacrality demands.

But I will leave you with a teaser. One of the greatest ironies in the area of trying to find good moral arguments for abortion is the fact that the best one was developed by a Roman Catholic pope, over a century ago. I will be using an argument first and famously written by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 in one of the most famous and best papal encyclicals ever written, the Rerum Novarum. No, he wasn’t writing about abortion. He was writing about the condition of labor. But he wrote about it, in this encyclical over which the Church is so proud it issued commemorative updates in 1931 and 1961, by developing an argument which said that concerns for the quality of human life must trump concerns over mere quantity of life. I’ll see you next week with my friend Pope Leo XIII and the brilliant and courageous encyclical he wrote 111 years ago.