Ministry

September 27, 2009

Saying Yes in the Face of No Reverend Don Vaughn-Foerster

The great spiritual need of our age is to restore to ourselves a sense of rightness and wholeness that has been steadily slipping away as our world has become more and more disjointed and random – and to restore this sense of rightness and wholeness on more than a superficial level. To do this, we need to be able to say that this world, even though it threatens us, can be ‘lived in’ on human terms. It requires us to acknowledge that, even when we feel that there is emptiness and meaninglessness within ourselves, we have it in us to say, “It is good to be here!” 

I doubt that there is anyone who hasn’t felt this need. There certainly are a lot of people scurrying desperately to find a philosophy or to create an institution that persuades them that it is good to exist. I wouldn’t want to deprive people of their security blankets – if their blankets truly do help them feel secure – but I strongly suspect that much of what passes as security is not grounded in the realities of life. Jesus, possibly one of the most humane beings to exist, spoke to this at the end of the Sermon on the Mount when he contrasted the man who built his house on a rock to the man who built his house on sand. As he pointed out, the house built on sand was built unrealistically and could not survive the winds, rains, and floods of life. 

Look around at how we build on flood plains and it is obvious that few people take Jesus seriously on this point.   Devout Christians and the secular alike seem to take Jesus to be the rock to which those words refer rather than looking within themselves, which is where those words should lead us to look, to find that basis of firm commitment to life itself which grounds us both in this world and within ourselves.    They should remember that when this talk of rocks and sand occurs is after a long litany of negative behaviors has shown us how to respond to them positively, i.e. “Turn the other cheek,” “Go a second mile,” “Love your enemies,” and so forth. Instead of acknowledging that the negatives of life are part of the rock of reality, people, usually (like Pollyanna), arbitrarily deny them and try frantically to build up sand castles or sand forts and try to find security there. The quick “born again” rush into the “arms of Jesus” (that has Jesus, instead of oneself, answering all of life’s questions) is precisely what The Sermon on the Mount was preaching against. Equally unrealistic are the strong clamor for social/political revolution and instant utopia, increased fascination with the occult and hidden knowledge, the pietistic retreat from social challenges and realities, pharisaical reliance on customs and morés, and certainly the preoccupation with materialistic pleasures so characteristic of today’s world. 

All of these avoid dealing with the emptiness and anxiety that arise out of deep contradictions within human existence. They externalize these contradictions and turn them into threats by God or by the world or by other people.  They externalize these contradictions, also, by believing that some kind of ecstatic experience, or some intense group experience, or unquestioning devotion to a religious leader (dead or living) will do for them what only they, in the closets of their own being, can do for themselves. All around us people are frantically grasping for unreal positives or for the unrealistic security of a spiritual prison whose bars are made up of dogmas, ecstasies, and false hopes. 

To believe with such fearful haste is, ultimately, to let life’s negatives defeat us. It is to say “Yes” to propositions that insist that there is no “No” for us to worry about in the first place. By stopping too short, our fears and anxieties are only driven deeper and have the effect of shaping our lives around a negative void, a vacuum– not a positive hope. 

We can truly affirm life, although doing so is not simple or easy. Truly to affirm life requires saying “Yes” to the realities of who we are and where we are. Futhermore, this is the kind of affirmation that can spring to the lips of a Buddhist, a Christian, a Moslem, a humanist, a pantheist, an atheist. It is a “Yes” that springs from the lips of the saints in all these religious ways. You know, there are even saints in atheism – persons who epitomize the fullness and depth of human responsibility to themselves and to the world, which is what I think a saint does. 

A primary characteristic of this “Yes” is that it unflinchingly faces up to a grim aspect of ourselves that most of us want to avoid. That aspect is the possibility that the sum total of who we human beings are and what we human beings do is as much a part of the pathology (sickness) of the universe as of its health. It’s highly possible that, in the end, human beings may well cause more destruction and hurt than up-building and love. For all we know, the ecology of existence may eventually balance us out with something else. Metaphorically, in the end Shiva, the destroyer, may overpower Vishnu, the preserver – or at least create a new context in which Vishnu must function. It does no good blithely to doubt that this is so. To deny the possibility that we are as much or more demon than angel, as much or more empty than full, is to deny the very awareness of how we think and of what we do that gives rise to this suspicion in the first place. Any faith that denies or underrates the grim negatives of human intention and behavior is distorted from the start. In the end it cannot instill any confidence or courage or hope because it blinds our minds to things our hearts know are real. We end up like the patient whose psychiatrist asked, “How can you expect others to like you if you don’t like yourself?” To which the patient responded, “Thankfully, they don’t know me like I do. Besides, why should they know me in order to like me?” 

We mustn’t go as far as this patient in our self-excuse; yet we must acknowledge our darker side. Such acknowledgment does not make us demons or empty or hopeless. Rather, it gives understanding of what is required to be angels and full and optimistic. To acknowledge the presence and the power of the cares, wants, griefs, and injustices of existence is, actually, the first step into the freedom and power to rise above them. 

Another primary characteristic of this “Yes” is that it heals, or perhaps not so much heals as transcends, the breach between the supposedly contradictory parts of our nature – that breach which has so widened in modern times as to lead human beings to damage, destroy, or distort the very natural and social worlds in whichwe must live.   For long centuries people appear to have lived with more ofan innate sense of connectedness with nature and unity with one another than we have today. However, since in modern times we have tended to separate the ability to reason from the capacity to feel, to do, and to think in holistic terms, the tendency has been to view the world rationally and objectively at the expense of living in it passionately and subjectively. We have produced a magnificent technology and large, populous societies, but we have severely distorted, if not destroyed, the personal harmony with the universe that seems once to have been the individual’s birthright. 

The result is breach – estrangement. We tend to comprehend the world with our heads without knowing it with our hearts. What W. C. Fields once said is all too true of those who face the world looking over this breach. He said, “I am free of all prejudices. I hate everyone equally.” This, probably, is functionally true of anyone who is out of harmony with the world they live in. Our society has become so accustomed to “making use” of things and people that we easily treat the world and others with such disrespect that it might as well be hatred.   

The only “Yes” that can affirm our existence is that “Yes” which restores our passion and recreates within us a new and larger sense of wholeness and unity – a wholeness that, unlike W. C. Fields, who seemed to wallow in his vices alone, includes both our virtues and our vices. Not that we must (or even can) renounce our use of that reason and empirical observation which intensified the breach between us and the rest of existence. Humankind has made an irreversible quantum leap into practical knowledge of the world and we cannot persist in a naïve acceptance of this physical universe as an impenetrable mystery and continue to live in it. We can, however, restore, within our own nature, the lost harmony of our passion and our reason. The “Yes” that truly affirms life (all of life – life as it actually is) does this.

One of the consequences of the restoration of the lost harmony within ourselves will be to get in touch once more with that power of life that both grows and destroys trees, that provides the food to sustain life and the passage of time to destroy living things. To find ourselves again will mean we will find our natural home again: our world with all of its other creatures, which are our brothers and sisters in life; our world with its supposedly inanimate rocks and air and oceans, which have a time, a process, and a destiny – a destiny that is not just theirs but is our own as well. 

How alienated we are from this world as a species was brought home to me by a remark the old Cheyenne chief made to the hero of “Little Big Man”, a film with Dustin Hoffman, made more than 40 years ago. In trying to explain why he had finally given up hope of ever cooperating with the White Man, the old chief said that Cheyenne (i.e. his tribe’s name for Human Beings) believe all the world is alive, that the stars, the air, the rivers are alive and are, therefore, valuable to the Human Being (i.e. the Cheyenne), whereas, to the White Man, nothing is alive but himself and, therefore, nothing is valuable save himself. The “Yes” we say to life, if it truly affirms life, returns to us (White Men and Women—and ALL people) the “Cheyenness” (humanness) we lost when our microscopes and telescopes, our cannons and explosives and other chemicals began to blind our eyes to the “livingness” of the non-human world. 

We have the capacity to make this affirmation. We have, innately within us, the power to see the real world around us, to see its hard and its soft, its evil and its good, its despair and its hope. We have the capacity to look beyond meaninglessness because it is within our own minds and hearts that meaning is discovered. To say the world “out there” is “pointless” and “only negative” is wrong-headed to the point of silliness – because, after all, we are in the world out there! It is in us! And as long as we can be aware of the world and of ourselves, we can know there is meaning; we can know there is “point.” Being is its own explanation and its own justification, after all. Perhaps that’s why, on Mount Sinai, when Moses asked for God’s name, he was not actually told a name, rather the voice from the burning bush merely stated “I am who I am” – or as my Old Testament professor in seminary said was the better translation, “I am being what I am being.” He went on to say another way of putting it is, “I am becoming what I am becoming.” (This should make the process theologians amongst us happy.) 

That’s what he said the Hebrew letters YHWH stand for. That these letters were transposed into a noun (not a verb), I think, is, a sign of how easily human beings can misunderstand the meaning that is clearly before them. When most people hear that life is its own activity and, in its essence, has no name they, yet, insist on taking active verbs and freezing them in time by making nouns (or “names”) out of them. That, in itself, is a superficial, and ultimately a meaningless activity.   Giving a static name to what is anactivity cuts us off from the very dynamic of existence; it makes us look onlyfor names to give things rather than encountering and living within processes as they are. And so, when we believe or disbelieve in God, the God in which we believe or disbelieve is not a moving power that undergirds and pervades all things but rather an idolatrous “thing” among other things, a name which our own minds have created and which we try to conceal by giving it another name and calling it a “person.” 

Our need is to restore to ourselves a sense of wholeness and of rightness in our being, to face up to the void and let our facing up to it transfigure our destiny. To do this, we must say a resounding “Yes” that admits that our seeing the world as not-alive may, indeed, make it lifeless and meaningless for us but yet asserts that saying this resounding “Yes”already tilts the cosmic balance for us in favor of meaningfulness and worth.