DON'T LOOK BACK A Sermon by Kenneth W. Phifer, Delivered at First UU Congregation Ann Arbor, MI, Sunday, February 6, 2005 Don't look back! There are two important tales in western literature that instruct us not to look back, the Greek story of Orpheus and Eurydice and the Hebrew tale of Lot's wife. Orpheus and Eurydice fall in love and marry and are very happy in their forest home. One day she is attacked by evil men. Fleeing for her life, she steps on a poisonous snake. She dies and goes to Hell. Orpheus pursues her there, playing his lyre to calm the guards and then to calm Hades, the Lord of the Underworld. Hades agrees to let Eurydice go, on one condition: that Orpheus lead her by the hand along the cliffs of Hell and not once look back at her as he does so. Orpheus makes it to the very edge of the Underworld before his suspicions overwhelm him: is it a monster who holds his hand, has Hades tricked him, will he be dragged back down into the Nether Regions himself. He turns and looks. For one unforgettable moment he sees the beauty of the woman he loves, before she vanishes forever into the Land of the Dead. Don't look back! You may lose that which is most precious to you if you do. Lot is Abraham's nephew and accompanies him on the journey out of Haran into Canaan. (Genesis 12) When they arrive, they separate and keep their herds on different plots of land. (Genesis 13) They remain close, though, and when Lot is captured by some kings, Abraham rescues him. (Genesis 14) Lot moves to Sodom. There he is visited by some strangers, who are really angels in disguise. He extends hospitality to them, even to the point of offering his daughters to the mob that comes asking for the strangers. (Genesis 19) Sodom is a wicked city and the Lord determines to destroy it, but for Abraham's sake, he spares Lot and his family. (Genesis 19:29) Lot is not all that anxious to leave. The text tells us that he "lingered; so the angels seized him, and his wife and two daughters by the hand, the Lord being merciful to him, and they brought him forth and set him outside the city." (Genesis 19: 16) Lot was told to "Flee for your life; do not look back or stop anywhere in the valley; flee to the hills, lest you be consumed." (Genesis 19: 17) The text tells us that "Lot's wife behind him looked back, and she became a pillar of salt." Lot fled first to the city of Zoar and then when destruction came to it, he went into the hills. There his two daughters determined that "there is not a man on earth to come in to us after the manner of all the earth. Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve offspring through our father." (Genesis 19: 31-32) They did so, and each bore a son, Moab and Ammon, the patriarchs of the Moabites and the Ammonites. Although the descendents of Moab would eventually number King David and, according to the New Testament, Jesus as well, the Moabites and the Ammonites were among the most hated enemies of the ancient Israelites. Don't look back! You may become frozen in time and your loved ones be led into desperate acts. It can be very dangerous to look back. Without discounting the enormous importance of memory, it is wise to keep in mind the perils of looking back. First of all, it is dangerous to look back in fear. That is what Orpheus did and it cost him his happy future. Afraid that he had been tricked, mistrustful of Hades, eager to be with his beloved once more, he forgot the simple rule of always living by the best values we know. He lost Eurydice because he was afraid of losing her. His fear led him to cheat on the bargain he had made with Hades, an act that led to disaster. Lot's daughters were also afraid. They were driven by fear to commit incest, as outrageous an act in their times as in ours. They were concerned about a lack of males with whom to produce children. The result of their fearful deeds was the birth of sons who would become the progenitors of two people who would be among Israel's most hated enemies. The prophet Jeremiah says of the people of Moab and of Ammon, among others, that the Lord will "make them a desolation and a waste, a hissing and a curse." When we act out of fear, we are acting on our worst impulses and ambitions and motivations. Usually bad things flow out of those deeds. No small part of the violence that explodes in war grows out of fear of the past continuing into the present. Lyndon Johnson, for example, was very much aware of the history of the 1950's and the false charges that brought many good people low of having lost China to the Communists. His fear led him, by his own testimony, to consider Vietnam a place where the United States not only must not lose, but must not be perceived to lose. Dean Rusk, Secretary of State to Kennedy and Johnson, was afraid of another Munich, where Neville Chamberlain sold out Europe to Hitler for a "peace in our time" that turned so quickly into a devastating conflagration. Fear blinded Rusk and many others to the absurdity of that analogy. The result of looking back in fear was a war that raged out of control, killed millions of Vietnamese and tens of thousands of Americans, and wreaked vast destruction on life and property in Vietnam and in America. It is clear that one impetus for Mr. Bush's launching a war on Iraq was his fear of terrorist acts being committed against the United States again. With casualties in Iraq reliably estimated at well over 100,000, a high percentage of those non-combatants, it is a reasonable question to ask whether fear has not driven us into an unnecessarily bloody corner. Of course, we must know our history, but, contrary to Santayana's famous warning, history does not repeat itself. Those who live in fear that it will are as helpless before the tides of time as those who pay no attention to history at all. It is important to learn lessons from history, but lessons must not become dogmas or we lose the ability to see the differences between our time and earlier times. It is always the differences that matter most! The same thing is true in personal relationships. We must not enter a new relationship fearful of the past, or the new one is as doomed as the old one was. Hank Williams sang, "Another love before my time made your heart sad and blue. And so, my dear, I'm paying now for things I didn't do." People are different. We must honor those differences so that we can go forward, live for today and tomorrow, and not be trapped in yesterday. Situations are different. We must recognize those differences if we are to make our way in the present and into the future. Don't look back in fear! Secondly, looking back can enmesh us in the past, trap us in an earlier age or an earlier self. Orpheus looked back, and was locked for a lifetime in his loneliness. Lot's wife—she is never named—looked back and became a pillar of salt. We harden and are held in place when past ways, past attitudes, past relationships become more important than present or future ones. Some boys who get into trouble never transcend the old ways, the good old pals with whom it is so easy to get into trouble, the old excitements at doing something nasty, the old feelings of relief at letting the anger and frustration inside come boiling out in acts of violence. Such males, and perhaps some females as well, are locked in their anti-social past. Habits, all the way up to addictions, can be like this. Alcohol, drugs, sex, overeating and not eating healthily, laziness, never completing a task or staying in a job or a relationship for very long, these and tens of ways in which we bind ourselves to the past can be destructive of a good life. Those recovering from alcohol addiction recognize that, even though they do not drink, alcohol is still their addiction. Alcohol is no problem for me, but coffee is. When I drank coffee, I drank too much, 8-10 mugs a day. I deceived myself for a while by pretending such consumption did not matter, but it did. I tried to cut back, and failed. So I quit. I had my last cup of coffee at 9:10 a.m. on Saturday, July 6, 1985, at Lake Geneva Summer Assembly. I have wanted a cup of coffee every day since then. I suppose I will go on wanting coffee until I die. I am not going to have any, at least not today. That is all I ask, that today I not have any coffee. My addiction to coffee was shared with my mother and her mother. My mother conquered it and lived her last 60 years without drinking any. My grandmother reveled in her daily enjoyment of 14 cups of Lebanese coffee, thick as mud and potent enough to wake the dead! In later life, as much as anything Nana lived for her coffee, the past dictating her daily rituals. The past can also hold us in thrall to a love affair from which we never fully recover. John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote of "Yesterday, All my troubles seemed so far away, Now it looks as though they're here to stay— Oh I believe in Yesterday." I know a man who "believes in Yesterday." He fell in love at the age of 12, and for a while she returned his love. They were two happy youngsters. Then something, I do not know what, happened, and she moved out of the relationship while he could never leave it. He never again fell in love. He never married. He only had "sex partners," never "lovers." There is a deep core of sadness in the man, locked in the embrace of a 12 year old girl who has not existed for many decades. We must be careful not to let old ways that deserve to be cast aside continue into the present and the future. We must take the opportunities that come to chart new paths, begin again, re-invent ourselves. Habits die hard, addictions with even more difficulty, and lost love from which we never recover can choke off possibilities for meaningful living. We must be careful not to look back and get trapped in the past. Thirdly, it is unwise to look back with regret. To some extent, we cannot help but rue our mistakes, particularly those for which we or others have paid a high price. Looking back with an incessant sense of guilt, an obsessive chanting of all that we have done wrong, can only stand in the way of our ever doing anything right in the future. One commentator on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice wrote that "in all the days after…(Eurydice vanished forever from his life), Orpheus was so sad that the music he played on his lyre was heartbreaking. The creatures of the forest listened and groaned in misery, the trees withered at the sound and even the stones shed tears. Even after he was dead, Orpheus's body went on singing with…wondrous and terrible grief." Imagine! If his music could work such woe on all who heard it, what might it have been like to hear him play had he not been living in regret? Perhaps he might have done what Martin Gray was able to do. Gray was a Polish Jew whose family was murdered in the Holocaust. He came to America, still a young man, and was successful in business. After some years, he met and married Dina, with whom he had two children. They lived in the south of France, until a fire killed his wife and children. He was devastated, but, as he tells us in his autobiography (FOR THOSE I LOVED), "I am living, doing things…living for my people…I got the Dina Gray Foundation off the ground in a few months….My people are living on, my wife, my children are fighting on: what's life if not doing things for other people?" Gray refused to give way to regret, though he surely had cause to do so. Lot was more like Orpheus, or so we may infer. Nothing more is heard of him. He passes from the Biblical narrative with his passive involvement in the act arranged by his daughters to secure the future. For all we know, he had given up, content to regret his choice of land, his choice of living in the city of Sodom, his choice of living like the Sodomites, his choice of not fleeing to the hills when he was warned to but waiting until full scale destruction had nearly found him. He was, as far as we know, a ruined man. Regret can do that. The extreme example of that is found in athletes who never are able to live down a bad performance. Donnie Moore was an outstanding relief pitcher for the California Angels in the 1980's. He threw one bad pitch that cost his team the American League pennant in 1986. Three years later, unable to forget that one pitch, he took his own life. Regret can take a heavy toll if we are not able to get past it. That toll can be especially bitter if it turns into a thirst for revenge. Part of the dreadful dynamic of so many of the bitter quarrels that fill our headlines—in Northern Ireland, in Eastern Europe, in the Middle East, in southern Asia, and elsewhere—is a yearning to pay back those who have wounded us. It may have been many years, even centuries, since the evil deeds were perpetrated, but memory can be long when fueled by a desire to avenge ancient losses. We laugh at the mountain saga of the Hatfields and the McCoys, but there is no laughter between Israelis and Palestinians, between Serbs and Croats, between Russians and Chechens, between Indians and Pakistanis. On too many of our urban streets, youth gangs live for paying back acts of violence and thievery worked against them by a rival gang, sometimes by the police, and, in their minds, by a society they feel has given up on them. Donald Shriver has pointed out that the Second World War had its origins in part in acts of vengeance against Germany by the victorious allies at the close of the first of the world wars. He notes a speech in 1985 by then German president Richard von Weizsaecker, who comments with respect on "how much conquest of self the readiness for reconciliation demanded of our former enemies." In 1945, vengeance took a back seat to justice and the possibility of forgiveness. The course of western European history since then has been far more humane than in the wake of the First World War. If we are to live with some modicum of happiness, we must not endlessly dwell on past mistakes—tests failed, jobs not won, a relationship that ended, achievements that are less than we hoped for, times when we did the wrong thing for or to our children, the hundreds of ways in which we can, if we choose, make and keep ourselves miserable by focusing on the irretrievable past. Learn from the past, of course, learn especially from our failures, but better not to dwell in that past, wishing it had been different. It never will be. Paul Simon, in his wonderful little book, FIFTY-TWO SIMPLE WAYS TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE, quotes a psychologist who studied artists. He wrote of the artists finishing a particular canvass, at which point "they almost immediately lost interest…Typically they turned the finished canvass around and stacked it against a wall…They could hardly wait to start a new one." What a wonderful way to live! Focus intently on what we are doing. When we are finished, don't spend much time admiring or regretting. Get on with living. Life is short. There is no time to waste in vanity or regret, and certainly not revenge. Perhaps most dangerous of all for our well-being is looking back with nostalgia. Nostalgia is glorifying the past, editing out the traumas, the failures, the difficulties, the uncertainties, all we hated back then. It is a kind of "sentimental yearning" for a bygone era. Mary Oliver captures this mood in one of her prose poems. "Oh, yesterday, that one, we all cry out. Oh, that one! How rich and possible everything was! How ripe, ready, lavish, and filled with excitement—how hopeful we were on those summer days, under the clean, white racing clouds. Oh, yesterday! Oh, yesterday!--the glorious carefree days of childhood when we had no responsibility and others took care of us and summer days were sweet and winter days full of warm cocoa and cookies. Oh, yesterday!—the grand times of the college years when we had the freedom of an adult but little responsibility to weigh us down and we could experiment madly with sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll. Oh, yesterday!—when my body was full of youthful grace and love was always just around the corner and the possibilities were endless of the ways that life would be good and surely I was going to live forever. Otto Harbach wrote the words for Jerome Kern's tune, Yesterdays: "Yesterdays, Yesterdays, Days I knew as happy sweet sequester'd days. Olden days, Golden Days, Days of mad romance and love. Then gay youth was mine, Truth was mine, Joyous, free and flaming life forsooth was mine. Sad am I, Glad am I, For today I'm dreaming of yesterdays." How sweet it was! Michael Perry refers to this kind of selective memory as a "futile longing for irrecoverable days." We are not going to be children or youth again, and our bodies, those of us with a few years on us, are never again going to have the sleekness and energy of our younger years. Even if we did, it would not be the same. Poet Vernon Ruland reminds us that "Twice-told tales, like jokes, turn stale." In his poem, "Comeback," Ruland writes that "The persistent child in me, raring to excavate my own lost eden, checks out the old topography. But our spacious softball turf is now a pint-sized parking lot. The Regent cinema rooftop, where scaling up near air vents we eavesdropped on soundtracks, now lies dismantled.. Acting styles in those films today look clumsy, the gore and ogres only greasepaint, moods maneuvered by tomtoms, sappy woodwinds, or string tremolo." We all like to play in our own lost Eden. For me, Eden was perhaps those high school years when I could eat all I wanted without gaining a pound or hearing some doctor berate me for elevating my cholesterol or tryglicerides. Perhaps it was those wondrous days of comradeship in the military when, living in Europe, I was very well-off even on my low salary and had friendships as firm as any I have ever known. Or perhaps it was the days of early parenting when I was in a state of daily wonder at my baby daughter, changing and growing and delighting every day, every hour, the smartest little kid that ever was and the most beautiful. But only perhaps, because mostly I was miserable in high school with raging hormones and very low self-esteem, especially about girls. Only perhaps because I lived in fear in the authoritarian Army, fear that I would deck some officer or sergeant who ordered me to do some witless thing or another, and fear that I would die before I got out of the Army. Only perhaps because it is easy now to forget the desperate financial situation we were in, forget that little girl's mother walking out on her, forget my confusion about what I wanted to do with my life which led me to feel I was letting my daughter down by pursuing a doctorate when I should be working and providing better for her. We may sing, "Those were the days, my friend, we thought they'd never end, we'd sing and dance forever and a day. We'd do the things we choose. We'd fight and never lose. Those were the days, oh, yes, those were the days." but we know better. We know there really never were such days, and even if there were, they no longer exist. Today is the only time we have. Living as though the best times were in the past is a waste of the opportunities before us. Robert Browning had it right: "Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be." How much happier Orpheus and Lot and his family would have been had they been able to follow that advice! None of which is to suggest that we should ignore the past. If we try, we will soon learn that the past will not ignore us. From the genetic structure that we inherited that guides so many aspects of our lives to the cultural mores and language within which we operate to the family traditions that have shaped us, the past is always with us. It is how that past is with us that matters. When we look back, we need to do so with clear eyes and generous hearts. We do better not to look back in fear or bondage, in regret or nostalgia. We do better when we understand the restrictions the past places on us, the possibilities the past presents to us, and the lessons the past can teach us. As we go through these next seven months towards my retirement at the end of August and your selection over the next year or so of a new senior minister, let us do so with both clear eyes and generous hearts, rejoicing in what we have done together, understanding and pledging to find ways to overcome our mistakes, and continuing to love and challenge each other so that we might grow and prosper in the time we have left with one another. I cannot think of a better way to spend these months than that. Copyright 2005, Kenneth W. Phifer. All Rights Reserved 11