HOPE IN A BLEAK TIME Kenneth W. Phifer Sermon delivered 4/20/04 William Butler Yeats wrote these bleak lines nearly a century ago: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight; somewhere in the sands of the desert, A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; But now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? Like Yeats at the dawn of the 20th century, his country and the world filled with repression, rebellion, and blood, we wonder at the dawn of the 21st century "what rough beast" is slouching "towards Bethlehem to be born." Terrorism and war have become daily realities, routine parts of our news, our travel, our fears. The United Nations, organized "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war" has been contemptuously ignored by the United States in its single-minded pursuit of an ideology of world empire. The economy is at best fragile with unemployment ravaging the lives of millions, a decline in the value of assets decimating more millions, and health costs threatening to add to the 40+ million people without insurance. Greed is rampant with CEO's making millions while demanding their workers take cuts and firing others, and corporate executives in too great numbers being rewarded for destroying their companies and the lives of their employees and the investors who trusted in their integrity. The ranks of the fundamentalists in every religion continue to grow, bringing with that growth an increase in the hatred and contempt for other religions. American cultural and economic reach has helped to homogenize and commercialize the world while trampling on the values of other cultures. A recent survey of an organization with more than 500 employees revealed that 29 of them had been accused of spousal abuse, seven had been arrested for fraud, 10 had been accused of writing bad checks, three had served prison time for assault, eight had been arrested for shoplifting, 117 had directly or indirectly bankrupted at least two businesses, 14 had been arrested on drug-related charges, 84 had been arrested for drunk driving within the past year, and 21 are currently defendants in lawsuits. What makes us pause before these numbers is that the organization surveyed was the United States Congress! Add to this the personal troubles that fill our lives: the deaths and grievous illnesses of those we love, the struggles to make a small business work, the fears for loved ones serving in far-off places where danger lurks, and the hosts of lesser difficulties that consume our time and energy and leave us drained and bereft. We rightly ask "what rough beast" is slouching "towards Bethlehem to be born?" We rightly wonder what defeats and disappointments and disasters await us? We rightly seek some measure of hope in such bleak times. We need hope if we are to live. When we abandon hope, we turn to one or more of the multitude of ways by which we can diminish life or keep ourselves distracted from it: one of the many drugs legal and illegal that are available to us, a life committed to pleasure and avoidance of pain, a life buried in the particulars of existence so that there is no time to think or reflect or feel anything but getting through this moment. When we lose hope, we lose our interest in life, our excitement in life, our enthusiasm and joy in being alive. We need hope, the sense that however things turn out, all will be well. Hope is not about outcomes, about assuming that all our desires will be fulfilled. That won't happen. Hope is not about believing the impossible or thinking that some figure of authority will save us. Hope is that which enables us to sustain the dark and difficult times in the faith that momentary losses cannot finally overwhelm the deeper currents of life in which we trust. That trust, grounded in a divine or natural or human source, enables us to cope no matter what happens. Hope is being able always to say that ultimately all will be well. Where can we find hope today? Let me offer for your consideration four sources to which I turn for hope. First of all, there is nature itself. Nature is our first home. Whatever else we are, we are natural, material, bodily creatures. Surely our bodies betray us, as everyone knows who has been grievously ill or who has reached a certain age. But they are also remarkably trustworthy for at least a part of our lives. For almost everyone, breathing just happens. When we focus on breathing, as many meditation techniques call upon us to do, we become aware of the wonder of the process. Mostly, though, we just breathe and get on with our lives. Isn't that great! We can make music by singing, by humming, by playing an instrument. We can dance and feel the energy of the universe as we swirl about to practiced steps or to our own wild improvisations. We can listen to great musicians play complex and beautiful pieces that make us tingle with joy and appreciation. We can use our bodies to bring forth life. What greater possible source of hope is there than a baby? Our bodies are a source of hope, part of the magnificent mystery of nature. Pema Chodron points to another element of hope in nature. "Things falling apart," she writes, "is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. (emphasis added—KWP) The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy." Nature has cycles. Human life, being natural, has cycles. There are ups. There are downs. There are good times. There are bad times. "It's just like that." The ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone bears this message. You will remember that Persephone is taken to the underworld by Hades, leaving her mother, Demeter, wild with grief. She removes the fertility from the earth, seeking thereby to regain her daughter. Eventually she does, but for only six months of the year. During that time, the earth will bloom and blossom. So in this season we can watch the trees beginning to bud and listen to the birds chirping up a storm even in foul weather, and smell the first flowers as they appear and feel the warmth in the air as spring comes The story of Demeter and Persephine is a nature myth, to be sure, but it is also about the cycles of human life. We too have moments of cold and darkness that shrivel our souls. We too have times of gladness when we rejoice at being alive. Nature offers us hope by reminding us of the wonder of our bodies and all that they enable us to do. Nature offers us hope by reminding us of the cycles of life. "It's just like that." A second source of hope is alluded to on the cover of your order of service. As you know, Bill Wasserman, the cartoonist, has borrowed the famous painting by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel where the Creator is reaching out to touch the hand of the first man, Adam. In Wasserman's version, the divine hand contains a baseball and God is saying, "And this is to get you through the tough times." I recognize that some of you are not baseball fans. I hope that you will be able to translate my remarks to whatever activity holds the place in your life that baseball does in mine. Maybe it is bridge, as it was for our beloved Elsie Sinclair. Maybe it is knitting, as I see many of you doing. Chess. Mountain climbing. Cooking. Whatever it is that engages you beyond your family and your livelihood, that is what I am talking about as a source of hope. For me, baseball has been important since I was a very little boy. Time and again I have turned to baseball to playing it when I was young and thought I knew how to play it, to listening to it on the radio and later and with vast disappointment to watching it on television, to going to games of any kind at any level, to reading about it as I am always doing, currently a book called THE FAITH OF 50 MILLION: BASEBALL, RELIGION, AND AMERICAN CULTURE; I have turned to baseball for solace and inspiration. I am not talking about major league baseball alone, though I certainly enjoy watching the remarkable athletes at that level play the game. I am talking about the little kids that a friend of mine coaches, including her son and daughter, as they learn what the game is and how to play it. I am talking about watching my 10 and 13 year old grandchildren over the past nine years as they have developed skills and pitched and batted and fielded and run with an increasing measure of competence. I am talking about the games that some UU ministers go to at General Assembly, usually to see a minor league team but this year to watch the Boston Red Sox play the Detroit Tigers in Fenway Park. I am talking about the game of baseball, a game of trying to get home, which all of us are always trying to do; a game of trying to be safe, which we prefer to be most of the time; a game of sacrificing, which in our better moments we do; a game of failure in which we are considered good if we get a hit three times out of 10. Perhaps most important of all for me is something Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York wrote about the game: "The idea of coming together We're still not good at that in this country. In moments of crisis we're magnificent at it At those moments we understand community. helping one another. In baseball, you do that all the time. You can't win it alone. You need all nine people helping one another. I love the idea of the bunt. I love the idea of the sacrifice. Giving yourself up for the good of the whole. You find your individual fulfillment in the success of the community. The Bible tried to teach you that and didn't teach you. Baseball did." Baseball salutes the individual but does so within community. That is cause for hope because humanity will survive only if we learn that lesson and live it fully. Whatever the passion that comes third in your life to your family and your work, may you find in it as I find in baseball a source of hope. Another thing that brings hope into my life is reading, specifically reading poetry. This realization came to me when I was meditating on the third chapter of Thoreau's WALDEN, titled "Reading." I thought of the many kinds of reading that I do and it quickly became clear to me that poetry was that which lifted my soul more than any other kind of reading. The reason for this, I think, is that poetry is almost always very well edited, whereas far too much prose depends not on human review but machine review and tends, in my experience, often to be extremely long-winded and inept at expressing the author's message. Let me express this another way, using the poet Virginia Scott Miner's words. Mrs. Miner (who was one of my English teachers in high school and who published more than 2600 poems) wrote that "Poems should be read in the morning when every sense is fresh when that first cup of coffee sings in the veins" She also said that "A poem is what you cut out when you've read all the distinguished prose. Poems keep." And finally, "Poetry is the hard way to say things right so they sound easy." Poetry lifts the spirits, soothes the ruffled mind, inspires the downcast heart with just the right carefully chosen word or phrase. Vernon Ruland, a Jesuit priest and long-time friend, writes in a recent collection of his poetry: "Most treacherous crashdive of all, the comedown from ideal to real. Deathtraps of astral withdrawal. Or the sad slapdash plunge into bitterness. Between inertia and the dream lies a poised tensile grace." Ogden Nash has long been a favorite for his pithy short poems and his witty way of bending words to fit his purposes. "God in His wisdom made the fly and then forgot to tell us why." "Many an infant that screams like a calliope Could be soothed by a little attention to its diope." "Candy Is dandy But liquor is quicker." And these words from the Polish Nobelist, Czeslaw Miloscz: "The same can be said of beauty. It should not exist. There is not only no reason for it, but an argument against. Yet undoubtedly it is, and is different from ugliness. Though the good is weak, beauty is very strong. Nonbeing sprawls, everywhere it turns into ash whole expanses of being. It masquerades in shapes and colors that imitate existence And no one would know it, if they did not know that it was ugly. And when people cease to believe that there is good and evil Only beauty will call to them and save them So that they still know how to say: this is true and that is false." Poetry can remind us of beauty and make us laugh and teach us of the inevitable chasm between the ideal and the real without causing us to lose sight of the dream. Poetry is a source of hope. "Poems keep." So does goodness. Every act of decency, kindness, and mercy, every expression of love is a source of hope for a frightened humanity. Vaclav Havel endured years of oppression and imprisonment and censorship only to be chosen to lead his Czech people in their freedom when the Iron Curtain was pulled down. He certainly knows about bleak times. Havel writes of "hope against all hopelessness." He says that such hope begins with a faith in elementary goodness. Tomonubu Imamichi, a professor of philosophy at Tokyo University, believes that hope grows out of an understanding of the unity of truth, beauty and goodness. Imamichi tells us that the "condition of human life is always a wounded one" and that our responsibility is "to ameliorate a given wounded object or condition. It requires giving primacy to practical participation in the tiny daily and private wounds" of life. To give that kind of attention to the sufferings of this world is goodness and in goodness there is beauty and the deepest truth of our human condition. To know that truth and beauty and goodness are a unity and that we can practice such things and that others do is a source of hope in a bleak time. There is goodness and thus hope in an e-mail transmission from a person in Saudi Arabia that appeared in the liberal Jewish magazine TIKKUN, stating that "among the Jewish people there are as many who are ethically sensitive and fair-minded as any community. I wish that the majority of Arabs become aware that voices of racists and extremists among Jews represent but a minority of misguided groups. Let people of good will and reason reach out toward each other." The work of an organization called Friends In Deed is the work of goodness. Because I donated some money from my Discretionary Account through this organization to help buy presents for a child whose mother was sick and penniless, I received a copy of the letter that mother sent to the organization to say thank you. She said that "the birthday presents were so appreciated and truly it made her 13th birthday special. You have treated me so wonderfully and respectfully. As a sick person who has lost everything in the material world that treatment means so much." A desperate woman can bring joy to her child and keep hope alive because of this splendid organization that tries to help people in trouble. Not long ago I read a sermon written by a friend of mine. It tells of a recent journey he took to Europe to visit places where his father lived in the 1930's when he was fleeing the Nazis. Returning to this country, my friend contacted his brother, who had lived through that period with their father. When the father had been forced to leave the continent to save his life, he arranged for the brother to be sent to a British boarding school while he made his way as best he could to other countries and eventually to the United States. They were reunited after the war and soon thereafter my friend was born. At that boarding school for German children fleeing the Nazis, a girl three years older than this frightened boy took him under her wing and cared for him. She was very fondly and gratefully remembered. Through the Internet, that boy's daughter began to correspond with that girl's son. A year ago, that son came to visit the boy his mother had watched over with loving attention. They had a wonderful conversation that reached its climax when the man told the brother that he worked at Brown University. The brother boasted that he had a niece there, my friend's daughter. He spoke her name and asked if by any chance the man knew her. Not only did he know her, he had been her advisor for four years, helping her with her interest in the space program, a vital part of her college life. My friend then writes "On one level we can dismiss this coincidence by saying it's a small world. But I think it speaks to the unfinished story of kindness and generous hearts. That we have no idea what ultimately happens to the stranger to whom we might provide shelter, or what happens to the person whom we try to comfort or offer a piece of ourselves. Kindness is not simply unleashed into a void; it lives on, and usually we don't hear how the story continues how an act of kindness impacts the fate of another and how they resume their lives because of it. But when we are privileged, in that rare instance, to discover how kindness weaves its magic to succeeding generations, how kindness develops a life of its own, we see the ties of human connection more closely linked than we might otherwise suspect And I can only say, 'Isn't this splendid and magical and so very real, too. Goodness begets goodness and evil begets evil. And it all seems to make sense even though we don't understand it.'" We have the opportunity in this congregation to reach out to those in need with acts of kindness. We heard earlier this morning about the work of Habitat for Humanity in which we can all participate in one way or another, and I hope that we all shall do so. There is the wonderful work of the Interfaith Hospitality Network to give assistance to homeless families. Our next week for helping is the first full week of May, so watch for information in the newsletter and the Sunday printed announcements. The good these and other church programs do is incalculable. Hope grows out of goodness. I know times are hard for many people, but times have been hard before. It is hope that helps us to live with hard times. It is hope that helps us to realize that the deepest meaning and the deepest strength and the deepest joy in life come from our appreciation of and commitment to enduring values. Nature, baseball, poetry, and goodness are among the enduring values in my life. May these and other sources of hope help each person to find and to share strength and joy and meaning in great abundance. Copyright 2003 Kenneth W. Phifer All Rights Reserved