TO SAVE OR TO SAVOR A sermon by Kenneth W. Phifer, Delivered at First UU Church, Ann Arbor, MI, April 17, 2005 Life is full of joy. The smile on a loved one's face. The taste of good food well prepared. The majesty of a mountain and the murmur of a rippling stream in a forest. A play well performed and a game well played, delightful to both participants and observers. The sound of Kid Ory's trombone and Bach's keyboard concertos. Comfortable clothes and clothes that look really sharp, especially when they are the same clothes. An engrossing story, a well-written essay, being well after being sick, a paycheck. A hug, a kiss, laughter! Life is full of joy. Joy is real but it is also vulnerable. The smile can become a grimace of pain. Food can make us ill. We can fall from the mountain peak and drown in the stream. A critic's tongue can spoil our pleasure in the play and games can become deadly competitions. My music may grate in your ears. Some people can afford to wear only rags. We can become lost in our stories and forget our duties. Words can sting us viciously. We get well, but then get sick again. Hugs and kisses can hide betrayal. Laughter can be mocking and cruel. Judith Smith-Valley rightly spoke of the "fragile joy of life." Several years ago I attended the Installation Service for a colleague in another state. After the service, we gathered in his home to celebrate this grand occasion. At some point during the party by candlelight-a storm had knocked out the power-we noticed the absence of our hosts' golden-haired kitten. When we left the cold house for the night, we assumed the kitten was somewhere outside in the snow. The next day at the airport, I was getting my luggage out of the back seat when I heard my colleague gasp as she opened the trunk to get her luggage. There, tucked away in her suitcase, its head poking through a tiny hole it had made in the luggage was the golden-haired kitten! Apparently when Nina was packing the night before by the light of a single candle, the kitten had tucked itself into her suitcase to get warm after its romp through the snow. Nina put the suitcase into the trunk of her rental car and carried only a small night-case with her into the home where she spent the night. That kitten was a source of great delight to its owners and fun for those of us who got to hold the tiny, furry creature in our hands. But we almost lost him! The joy was fragile. Had that suitcase been loaded onto the plane, that kitten would not have survived the three-hour trip in the luggage hold. Joy is fragile, temporary, uncertain. We must therefore not just take delight in it, but also be prepared to protect it. Joys and sorrows, laughter and tears, this is the human struggle every day. E.B. White once wrote of the dilemma that faces us all. "If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning, torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. That makes it hard to plan the day." Surely we should do both, save and savor the world. The world certainly needs saving. Indeed, that is the impetus for much of the human enterprise. We want to be rescued from tedium, from pain, from death, from despair. So many of the inventions that have filled our world across the centuries have been intended to relieve us of hard, boring work. Perhaps the outcome has not been all that we might have wished. Factory work is not necessarily any more interesting than pushing a plow. Working at a computer can be just as dull and frustrating as pounding a manual typewriter or writing in dusty old account books. But the clear motivation for so many of our creations has been to make the burdens of life less onerous and more interesting. We have far more freedom to use our time today than was true 100 years ago and for all the centuries before that. In earlier times the hard work of earning a living, growing and fixing food, cleaning one's living space, and tending the sick filled almost all the available hours and wore people out at much earlier ages than is true today. We want to be saved from tedium. Look at any home medicine cabinet. See how much of our treasury we spend to hold pain at bay. The pharmaceutical industry is one of the nation's largest and most profitable. Drugs are available for every manner of physical or mental distress. We want very much to be liberated from our headaches, our backaches, our upset stomachs, our aching joints, our depressions, and our manic times. We want to be saved from the things that make us hurt. The remarkable advances of medical science, from simple preventive measures like vaccinations to more complex procedures like organ transplants, have added decades to our lives, some 30 years on average in the past century. We would like to add more. We want to hold death off until we are simply too tired or suffer too much to care. We want to be saved from death as long as we can be. People who flood counselor's offices, who seek relief in happy-drugs, and people who simply quit on life are all trying to cope with the threat of meaninglessness. We want life to matter. We want our lives to have some purpose. We reach out for ways to resist the lure of despair. Religion is one of the most important ways which humanity has devised to save us from despair. Every religion offers its adherents some form of salvation. Buddhists call it Enlightenment. Jews speak of redemption. Shintos talk of bringing kami, the divine, into daily life. Hindus talk of reincarnation as the path out of the burdens of existence. Religions speak of salvation because there is a great deal of misery and suffering in the world. Differently envisioned by each religion, salvation is always a way to relieve or transcend or learn how to live in gladness with the suffering. This is the path to meaning. Religion, humanistic or theistic, this-worldly or other-worldly, begins in the yearning to be saved and to see others saved as well. In Catholic services there is a moment when people greet each other, usually with the words, "The peace of Christ be with you." A colleague in attendance at a Mass heard quite different words, "May the unrest of Christ be with you." That unrest is what all the great religious teachers have given to the world. Each has tried to stir us up out of our complacency and lethargy to help a world groaning in travail. Buddha and Moses, Mohammad and Confucius, Zoroaster and Jesus, King and Gandhi and numerous others have taught us the importance of being moved by the agony of humanity and all creation, moved not so much to pity as to action. Some may act because of a conviction that acting for good is required for eternal bliss or to move up the ladder of reincarnation. Others may act for goodness just to make this world better. It does not matter so much what our beliefs are as what they inspire us to do: to withdraw into a self-centered life of private satisfaction or to act justly, loving kindness, being fair to all people, and helping to save humanity from further anguish. The religions of the world teach a uniform lesson: that salvation from despair lies in acting for all humanity. Certainly our own UU faith calls us into action to save the world. From our earliest days, we have insisted that the work of goodness must begin here and now, in this place, with this and with that and with the other person who is my neighbor. Time enough when we die to find out what is required in that life if there is one. To read our history is to see men and women endlessly working to save this world and its people from tedium and pain, from death and despair, trying to bring a measure of happiness into life: help for the mentally ill-Dorothea Dix; care for the wounded on the battlefield-Clara Barton; the abolition of slavery-Theodore Parker; interfaith dialogue-James Freeman Clark; pacifism and non-violence-William Ellery Channing and John Haynes Holmes; civil rights-Clarence Skinner and Dana McLean Greeley; woman's suffrage-Susan B. Anthony; the rights of sexual minorities-Meg Reilly. In every congregation there will be found hosts of people engaged in feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, struggling for racial justice, working for a clean environment, and so many other worthy causes. The world can be brutal, cold, and dangerous. Nature and humanity can bring woe upon countless persons in earthquakes and hurricanes, in wars and criminal attacks on our person or property. We must be stirred up by the unrest of Goodness Itself to try to save what we can, whom we can, as we can. Doing so is a way of saving ourselves. It is just as important that we spend time savoring the world. However we were washed up on this shore of existence, part of what is intended by Nature, God, or Chance is that we enjoy ourselves. Take two essential elements of our existence as examples, food and sex. We must eat, but eating is very pleasurable. Food tastes good and gives occasion for various moments of delight. W celebrate accomplishments over a meal. We propose marriage. We swap stories of the day over family supper. Table fellowship is an important human rite. For some of us, even the growth or purchasing and the preparation of food are fun. Food is meant to be pleasurable. Savor it! Our sexuality is a fundamental part of our identity and a source of great pleasure. We like to look at one another, touch one another, smell one another. In the intimacy of a trusting relationship of love, there is joy in sex beyond words. Sex is a physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, total-body experience of wondrous delight. Sex is meant to be pleasurable. Savor it! Some will certainly challenge this approach to food and sex. Food may taste good, but it can give you indigestion, hurt your ulcer, clog your arteries, and make your skin break out. Sex is a rotten bargain between men and women and an immoral scandal between members of the same sex. Women are seductive and wicked. Men are all bent on rape. Food and sex police are busy everywhere! Of course, food can cause us problems. Of course, sex can be problematic. Sometimes we eat too much or we eat the wrong foods. Sometimes we find only sadness and pain in sexual experience. Without being perfect delights, they are still highly pleasurable. Since both are so essential to our humanity, better to enjoy them. Life is sometimes rotten and stupid and awfully hurtful. We have to learn how to savor life despite its being difficult and perilous and full of imperfections. Mary Oliver says it well. "Every year the lilies are so perfect I can hardly believe their lapped light crowding the black, mid-summer ponds. Nobody could count all of them- the muskrats swimming among the pads and the grasses can reach out their muscular arms and touch only so many, they are that rife and wild. But what in this world is perfect? I bend closer and see how this one is clearly lopsided- and that one wears an orange blight- and this one is a glossy cheek half nibbled away- and that one is a slumped purse full of its own unstoppable decay. Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled- to cast aside the weight of facts, and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world. I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery. I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing- that the light is everything-that it is more than the sum of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do. "The Ponds" Sometimes we are blessed with unexpected beauty or delight that require very little on our part to appreciate: a dinner party at which every one of our favorite foods is served and every guest is pleasant and interesting, the voice of Paul Robeson pouring out of our car radio, the sudden appearance of the sun after days of dreary clouds and misty, messy weather. Sometimes it is not hard to savor life. At other times, it is very hard. When we are filled with a sense of the impurity and the imperfection of the world, when our pain is overwhelming and our suffering great, it is harder to see and hear and feel the beauty that is always there. That is what Mary Oliver is talking about with her desire to believe that "the imperfections are nothing." To savor life when all its savagery and nastiness are hugely present in our lives takes a great act of will, but it can be done. Edy White, in her aged weakness and mortality, still rejoiced at the beginning of each day to see the sun once more in all its splendor. When it was hidden by clouds, she remembered where it would be and rejoiced that it was still there, even if invisible to her. Christopher Reeve spoke of coming out of despair about the accident that left him a quadriplegic by remembering the love of his family and how much he loved them. Life was good. An unknown Quaker prisoner in the depths of an abominable English jail in the 17th century scratched into the wall of his cell these words: "Only by coming to this ghastly place could I have learned that there is loveliness even in a cockroach. It is a wonderful world God has given us." Whatever our circumstances, our lives are enriched when we savor the world despite its imperfections. We need to savor life. E.B. White saw each day as presenting him with a choice of either saving or savoring the world. Perhaps the right choice is to do both every day. We can save the world each day if we take it upon ourselves to be competent at what we do, and to be just and kind and friendly as well. We can save the world whether we sling hamburgers or sell software or drive a truck. If every person on earth really did live that way, the world truly would be saved. The place to begin is wherever we are. The time is now. We can savor the world by swinging our hips to a rhythmic tune or admiring the forsythia. We can savor the world by getting excited about a new stamp for our collection or by pausing to listen to a grandchild explain the wonders of a railroad car. Simple moments of joy add up and make a difference in how we feel and how we understand life. Sometimes saving and savoring the world are not so very different. Fred Wilhelms tells the story of his family cat, Blackie, who had a habit of coming to a member of the family looking for a lap. Once there, he would start vibrating even before he was touched. When his back was stroked or his chin scratched, when he was told what a good kitty he was, he would begin to purr almost out of control. He would look up at the owner of the lap with adoring eyes, a look of complete trust on his face, and then either settle down for a nap or leap down to go about some important feline business. Wilhelms' daughter described this experience as "Blackie needs to be purred." Wilhelms suggests that we all have a need "to be purred." We all need to be held and stroked physically and mentally. We all need to be told we are loved. We all need to have our routines of security and comfort attended to faithfully-milk and cookies for our afternoon snack, the late night glass of wine poured and shared, the gentle hug and kiss at parting from our beloved for the day's work. We all need "to be purred." Can you imagine what a world it would be if every girl, every boy, every man, every woman, every animal in our family were "to be purred" every day? For the purrer and the purree, purring is a way both to save and to savor the world. If each of us had a way to do that, we would not only protect but find great delight in "the fragile joy of life. Copyright 2005, Kenneth W. Phifer, All Rights Reserved 1