Doing Well Enough

The First Parish in Bedford Unitarian Universalist

75 The Great Road, Bedford, Massachusetts 01730 On the Common

781-275-7994

We have many forms of surplus in our lives: material goods, opportunities, information. While these surpluses can relieve our anxieties about scarcity, they often create a new anxiety: That we will be blamed for letting it all go to waste. Usually, we think of the challenges of dealing well with each form of surplus separately, but some challenges are common. What does our culture teach us about dealing with surplus? Where are its teachings failing to keep up with a rapidly-changing world? How can we deal better with unbounded opportunities? with the Internet? And what about that box of old photos I keep saying I should do something with?

We light this chalice to remind ourselves of the light of truth, the warmth of community, and the spark of Divinity that resides in each of us.

Our opening words are from Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, by David Brooks:

"The biggest tension … is between worldly success and inner virtue. How do you move ahead in life without letting ambition wither your soul? How do you accumulate the resources you need to do the things you want without becoming a slave to material things? How do you build a comfortable and stable life for your family without getting bogged down in stultifying routine? How do you live at the top of society without becoming an insufferable snob?"These are questions we face individually, but our answers are shaped by our community experience. Our opening hymn is Number 349, "We Gather Together".

Our reading is from The Saturated Self by Kenneth Gergen. This book explores the problems resulting from what he calls “social saturation”: our exposure to - and our natural wish to identify with - an ever-increasing number of fellow humans. Gergen describes a condition he calls "multiphrenia", the splitting of the individual psyche into many competing parts that results from social saturation. He gives the following example of multiphrenia:

"It is a sunny Saturday morning and he finishes breakfast in high spirits. It is a rare day in which he is free to do as he pleases. With relish he contemplates his options. The back door needs fixing, which calls for a trip to the hardware store. This would allow for a much-needed haircut; and while in town he could get a birthday card for his brother, leave off his shoes for repair, and pick up shirts at the cleaners. But, he ponders, he really should get some exercise; is there time for jogging in the afternoon? This reminds him of a championship game he wanted to see at the same time. To be taken more seriously was his ex-wife's repeated request for a luncheon talk. And shouldn't he also settle his vacation plans before all the best locations are taken? Slowly his optimism gives way to a sense of defeat. The free day has become a chaos of competing opportunities and necessities."

Sound familiar? Gergen goes on to describe the sources and costs of this multiphrenia, this splitting of the self into competing parts. Here's a short excerpt:

"… each person, passion, or potential incorporated into oneself exacts a penalty … Through continued interchange, one acquires, for example, a yen for Thai cooking, the desire for retirement security, or an investment in wildlife preservations. Through others one comes to value whole-grain breads, novels from Chile, or community politics. Yet as Buddhists have long been aware, to desire is simultaneously to become a slave of the desirable. … Each new desire places its demands and reduces one's liberties."

We're three days past Thanksgiving, and I'm keenly aware of vast surplus in my life. The original Thanksgiving celebrated the bounty of harvest, a temporary excess that would undoubtedly be used up by the next harvest. But in more and more areas of my life, I find myself dealing with more than just a temporary bounty. Instead, I’m looking at surpluses that I may never get around to using up.

I have access to more food than I can eat, more clothes than I can wear, more opportunities than I can take advantage of, more information than I can absorb. I work in computer security - no end of interesting problems there. Doug and I have a backlog of, oh, maybe a hundred hours of TV shows we've taped – with more coming each week. New Web sites appear daily, with poetry and commentary and designs for beadwork. Did I mention that I own a vast number of beads, and books of designs, and finished pieces? [Rattle necklaces] And then there's what I've inherited: knickknacks and photos and letters from my parents and grandparents.

Like the fellow in the reading, my gratitude can slip into dismay and defeat. Figuring out what to do with what I can't use has become a demanding job.

I would guess that many of you also have access to surpluses of one form or another - too much stuff, too many opportunities, too much information, too many people serving as role models (the phenomenon Gergen calls "social saturation"). These different forms of surplus each pose their own unique challenges, but this morning I’d like to look at them as one big challenge. I'll examine the responses our culture teaches us to surplus in general, responses we apply whether the surplus is one of material, opportunities, or information.

Judging these responses to be good or bad often misses the point. I would rather apply the Buddhist notions of “skillful” responses and “clumsy” responses. I see more clumsy responses to surplus in my own behavior, and in behaviors I see around me, than skillful ones. I want to explore why this is so. And then I want to describe some possibilities for more skillful responses to surplus in our lives.

Consider creativity: My beadwork has taught me that an obvious surplus of materials lets me be more playful than if I have just enough to allow for a couple of mistakes. Surplus banishes the fear of error that stifles creativity.

Generosity: For the last several years, Doug and I have gone to the Burning Man Festival - an alternative and totally non-commercial arts festival on the alkali flats of Nevada. Onto that empty and hostile landscape, thousands of participants pour time, energy, creativity, and material resources. And for a few days, the desert blooms with performance, painting, sculpture. It comes alive with the creative expressions of people who don't sell themselves as artists, but who have thought of something they want to do or to make, of something they want to share with this temporary community.

One way of looking at Burning Man is as an example of what sociologist Lewis Hyde calls a “gift culture” – a culture where your status is measured not by how much you consume, but by how much you give away. The Web is a gift culture; the success of a web site is measured by how many people have visited it. The Open Source Software movement is a gift culture. In a gift culture, generosity is the distinguishing trait of the superior person.

Tolerance: Fear of scarcity magnifies every kind of intolerance. Surplus dissolves that fear. If I'm confident that there are more than enough brownies on the buffet table, I won't glower at the people taking seconds before I’ve had firsts. Theologically, the experience of unbounded and unconditional grace can wash away intolerance: we need not compete to be God's favorite.

The skillful responses to surplus have their downsides: Creativity can be wasteful, gifts can come with strings attached, tolerance can mask a lack of moral guidance. But there are also downright unskillful responses to surplus: misplaced moralizing (ah, the gluttony of Thanksgiving dinner!), denial and anxiety (evidenced by hoarding), and escalating standards. Let me say a little about why I think these are unskillful responses.

Misplaced moralizing: We evolved, as a species and as a culture, assuming certain things – like food and wealth and opportunity – will be scarce, and others – like time and energy and attention – will be in more-than-adequate supply. I was raised to react to waste, especially of food, as bad, as evidence of moral failing. How many times did I hear: "Finish everything on your plate; there are people starving in Africa."

The language of sin and virtue is most obvious around food (pick up any women's magazine if you want some examples), but we can see attempts to apply moral standards to other forms of surplus. Unfortunately, those standards usually assume a temporary bounty that needs to be conserved, not a lasting surplus. In human culture, long-term surpluses of material resources, information, and opportunities are quite new. We still haven’t developed appropriate moral standards.

For example, I hear about how bad it is (that moral language again) that people spend so much time on-line, not interacting with real live human beings. But the Internet is very new in our experience; we're still figuring out how to use it, how much is enough. Watch a child learn a new skill; watch all the failed attempts, variations, and repetitions. Our culture is an infant with respect to many new technologies; It's premature to condemn either the person who spends 70 hours a week on-line or the person who won't go near a computer. They're each part of our culture's larger learning process. Our culture is acquiring experience that will lead to developing customs - mores. Mores, together with ethical principles, form the basis for morality. Until enough experience with surplus exists, moral standards are ill-founded.

Denial and anxiety: I'm not going to dwell on these, just give a couple of examples. I'm not in information overload - my boss fields lots more e-mail than I do. How can I be sure we have enough money, when we might spend 30 years in a nursing home?

Escalating standards: Let's take a step back into history. In his book The Embarrassment of Riches, Simon Schama wrote about the Dutch Republic during the Seventeenth Century. At that time, Dutch society was facing problems similar to our own: how to preserve moral character in the presence of potentially corrupting abundance. Speaking of the burgher class whose norms shaped Dutch culture, Schama says:

"…if any one obsession linked together their several concerns … [it] was the moral ambiguity of good fortune."He describes how norms of public and private behavior, of consumption and accumulation, evolved to reconcile wealth and good character.Those norms included increasingly higher standards, for example standards of cleanliness.

What I find interesting about The Embarrassment of Riches is the parallel we can draw between the Dutch burghers of the Seventeenth Century and today's educated elite, which author David Brooks calls bourgeois bohemians - or Bobos for short. He says: "These are the highly educated folk who have one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another foot in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldly success."

Brooks confesses that he is a Bobo himself, and so, I suspect, are most of us. As we heard in the Opening Words, Brooks diagnoses the challenge of our time and class as "the tension … between worldly success and inner virtue ". While the answer is a work in progress, one response is to set higher standards – not because the higher standards serve any purpose, but just because we can. The Dutch housewives set higher standards of cleanliness; our standards tend to focus on achievement and consumption. Brooks presents a series of "consumption rules" which are both tongue-in-cheek and scathing: he has us pegged. Here's one example:

"Rule 2. It is perfectly acceptable to spend lots of money on anything that is of 'professional quality', even if it has nothing to do with your profession.Very few of us are actually professional sherpas, leading parties up Mount Everest, but that doesn't mean an expedition-weight three-layer Gore-Tex Alpenglow reinforced Marmot Thunderlight jacket is not a reasonable purchase."

Brooks goes on, but you get the idea: High standards are not automatically a sign of moral superiority. Sometimes high standards serve only to defuse our anxieties about surplus by creating artificial ways to use it up. This is not a skillful response.But it's the way our culture is going, and if we don't pay attention we'll adopt it automatically. One benefit of being in community is that we can support one another in not going with the cultural flow.

One other unskillful response to surplus I wanted to mention is the sense of obligation to things - to material objects, and to opportunities. As Emerson wrote: "Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind." Obviously, the desire to "do right" by our gifts, not to waste them, is not all bad. But this desire can mask unconscious superstitious thinking. The smart-aleck kids who respond to the "people are starving" line with "well, wrap this up and send it to them" have good point: My "doing right" by my gifts will not automatically cause others to receive the same gifts.

My expectations of myself often escalate unconsciously, reflecting my exposure to other people's achievements. I leap from "I could make a beaded pouch" to "It would be nice if I made something out of this design book" to "I should design something on my own" to "I will be disappointed in myself if I don’t submit a piece to next year's Beadwork competition". But nowhere in that process is there a reality check. There is no point where I analyze where the time and energy is going to come from, or what I won't be able to do if I put 400 hours into a beading project. Our cultural lore should inject that reality check, but our lore comes from an era when time and energy were not the controlling factors. Unrealistic expectations, and the chronic pain of their frustration, result.

I've already suggested some ways we could become more skillful in our response to surplus. We can recognize that our culture is a work in progress; we can hold back from moralizing about how people handle surplus.

Doug and I face this problem very concretely when we buy holiday gifts for children who have far more stuff than we ever did. If we expect them to react to our gifts the way we would have, we're in for disappointment. We could get curmudgeonly about this - "the kids these days, they don't know how it was" - but the truth is that "the adults these days, we don't know how it is." Once we recognize that these lucky kids are working on the problem of how to deal gracefully with more gifts than they can pay attention to, we can watch the feeding frenzy of the holidays without being personally offended that our gifts aren't getting the attention we put into choosing them.

Another skillful way of dealing with surplus requires us to act in community. Maybe a surplus can benefit those who need it, if we only work together. For example, America's Second Harvest makes the connections between surplus food, excess transportation capacity, and people who can distribute food to the hungry. The mantra of the recycling movement - "Reduce, recycle, reuse" - only really works on a community level. I will never get around to turning my plastic bottles into something useful, but I can take the bottles to the recycling center. The challenge of acting in community is that I have to relinquish control. I can offer surplus ideas of interesting problems to my colleagues at work, but I can't control what they'll do with those ideas.

I mentioned denial and anxiety. These responses can be defused by observation and self-examination, by asking "what am I afraid of?" Maybe I'm afraid of being condemned as wasteful. Maybe I'm afraid of inviting bad luck. Better I should face those demons directly than project them into my excess stuff.

I mentioned escalating standards and unrealistic expectations. A more skillful response frequently means lowering expectations. But if my expectations are based on hidden assumptions of unlimited time and energy, I will be disappointed. Better for me to take responsibility for making honest assessments of what's possible. Better for me to release myself from foolish obligations, and to encourage others to do the same.

Better for me to forgive myself for seeing more opportunities than I can take advantage of.

But sometimes release and forgiveness seem really hard. This brings me back to those boxes of photos and memorabilia, and to the expectation that someday I'll do something with them - organize, document, put in archive-quality scrapbooks. Realistically, I don't think I'll ever get around to that; I'd rather be beading. But my failure to do something with those photos is much harder to forgive than my failure to use up all my beads. Why?

I've come to think that there's something to that so-called "primitive" belief that a photo captures one's soul. Just as the consciousness of divinity pervades all of creation, so that each of us contains a spark of the Divine, just so do we infuse sparks of our own souls into objects, memories, and goals. So tossing that old correspondence in the recycle bin, giving those objects to the Rummage Sale, feels like denying and devaluing those bits of soul.

My grandmother kept every letter and card she ever got. In the last few years of her life, she started going through the bags of correspondence from her basement, looking at everything and slowly throwing things out. I think that she was reclaiming those soul-sparks, retrieving them from the pieces of paper and bringing them back into herself. She fretted constantly about what would happen to the bags she hadn't gotten to when she died. (She fretted constantly about a lot of things.) Her executors threw them away. And I can't fault them. She was the only person who could reclaim anything from those cards and letters. The spiritual says we’ve got to cross that lonesome valley by ourselves. "Ain't nobody else can cross it for you; you've got to cross it for yourself."

And the same thing is true of redeeming sparks of one's soul, calling them back from the objects and events, memories and dreams, in which we put them. We can't pass that task on.

That redemption can take many forms. Last year Doug and I described our rollback process; Carlos Castaneda describes the "recapitulation" practice. These are both techniques for retrieving sparks of our souls from events and memories. My grandmother handled pieces of paper. Shamanic practicioners lead their clients in soul retrieval journeys. We can create performances, works of art, or rituals to evoke the experiences, remember the people, envision the objects into which we cast our souls, and reclaim those bits of ourselves we left behind.

And that redemption is the final piece of my surplus puzzle. Yes, we can respond to surplus with gratitude, generosity, creativity, tolerance. We can also moralize against it, deny it, or exhaust it by raising our standards. Or we can accept the challenge of learning to deal skillfully with surplus. We can take responsibility for setting our own standards. We can act in community to work more effectively. We can release ourselves from unrealistic expectations, from obligation to things. And we can redeem what we've infused into the bounty of events and material we've been given; we can play our part in saving our souls.

Our closing words are from Miraculous Living, by Rabbi Shoni Labowitz. She writes:

"In selfless service, you release the hidden sparks imprisoned in the [shells] of the world. Redeeming or releasing the holy Godsparks is like lighting candles. There are so many candles to be lit. … Yet the selfless one realizes that in the lighting of just one candle, a series has begun, whereby one candle will light another, and yet another, and so on. … Your task is not to count the candles, only to release the sparks."