First Parish Bedford UU

A Thought to Ponder at the Beginning:

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

—Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man”

“THE WISEST THING I KNOW”

A sermon preached February 21, 2010,
at the First Parish in Bedford, Unitarian Universalist, Bedford, MA,
by the Rev. Dr. William F. Schulz

When I ran for President of the UUA between 1983 and 85, I delivered the same campaign speech, word for word, 278 times. My first wife heard it about 244 times, laughed uproariously at the same jokes each time, and then we got divorced. She did not cite mental cruelty but she could have.

For you, on the other hand, I write a new sermon each year. Since I only get one shot a year, I try to tell you something really worth knowing. I’ve mentioned before the woman who came up to me after a speech one night and said, “Dr. Schulz, I couldn’t hear a word you said tonight,” and, thinking to be modest, I said, “Well, I’m sure you’re not missing much,” and, without missing a beat, she said, “I know, that’s what everybody told me.” So this year I’m going to tell you the wisest thing I know.

The origin of this sermon was the opportunity I had last November to attend church here one Sunday and hear John preach in favor of being kind. The trouble was that for people like me who would like to be a lot kinder than we are, he didn’t tell us how to be kind. I remember a professor in theological school, one of the nastiest bullies whose classroom it was ever my misfortune to habituate, who once preached a sermon entitled “Ministry is Kindness.” That was shortly after I had heard another minister pounding his pulpit with enormous fury while he screeched at the congregation, “You must be GENTLE with each other.”

So how may we be kind if we’re not feeling kind? This is the wisest thing I know. But in order to share with you the wisest thing I know, I need first to parse for you the last two lines of the poem printed in your order of service… “And, nothing himself, beholds the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Sounds like nonsense, doesn’t it? The secret to understanding what it means is to focus on the title, “The Snow Man.”

What do you think of when you think of a snow man – or, to be more politically correct, a snow person? You think, I would guess, of children transforming an inert substance, snow, into the image of a human being. And if it is a classic snow person, it will have two eyes made of charcoal and a carrot nose and two ears made of perhaps buttons, and maybe a red stocking cap and, suddenly, inert nature will have taken the shape of a creature capable of beholding itself. The creators of the snow person have taken a dumb substance, snow, frozen water, and almost magically changed it into a creature that appears to be capable of consciousness, with eyes to see the pine-trees, a nose to sniff the wind, and ears to hear the sound of the leaves, the sound of the land.

Anything in that story seem familiar? Well, it should because it is a perfect metaphor for the evolutionary emergence of real human beings out of the dumb mud into the sensual light of consciousness with eyes to see the glory of the frost and the boughs, a nose to sniff the junipers, ears to listen to the whistling wind – a human being, capable, as the poet says, of beholding “nothing that is not there” – that’s a double negative – capable, that is to say, of beholding everything, every precious gift with which we are surrounded. Every precious gift. Everything.

But – what is the ultimate fate of a snowperson? He melts. She eventually disappears. She disappears into nothingness. In fact, she contained that ultimate fate, that nothingness, within herself from the moment she was born. So, when the snow person looks out, he, being nothing himself, sees both everything around him – nothing that is not there – but also the “nothing that is,” there, namely, the fact of his own nothingness, his own mortality, the fact that ultimately he will melt into air. Get it?

But does the fact that the snow person ultimately disappears into nothingness mean that she had no value while she lived? Of course not. She charmed the children. She embodied their creativity. She stood bold against the wind. And she beheld everything that was there, every radiant inch of it.

Perhaps now you can see the wisdom contained in Stevens’ last two lines: look, he says, look all around you with penetrating, grateful eyes; smell, he says, with a keen appreciation; listen, he says, with ears filled with rapture to everything that is and don’t fail to include the fact that you, being nothing yourself, will ultimately melt into air. Remember that and you will love this world and those who inhabit it with a desperate, aching calm, a calm of wonder, a calm of gratitude.

Pretty wise, I’d say, but not yet the wisest thing I know.

Because when we behold the world out of our charcoal eyes and carrot noses and button ears, when we truly see everything there is, we see many things that are not as pretty as pine trees crusted with snow or junipers shagged with ice. We see degradation and blight and cruelty beyond imagining, both human and natural.

And, furthermore, when we, being nothing ourselves, contemplate the fact that ultimately we and all whom we love, all that we love, will melt into air – well, that is not exactly a comforting thought. Of course it’s true that none of us will literally disappear. We will simply be transformed into another form of energy just as we were before we were born. Those of you who are Buddhist will regard this as quite sufficient but even Buddhists know that the First Noble Truth is suffering and, for myself, I’m kind of fond of consciousness

So what is the appropriate response to cruelty and suffering?

Well, of course one obvious response is anger. If we do not feel anger in the face of cruelty to ourselves or others, there is something wrong with us. Failing to acknowledge our anger leads almost inevitably to depression, to internalized anger and ultimately self-destruction. Being in touch with our anger and honoring it is not just a catchy bit of pop psychology; it can motivate us to work nobly to redeem the world of its suffering.

But anger alone is not enough. Indeed, one of the most interesting things I observed during my years as head of Amnesty International was that the angriest people in the organization were also the least effective. They were the people who, instead of addressing the anger they felt about their parents or their partners or their kids or their jobs focused their anger on the Burmese generals or the prime minister of China or the Guatemalan military or George Bush. Now don’t get me wrong – all of those people were most deserving targets of anger. But the problem was that my angry activists didn’t stop there. Their anger spilled over onto other people in the organization itself – people who they perceived to not be as angry as they were at the Burmese generals or people who had a different idea than they did about how to confront the prime minister of China or people who thought that stopping genocide in Darfur was just as important as confronting the Guatemalan military or people who believed that, despite George Bush, the United States occasionally did the right thing. Honoring our anger is important but so is focusing it on the right sources because undifferentiated anger is enormously destructive to other people and to one’s own soul.

So if anger is not enough, what is another appropriate response to cruelty and the fact that all that we love will melt into air? Another appropriate response is grief. If you feel no grief in the face of cruelty and finitude, I suspect you are out of touch with your feelings.

Now grief is a funny thing. We associate it with sadness and depression and of course it can take those characteristics. But grief is a more active phenomenon than common forms of depression. As those of you who have grieved a loved one or a lost love or a profound disappointment know, grief can feel like a thousand things at once, like you’re living with a bouncing ball inside your body: raging, unbearable pain one moment; dullness and detachment the next; lightheadedness; disbelief; compulsive behavior; unexpected moments of laughter. Drugs can often help with depression and they can get us through the worst moments of grief too but at the end of the day, there is only one cure for grief and that is mourning. None of us likes to be in mourning. Most of us resist it with all our might. We try to cut it short. We run as far away from it as we can. But inevitably it catches us up and we discover that the only sure way through our grief is to go right into the heart of it. With loved ones (or therapists) holding our hands, to be sure, but into the heart of it. I’ll tell you one of the other things I learned at Amnesty: that some of our most effective activists were people who had either been tortured themselves or had their loved ones tortured or killed; had been fortunate enough to find space to honor their anger and mourn their losses; and who then, having seen the dark side of the moon, were ready to do what they could to put the world right again. If we can find our way to the other side of grief, we can finally let go of the failures of our parents, the limitations of our partners, the disappointment in our kids and, most especially, our unhappiness with ourselves, and recognize that almost nothing in life is perfect but lots of it is tinged with grace.

So now, finally, we come to the wisest thing I know. It is a short aphorism from a theologian friend of mine named Sam Keen: “Every day we are not mourning is a day we will be taking vengeance.” “Every day we are not mourning is a day we will be taking vengeance.”

What in the world does Sam mean? Does he mean we should spend our days in black shrouds and downturned faces? I assure you he does not. When he was well into his fifties, Sam Keen taught himself to become a trapeze artist. What he means is simply this: the more we try running away from the tough facts of life, seeking escape from our grief in chatter or pretense, liquor or license, the more likely we will be to seek vengeance for our pain at the expense of others. The next time you encounter an act of cruelty, just ask yourself what unacknowledged pain the perpetrator is purveying.

And, conversely, those who embrace their mourning are more likely to resist the impulse toward vengeance. They may well seek justice but they will have no need for vengeance. Among the most remarkable people I got to know at Amnesty were the members of a group called Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, people who had lost a loved one to murder; gone through the tough work of mourning; and who, though demanding that the killers be brought to justice, stood foursquare against vengeance. They were the most effective advocates against the death penalty I have ever witnessed.

Ted Kennedy mourned the death of Mary Jo Kopechne every day of his life and that is why, by the end of his life, he had done everything he could to atone for his terrible mistake by being the most generous, constructive, loving person he could be. The late Unitarian Universalist minister, Forrest Church, told me that, when his father, former Senator Frank Church, was dying in Walter Reed Hospital, Ted Kennedy slipped out of his office and quietly visited the hospital and held his father’s hand every single day for more than a month. Do you know that, no matter how busy he was, Ted called every one of his dozens of nieces and nephews, grand-nieces and grand-nephews, on their birthdays, including one on the morning of the day he died?

Whole nations can be caught up in the dynamic Sam Keen identifies. Had Americans been encouraged by their leaders in 2001 to do the hard, introspective work of mourning that 9/11 called for instead of told that the way to stop terrorism was to keep on shopping, it is likely that the United States would still have taken military action against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan (for mourning does not preclude seeking justice) but it is unlikely that the United States would ever have invaded Iraq for true mourning makes such foolish vengeance unnecessary.

It is no coincidence that Germany which, over the past twenty-five years, has sought in a myriad of ways to make atonement for its Nazi past – from teaching that past to its children; to outlawing denial of the Holocaust; to regularly memorializing its victims; to offering 24-hour police protection to Jewish institutions – it is no coincidence that Germany, having done the work of mourning, is one of the preeminent proponents of international human rights today and that, in contrast, Russia, whose leaders were responsible for even more deaths than the Nazis but which has failed to face its past in any comparable fashion, that Russia is one of the world’s worst violators of human rights today.

So this is the wisest thing I know: that the way to live a good life is to attend to the world in all its splendor and its savagery; to try to face hard truths with as much integrity and authenticity as we can muster but that, when all is said and done, how we treat each other, whether we make glad the hearts of those that travel with us and touch kindly the lives of those who share our journey – that this is the true measure of a life well lived. And the way to make such kindness more likely is to do the work of mourning in order to embrace the wellspring of love.

Many years ago a married couple in Belfast, Northern Ireland, lost their only child, their son, to stray bullets that hit the taxi he was driving. Patrick and Mary were consumed in their grief, inconsolable, they thought, and some months after their son’s funeral, they determined to commit suicide together. They changed into their pajamas that night and laid the pills they would take on the kitchen table. But before they took the pills, Patrick suggested that they have a sandwich and, while they were eating their sandwich, Mary burst out laughing for the first time since their boy’s death. “Patrick,” she said, “who eats a sandwich to fortify themselves right before they do themselves in? What’s the point of that?” And Patrick too began to laugh. And when they had finished chuckling, they had a serious conversation with one another. They decided that life was not finished with them yet and that, far from their son’s loss rendering their lives without purpose, it had clarified what was expected of them – they would work for sectarian reconciliation in Northern Ireland and that is exactly what they did.

I do not claim that the work of mourning is easy nor even that it works every time. But I do know – the wisest thing I know – is that, without it, you and I will not be the people we want to be nor the world a less violent place. Kathe Kollwitz was a great German artist and sculptor but her life had been filled with tragedy and travail. Her son had been killed fighting for Germany in the First World War. She was an ardent pacifist, socialist and anti-Nazi but, despite that, her grandson enlisted in the German army in the Second World War and he too was killed. Kollwitz herself was declared a “non-person” by the Nazis, threatened constantly with deportation to a concentration camp, her art destroyed, but she refused offers to emigrate to America for fear of reprisals against her remaining family. She had every reason to be bitter and on her death bed in 1945 she offered one last word: “Greetings to my friends, just my friends,” she said. But then, with her dying breath, she corrected herself. “No, no,” she said, “Greetings, greetings to all.”