"An Outer Life"

READING

You will recall that a major theme of the Bush Administration's response to September 11 was that life should go on as usual. We should keep saying that broad consensual Yes as loudly as we dared. We could best express our patriotism by hitting the malls, by booking a flight to Disney World. At the time, the advice seemed prudent enough: avoid hysteria, defy the intimidations of murderers and fanatics.

In hindsight it's hard not to see the roots of our predicament in the readiness with which we took that advice to heart. We did exactly as we were told, with a net result that is less an implicit defiance of terrorism than a tacit amen to the "war on terror," including the war in Iraq. Granted, many of us have come to find both those wars unacceptable. But do we find them intolerable? Can you sleep? Yes, doctor, I can sleep. Can you work? Yes, doctor, I can work. Do you get out to the movies, enjoy a good restaurant? Actually, I have a reservation for tonight. Then I'd say you were doing okay, wouldn't you? I'd say you were tolerating the treatment fairly well.

It is one thing to endure abuses and to carry on in spite of them. It is quite another thing to carry on to the point of abetting the abuse. We need to move the discussion of our nation's health to the emergency room. We need to tell the doctors of the body politic that the treatment isn't working - and that until it changes radically for the better, neither are we.

Garret Keizer, Harper's Magazine, October 2007

SERMON

I was minding my own business at the gym the other day when two people standing near me began talking about Yom Kippur. "Are you going to services?" one asked. "No." "Me neither." "I only have one thing I'm praying for this year, anyway. I just want the world not to blow up."

Expressions of global despair work their way into unlikely settings these days. There we were, in a place devoted to hopeful self-improvement, complete with mirrored walls to remind us we needed it. Yet even there, where we can be unapologetically self-absorbed, we cannot shake off our dread about what is going on around us.

Garret Keizer's essay validates this observation. "Of all the various depredations of the Bush regime," he writes, "none has been so thorough as its plundering of hope." Think about how many nights you'd rather get your news presented to you in comedy format, as "The Daily Show" does so well. We can't take it straight anymore. This war on terror, what Garret Keizer calls "a shock-and-awe tutorial on the utter futility of any opposition to the whims of American power - has achieved its greatest and perhaps its only lasting success in the American soul."

This is the season to consider our souls. It is Yom Kippur, Ramadan, and the beginning of Fall. The weather has taken yet another unsettling turn. And we are at church today. What kind of soul-searching shall we do?

During this season of repentance, I've had no trouble finding things to regret. There are the usual regrets, the ones that are all my own, and then there is a new one, that isn't just about me. It's about us - all of us. Have we done all we could - as citizens and as members of a faith community - to confront, to protest, and to stop the devastation carried out in our name? The answer is clear; I have not; and we have not; and for that I am very sorry.

What is the failure? Of imagination? Of courage? Of grandiosity in thinking that what you or I or our congregation might do would really make a difference anyway? "You will want to cite the exceptions," Garret Keizer writes, "the lunch-hour protests against the war, the dinner-party ejaculations of dissent, though you might also want to ask what substantive difference they bear to grousing about the weather or even to raging against the dying of the light - that is, to any ritualized complaint against forces universally acknowledged as unalterable."

So we are fairly accustomed, by now, to being at war; and though we are unhappy about it, life must go on, at least our lives will. Yet this dissonance between going about our lives as if we were all right, and knowing that our nation is engaged in a war that is inflicting immeasurable suffering, is not a healthy condition. We may appear to be "tolerating the treatment fairly well," as Garret Keizer puts it, but the long term effects are already setting in. War is taking its toll on us all, even those of us privileged enough to live far from it. And we know how bad it is over there.

This dissonance is what I heard at the gym. Yes, we're going through the motions. And we'll be back tomorrow as long as the world doesn't blow up.

Let's be honest about what is happening with us. The uneasiness we feel is collective, no matter what is going right or wrong with us as individuals. Every one of us knows and suffers life's tragedies, at one time or another. I do not minimize them. They are more than enough for any of us to bear.

Actually, manufacturing more tragedy - as in concocting a reason to invade another country - is an insult to the real struggles every human being has to face in life. This tragedy is gratuitous. This contrast is almost unbearable. As Garret Keizer writes, "A young man goes to Walter Reed without a face. Shall I make an appointment with my barber?"

Enough, already, you're saying to yourself. But it's not enough. And that's the problem. The heartache is pervasive and we cannot seem to bring it to an end.

What to say, what to do to give us hope?

Garret Keizer proposes that we have a general strike. Everyone refuse to go to work on Election Day. The idea has merit. It's expansive, daring, attention-getting. But "Harper's Magazine" has a circulation of 220,000 - about the same number as Unitarian Universalists - and there's probably a lot of overlap. So I don't know about getting the word out about the strike idea. But it has hope in it and that is why I like it.

Restoring hope is the first step to taking care of our souls. Not the numbed-out business-as-usual kind of activity we already know too well. But looking directly at our despair and sense of futility so that we see the truth, painful though it is. Hope comes out of truth. So this is the work we need to do on ourselves. It's uncomfortable, but it gets us moving again.

Next comes the plain fact that if we want to make the world a better place, as our children's story told us, we all need to do our part. Soul-searching begins inside each of us, but it needs to move outward, join together, feel the strength that only a collective activity can create. Hope does not grow unless we give it an outer life.

Another truth we need to confront is that there are so many major threats to survival and civility. Every single issue that will come before our Faith in Action issues election later today will be urgent and compelling and worthy of our attention. As the environment crashes around us, and people who have nowhere to live must subsist on what others throw away, we can get paralyzed by too many good intentions.

We have to choose, so that we can focus our energy. Yet every choice means that something will go undone. A lot of us will be bothered by that. So we need to remember that however we choose to act, whatever we do will connect us to everyone and everything else. And that is always powerful.

Speaking of collective energy, our congregation has the power to do amazing things together. We are building and teaching and greening and exploring who we are and where we are going and even what we are going to call ourselves. We thrive on challenge and a little controversy. Our inner life as a congregation is vibrant and imaginative and I say to you, let's use that strength to take on the world a little more. Not everyone's an activist. But each of us can do our part in making the world a better place. Our souls depend on it. And so does everyone else.

Let's face the truth. Repent, if we need to. And let our hope arise: hope that knows the ambiguity and the risk, hope that can face failure, hope that will save our souls and perhaps even the world. It's not too late to get to work together.

The text for this sermon is Garret Keizer's "Notebook" essay, "Specific Suggestion: General Strike," in "Harper's Magazine," October 2007.