"The Longest Night"

The future is ours to win, said the president of the United States on Tuesday night.Perhaps you were listening to his speech in the car or watching it on the television, theState of the Union address, and maybe you heard him come back to this phrase, ?how wewill win the future.? More than once, he talked about the challenges and opportunitiesfacing us now using the language of a coach or a teammate or a star player in this greatgame. He talked about the painful changes women and men have faced in the past twoyears of recession in this country, a loss of jobs and benefits, purpose and meaning, thatmade them ?feel like the rules have been changed in the middle of the game.? He talkedabout the need to ?level the playing field? for all those who pay taxes in this country,talked about the need to ?win the race? to educate our students, to celebrate the winner ofthe science fair as well as the winner of the super bowl. He talked about the children ofundocumented workers who are educated by this country yet live under the threat ofdeportation if their status is revealed, and the students sent here from countries all overthe world to great universities only to come to the end of their studies and be sent home,he said, ?to compete against us.?

The language of winning and losing is one that hit home with me ? and I realize that that expression itself is borrowed from the great game of baseball. By calling us to consider the race to the top, the competitive edge, our president reminded me of a story one of my high school teachers once told, about two young women out for a hike in a wild part of the world, in a forest known to be a great habitat for bears.

One morning, the hikers wake up and get their breakfast as usual at the campsite. They enjoy the sound of the birds, the crisp mountain air, and then the morning stillness is broken by the sound of an angry bear, an angry mama grizzly headed straight for their camp. One hiker immediately gets up and starts running, but then she looks back and realizes that her fellow hiker is calmly sitting and starting to put on her sneakers, lacing them up one at a time. Are you crazy, she asks, as the crashing noise of the bear gets louder. Even if you put on your sneakers you know you?ll never be able to outrun that bear. We?re finished! And her friend looks up and says, I don?t need to outrun the bear. I need to outrun you.

So much for friendship! So much for cooperation! In the world of winning and losing, I don?t need to outrun the bear. I only need to leave you behind, outrun you, to win that race. Is that the way the world is?

Is that the way we want it to be?

When I was growing up, my parents were big supporters of cooperative board games. The first I remember was called Beaver Dam, and players joined forces over the course of the game to save the beavers from the perils of an evil land developer. There were tiny wooden sticks that you won over the course of the game to build the dam, but there were also cards that let the bulldozer get closer, and many games ended with the destruction of the dam and the unfortunate demise of all the beavers. Another favorite was Save the Whales, although it too often ended in a depressing list of extinctions; I remember the heavy silver whale pieces that players moved, as we all worked together to clean up the ocean and pass legislation to protect the whales. One player at a time got to place their silver whale in a golden barnacle, which imparted special powers. Nectar Collector was the game of collecting enough wildflower honey for your bee hive; and in Back to the Farm you saved up to buy a solar collector, a windmill, livestock, a prize-winning dairy herd, and vegetable seeds to stock your own organic farm.

The values behind these games were clear then to me as a child, and seem even clearer now, as a parent: be a good neighbor; take care of the land and its creatures; and one I wanted to hear echoed in Obama?s speech: when we work together, everyone can win. Everyone can win.

What was less clear to me as a child, but is becoming ever clearer as an adult, is how very much of our time, as a nation of winners dedicated to that race to the top, how very much of our time on this planet we spend losing.

The art of losing isn?t hard to master, writes the poet Elizabeth Bishop. But that has so rarely been the case in my life. In the hours when my sister and my brother and I weren?t happily playing cooperative games, we played cutthroat games of Hearts and a bridgelike game called Scrounge, whose rules require that the last person to bid her hand alter her bid so that it is impossible for all players to win. These were the high-stakes games that brought about high drama in my family. And I hope I am the only person in this room, though I suspect I am not, to reveal that one of the results of all this game-playing is an inability to play cards with my siblings that has lasted to this day. It?s just a game, my level-headed, dearly loved family members will say, and I have to reply: but it?s not, not to me. It?s a fight to the death that has more to do with my psyche, my desire to look smart and capable in front of my family, than it does with whether I can count up the wining cards in my hand. If I can?t handle losing, and I will tell you now, I can?t handle losing, then it seems clear that I shouldn?t play at all.

The art of losing isn't hard to master, writes the poet, and here is the rest of her poem,

so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

But so many of you know where how hard the art of losing is to master, even when artfully practiced. It is one thing to lose a set of keys, but quite another to witness the gradual decline of your spouse, your mother, your grandmother. A love of winning adds drama to the game, the competitive spirit enlivens the debate, and yet we go too far. To be human is to live not only under the confetti of the winner?s parade, but to find ourselves again and again, many times, among the losers and the lost, losing one another, losing sight, losing touch, losing out, looking for meaning and purpose every single time we find ourselves facing loss.

Can the future be won? I suppose it may be possible for us as a nation to beat out the Chinese or the Indians or the Russians, out-compete other peoples to secure more and better jobs, more and better education, more and better life chances and resources, but as individuals, I?m afraid our hopes for ?winning the future? are ultimately rather limited. Some day, we are each of us going to lose that race for the future, lose that battle with death. And if we can?t win, if we can?t hold on to one another forever, win every game, achieve every goal, the question becomes, do we still want to play?

Daniel R. Heishman, a college chaplain and secondary school administrator for many years, writes about how it was his unfortunate duty to call parents and notify them that their son or daughter had been put on academic probation, that they were being suspended or otherwise disciplined by the school. This is not a conversation a parent looks forward to, but although parents reacted in many different ways, Heishman came to realize he could predict, week in and week out, what a parent?s first question would be. That question was: Will this go on my son?s record?

What he longed to hear was a question not about the consequences, but about the care we could show to our children. A question like: How is he handling this? Or, what can we learn from this? In the performance anxiety of the parent, Heishman read a greater trouble for our culture, in which, he writes, ?the internal life of the young man was taking a back seat to his external promotion in the world.?

Here he heard once more the relentless drumbeat of our obsession not with playing games together, but with winning games alone ? with outrunning not the bear, but one another: Win the future. Win the job. Win the interview. Win the college admission. Be a winner.

Where is the voice singing a different song, where are the ones who march to a different beat?

Writing again about young people facing academic probation, Heishman writes, ?Life presents them with many obstacles, challenges, and baffling circumstances, and these situations produce a great amount of internal distress?Yet these young people yearn to find an inner core or compass that not only would help them being to understand themselves in times of distress, but would help them define and disentangle themselves from the web of performance, the need to be cool, and their anxiety about what the outside world things of them.?

The inner core or compass, as Heishman describes it, ?is the reservoir of our convictions, sense of commitment, and yearning for a better world.? Rather than pointing us directly to yes or no, win or lose, the inner compass directs our attention not only to ourselves, but to a larger context in which our choices matter, in which we can be part of something greater than ourselves.

This afternoon I think you will hear those who are singing a new song, who are marching to a different beat, who are calling that other world into being at our Peace Sunday service. This morning I hope you saw a glimpse of that possibility in our lesson for all ages, in playing games of peace rather than tugs of war.

The inner compass, the life of faith, points us toward a way to measure ourselves outside the scoreboard of external performance, the permanent record, the latest contest. Week in and week out, we yearn to be a people who remember that it?s not whether you win or lose, it?s how you change the game.

It?s not whether you win or lose. It?s how you change the game, and how the game changes you.

The UU minister and songwriter Fred Small figured this out a long time ago. There is a song he sings to his congregation in Cambridge called ?Everything Possible,? and the second verse goes like this:

You can be anybody you want to be
You can love whomever you will
You can travel any country where your heart leads
And know I will love you still
You can live by yourself, you can gather friends around
You can choose one special one And the only measure of your words and your deeds
Will be the love you leave behind when you're done.

The life of faith is not about winning and losing. It is not about who is younger, stronger, faster, cooler. It?s not about the scoreboard, the endzone, or the goal box. It?s not about your record. It?s not about what?s not possible, it?s about the most exciting examples of everything possible.

It?s not about what?s easy to count, it?s about what really counts.

And what really counts is living and loving fully, living and loving and the whole time knowing, as Fred sings, the only measure of our words and our deeds, will be the love we leave behind when we?re done.

May it be so.

Please rise in body or spirit and join in singing our closing hymn, Love Will Guide Us.