Dr. John Young 3/6/05
Unitarian Universalist Church of Jacksonville
Waking Up Inside, Keeping Engaged Outside
Today, we are going to consider how we can stay awake within ourselves, and how we can remain engaged with the world around us. People who fail to stay awake sleep through their own lives and miss many of the opportunities that life presents to each of us. People who fail to become and to remain engaged with the world around them are blind to life’s gifts and turn life’s abundance into a desert and a despairing ordeal.
But before we can do justice to being awake and remaining engaged, we need to face the facts of death and to celebrate the joys and satisfactions of sleep and rest. I heard a scientist on public radio propose recently that there will be no more death in a generation or two. I will not count on that happening, or plan the rest of my existence around such magical hopes. Death is still a central reality. Life is a treasure and a feast, but it ends. We die, and although many of us may have a strong faith that our spirits endure, greater than any space or time. The people we have been do not live on. As a humanist, a person focused on this world and this life, our finitude makes it all the more important that we remain awake and engaged as much as possible while we are alive.
This week, I did a Memorial Service for Flo Marquardt’s mother, Harriet Coleman. Portions of Harriet’s family are traditional believers, and the service was at a mortuary with an open casket during the service. Harriet had attended services with Flo and Chuck at UUCJ, and I knew and appreciated her. I celebrated her enduring spirit. For me, that continuing presence had nothing to do any longer with the embalmed body before us. This week, I also did a committal ceremony for Audrey Roddy in UUCJ’s Memorial Garden. Her son, John, his wife and children and I placed her ashes in a niche in the Memorial Garden and celebrated our memories of her. The ashes of a human being are very small and very light. There is so little there there after cremation, and, yet, our memories are filled with the deceased people we have loved and known, and many of us trust that their spirits continue. For us, after death, the body is no longer important, because it dead, the person is gone from it forever, while our memories may flourish, and their spirits continue to support and lift up the world.
Each of us has had the privilege of sitting with a relative or friend that is sleeping. I sat this week with a UUCJ member that was asleep in his hospital room. We were alone, and he was sound asleep and did not respond to either my voice nor to my touching him lightly on his shoulder. So, I sat quietly with him for some minutes and tried a couple more times to get a response. He was doing what he needed to do for his recovery. He was sleeping. Our conversations could wait for a better time for him. Sometimes when people sleep, they sleep so quietly that it hardly seems that they are breathing. If you did not pay close attention, you might think that they were already dead. Human beings do sleep about 1/3 of their entire lives. We need to sleep and rest in order to survive and to flourish. When we are very small, we sleep a lot; for, we have just come out of our mother’s wombs, and, then, again, as we age and near death, we usually discover that we need more sleep again. I took an oral vaccine this week to protect me from typhoid during my upcoming sabbatical, and it made me sleepy because my body was fighting off the controlled dose of typhoid that I was giving myself. We are a culture and live in a time that does not take rest and sleep seriously enough, and we need them to be productive and happy people. So, get enough sleep, and rest when you need to do so. Different people at different times and circumstances need more or less sleep or rest. Be sure you get enough of both. Life becomes an inattentive haze and a confusion of day-dreams without enough sleep and rest. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus argued that “while each sleeper has a private world of his own that the waking have one world in common.” We are nourished and renewed by investing nearly a third of our lives in sleep’s repose. Rest is necessary and nourishes us all. Sleep and rest are the pauses that allow us to pay attention.
We are asleep, and, then, we wake up. Gautama Buddha said the point of his teachings was to help humanity wake up. He wanted us to wake up to what is real, what is genuine about ourselves and about the world. Today, I want to consider some useful methods for adult development. How can we continue to wake up internally and to keep engaged with the world around us? How can we continue to develop and to grow throughout our lives, regardless of our age or health, economic circumstances or intellectual accomplishments? So many people sleep walk their way through life. They make big efforts to get to the special performance, the big event, and, then, they sleep through it. Most of the people most of the time seem not to be fully present in their own lives, to miss central elements of their personal activities.
Buddha suggested a middle way that resisted both excess and life-denial. He had grown up a prince, sheltered from the tragedies of life, surrounded by luxury, and he did not find peace or wisdom in the midst of excess. Then, he had tried a variety of ascetisms over a seven year ordeal. He was as good an ascetic as he had been as a prince, and others followed him, but he did not find satisfaction or peace in these world-renouncing ordeals either. His enlightenment was realizing that tragedy and suffering happens to everyone in life, but that most human suffering is caused by craving, by wanting too much or expecting perfection, by becoming possessed by either excess or denial.
Let me talk about these insights in a slightly different way. I believe that much of the world’s spiritual and philosophical wisdom has to do with understanding that pride, arrogance, and righteousness are each as dangerous and seductive as guilt, inferiority, and shame. Each human being sometimes feels guilt, inferiority and shame. Many people are overwhelmed by these negative feelings. However, the world’s wisest people have also focused on the dangers of pride, arrogance, and righteousness. The ancient Greeks were concerned with our human tendencies toward hubris, arrogance. Christians and others identified pride as the greatest sin, and contemporary existentialists are struck by the destructiveness of righteousness.
Spiritual progressives, like Unitarian Universalists, criticize much of traditional religiosity and ideology because they too often sanctify arrogance, pride, and righteousness. We are concerned that people get too weighed down by false or unnecessary senses of guilt, inferiority and shame. Unitarian Universalists tend to believe that people are not born in sinfulness, cannot inherit guilt, and should overthrow assumptions that there is one right way or that perfection is necessary. We want people to become and to remain responsible, but we know that each of us must always continue to guard against arrogance, pride and righteousness.
How do we live this middle way, avoiding excess and life denial? How can we outgrow our guilt without getting filled with pride, overcome inferiority without becoming arrogant, tame our shame without becoming self-righteous? As each of us knows, from the hard lessons of our lives, these tasks never get easy or simple. We never get so we can take these dilemmas for granted.
I think the keys are: hopeful awareness, realistic acceptance, and enthusiastic affirmations. You do need to pay attention, but it works better if you pay attention to what makes you hopeful. There are too many choices. You cannot take all of the above. You have to choose and keep choosing right until your last breath. So, figure out what you are hopeful about within yourself and focus on those sources of hope, become truly aware of them and use that awareness and hope to lift them up in your life. We do need to be realistic, especially we need to become realistic about what we accept, but then we need to concentrate our acceptance on what is realistic for us in the world around us and within ourselves now. Each of us does need to practice some denials, but don’t waste most of your energy on what you don’t believe, don’t like, don’t care about. Instead, use your positive energy, your enthusiasm to focus on life affirmations that work for you. Now, you are truly awake within yourself: hopefully aware, realistically accepting, and enthusiastically affirming. How do you keep engaged outside, in the world around you?
I struggled for a long time with the foundational Islamic belief that we need to submit. Submission was not a comfortable concept for me. However, my conceptual analysis has finally begun to catch up with my intuitive insight. For a long time, I intuitively understood that this Islamic foundation of submission, while uncomfortable, even unnerving, was, in fact, necessary and vital. I have come to believe that the foundational step in staying engaged with the world is to learn to submit to what is inevitable or overwhelmingly probable in our lives. Way too many people waste much of their lives losing themselves in fighting the inevitable, in resisting the overwhelming probabilities. This is a colossal waste. Choose your battles. Submit patiently to the inevitable and figure out what is overwhelmingly probable and embrace it.
The Jewish tradition teaches its members to do justice, to make the most of what is possible, to be fair and equitable. People do make mistakes, against other people and against Creation, and so they need to recognize their sins, to express regrets, to make amends, and to find ways to change their behavior so that they do not repeat the same injustices again and again. This is my second step in remaining engaged with the world. Do the justice that you can do, be fair, be equitable, recognize and admit your mistakes, make amends, and improve your behavior. But equally do the justice, the new, fresh justice that you can do in the world. The primary point of self-improvement is not making the fewest mistakes but instead doing all the good that you can do.
The Christian tradition has worthy goals that stretch people toward love and embrace them in a vision that humanity can help to create the Kingdom of God, or, as I prefer to think of it, to approximate the potential of Creation. Unitarian Universalists have been vigorous proponents of these aspects of the Christian tradition for more than four hundred years. This is my third step in remaining engaged proactively with the world around you. Live a life of practical love, a life that has faith in human improvement and sustaining the good Earth, the Creative universe, a faith that dedicates our best efforts to these hopeful and loving goals. The Buddha taught us to wake up, but the point of that personal enlightenment was so that you could become effectively compassionate with the world around you. True enlightenment means getting beyond your ego, means outgrowing selfishness.
In summary, I am proposing that you wake up not only by overcoming unnecessary sources of guilt, inferiority and shame but equally by outgrowing pride, arrogance, and righteousness, particularly the righteous indignation of anger and disdain. I propose three primary positive steps in continuing to be awake: hopeful awareness, realistic acceptance, and enthusiastic affirmations. Concentrate your awareness on what you find hopeful. Stop getting lost in despair and cynicism. Concentrate your acceptance on what is realistic for you to accomplish now. Stop focusing on what you don’t believe, don’t care about, or can no longer realistically hope to achieve. Concentrate on affirmations, but concentrate on positive affirmations that work for you now. Happiness is based on discovering the gardens and sources of love and satisfaction in your existence, rather than getting caught in the losing battles and the unquenchable deserts that persist in each of our souls.
It is not enough, however, to become enlightened, to wake up and remain alert. We need to become and remain engaged with the world around us. It is so easy to become unengaged or disengaged through the cynicism, doubt, skepticism, and despair of aging. Here, I also suggested three primary steps. First, submit to what is inevitable or overwhelming probable. It is useless to fight the inevitable, and it is a horrible waste to continue to resist the overwhelming probable. Use your dwindling energies more wisely. Choose your battles, focus on your energies. Second, do justice, be fair, make amends for your errors, change your ways, but even more important continue to creatively do the good you can do. It is not enough to make few mistakes. The point is to do the most good you can do. And finally, dedicate your lives to the practice of love, to the nurture of your vision of human, natural and divine Creation on this Earth. Our spirituality is: creative, democratic, sustainable, progressive, activist, and engaged. Wake up inside and remain engaged outside.