by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

Come this day into this circle of love and justice.

Come into this community of mercy, holiness, and health.

Come, and may you this day know peace and joy.

Come now, and let us worship together!

Knowing that I was an English major, a friend of mine, an engineer, actually, who was taking a course on William Faulkner’s writing asked me about a title she was considering for a paper.  She said, “I’m thinking about calling it ‘The Meaning of Life in the Works of William Faulkner.’”  I told her that I thought that was perhaps a little too broad for a three-page paper. 

Nevertheless, as impossible as the topic is, that’s where we all end up at some point—when we finally stop our running, when we finally breathe deeply, when we finally allow ourselves to be present with ourselves, that’s the question that emerges, and that’s the question that each of us is called upon to answer, “What is the meaning of life?”

One of the purposes of ancient scripture is to help us answer that formidable question.  For those of you who did not attend Sunday School, and are Biblically challenged, the story of Adam and Eve goes like this:  God created the seas and the creatures in the seas and the dry land and the creatures on the land, and finally God created man, in the likeness of God himself, and He placed man in the Garden of Eden.  God told man to dress it and keep it, and he said, “Of every tree you may eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat, for on the day you eat of that tree, you will surely die.”  Then God said, “It is not good for man to be alone, I will make a help-mate for him,” and God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and as he slept, God took one of his ribs and made a woman, and brought her to the man.  And Adam said, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman.”  And Adam and Eve were both naked, and were not ashamed. 

Then the serpent enters the picture and tempts Eve, telling her that she will not die if she eats the fruit, but the serpent says, “You will be as gods, knowing good and evil.”  So wanting to be wise, Eve ate the fruit and gave it to Adam, and he ate it also.  And their eyes were opened, and they saw that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves.  They heard the voice of God and they hid themselves from God.  And God called Adam, “Where are you, Adam?”  (Actually, I love the language of the King James version, which reads, “Where art thou, Adam?”)  And Adam said, “I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.”  Adam blames Eve, and Eve blames the snake.  God confronts them with their disobedience and casts them out of the garden forever. 

What a great story that is!  It has love, betrayal, running from God, guilt, punishment, conflict in the family, and the first recorded incidence of passing the buck.  So human, so like us.  Some interpret this story as being the human’s fall from grace, that at this point, at the very beginning of time, evil entered the picture, and polluted us all from then on—these folks believe we are born into sin, we are guilty from day one, and have to be saved.

This is not my interpretation.  I believe that the fall was paradoxically a fortunate fall, as some have referred to it, a fall into consciousness, the very thing that makes us human.  This myth describes what took place in evolution over thousands of years until a time that the anthropologists call “The Transition,” occurred in Europe somewhere around 45,000 years ago.  Recent studies show that this movement to human consciousness took place earlier on the African continent, and it is thought that the first living creatures that we know as human come from Africa.  And how did scientists know when the humanoid, or nearly human, turned human?  Humans, they say, developed the following four qualities: (1) abstract thinking, not limited in time or space; (2) planning, strategizing based on past experience in a group context; (3) technological innovation; and (4) ability to symbolize. 

These qualities made us lose our innocence, tossed us right out of the garden.  Take just the first one—that alone would do it—abstract thinking, not limited in time or space: that is, we know we have a past, a past that informs us, sometimes haunts us, stays with us; and we know we have a future, a future that includes not having any future at all, that includes death.  We are the only creature that knows it is going to die.  And because of this knowing, we develop an existential angst.  It’s part of the human condition.  It’s lonely and scary being human, ever since Adam and Eve bit that apple. 

It’s so different with animals—with Molly, my cat, for example.  Whereas I am rushing about trying to get all of my life into one 24-hour period, sometimes running late to this or that, I note that Molly is never late.  Stretching and purring, she is exactly where she wants to be at any given time.  I think that’s why I like being around her.  She is just so totally okay, so present in the moment. When I come home—maybe because there is a dearth of human company—I talk with Molly—or I should say, I talk to Molly.  “Hi, Molly, how’s it going?” I say.  “How is my sweet precious kitty?”  I look into her eyes—and there is nothing there, nada, nada, nada.  If she were a monk, I would say she has on her kitten face an expression of transcendent wonder and awe.  She looks at me with that blankness and emptiness, that absence of comprehension, that lets me know that she is simply there, in her cat body, in her cat state, without a need to be other than the cat she is.  Perhaps it is no accident that the word for animal comes from the Latin anima, which means soul.  The very first symbolic representations, the very first art of early humans was depictions of animals on cave walls, and the early gods were presented as animals—those beings that are perfectly present.

Molly is 3, so maybe if she is lucky she will live 12 or 13 more years.  But she doesn’t know that.  She is not worried about aging.  She is not putting away bags of cat food for her retirement.  She has no idea that she will die, or what death is.  Having her food dish filled is dependent on my giving sermons on Sunday—but she doesn’t worry about that.  Molly will never have kittens—the Humane Society saw to that—but she has no regrets, because she doesn’t even know how kittens are made.  No, Molly pretty much just wants food, water, warmth, some time to play and to groom herself—and she wants to be loved.  She meows when she wants to be loved and petted, which makes her smarter than many people I know.  The only time she has ever been depressed is when I went away to Eastern Europe for three weeks, and she refused to eat and refused to go outside and play—at least for a few days, and then she got over it.

When we were cast out of the Garden of Eden—when we came to know time, when we came to know right from wrong and were called upon to make moral choices, when we understood we were going to die—our blissful innocence was gone.  We went into a state which seems almost intolerable at times—the state of a finite creature that is aware of the infinite—therein lies the “cast out” feeling, the feeling of never quite being at home in this world.  The one who has eaten of the apple is a creator himself, who can contemplate the universe and split the atom, and yet at the same time will become food for worms one day.  This consciousness of self is hardly bearable.  So what do we do with that understanding?  We let it go underground, and shoving down that awful knowing results in a restlessness, an anxiety, sometimes manifesting as vague feelings of guilt, sometimes as anger.  This is part of the human condition, it is part of our tragedy and part of our glory.

Glory?  Now how can this uncomfortable state be a part of our glory?  Because the only resolution for it is union with God.  It is the very thing that gives us the impetus to develop a spiritual life.  Now for those of you who are not comfortable with God-language, use something else—whatever, it doesn’t matter.  Use “reality,” for example.  Or “nature.”  Or “the Sacred.”  The important thing for us to know is that this yearning is universal, that our restlessness is not something only we face, and that it’s not going to go away completely, ever—at least, not in this world.

I want to add that we in postmodern civilization have an extra dose of this angst, because so much of what we depended on to be steady and sure in our lives is no longer that way.  Some of us grew up without locking the doors to our houses—not any more.  The 1950s American Dream of a happy marriage with 2.3 children that lasts forever is gone.  There is no longer one true faith, the one of our parents.  We once thought the company we worked for would take care of us, and keep us around, if we worked hard—not any more.  And when could we last really trust a national leader, really believe in the goodness of our nation?  What can we depend on anymore?  Anything?  Sometimes we wonder.

It was the poet Auden who labeled our age “the age of anxiety.  So what do we do with these disconcerting feelings?  Mostly we try to escape from them.  There are ways to distract ourselves, and many of those are addictive.  We can numb ourselves out on alcohol or drugs.  We can use food—and with 65% of our population either obese or overweight, we are literally eating ourselves to death.  We can use work.  We can shop.  Some people feel that if they could only find the right partner, their real soul-mate, then this existential angst would disappear—and so they fall in love—over and over and over again, only to find under their projections, a real human being, not a savior.  Unsatisfied, frustrated, we are finally pushed to accept life on its own terms.

Not that doing that is easy, though.  The story comes to mind of a little girl, four years old, and one of those old-fashioned gas water heaters.  One day she was standing in the bathroom ready to climb into the tub when the heater exploded.  The little girl ran out of the house without taking anything along to cover her nakedness and disappeared into the surrounding woods.  When she was found many hours later, she expressed her unwillingness to return home with the words, “I do not want to go back to a house where things like that happen.”  Of course in the end she did go home, for it was the only home she had.

We ourselves are in a similar situation: this is our world, this is our reality—it’s the only home we have.  And so in realizing and accepting this, the spiritual searcher is thrown back on despair—and finally then has nowhere to go, except to God.  “Adam, Adam, where art thou, Adam?”

The theologian Kierkegaard puts it this way:  “We become free from despair only when, precisely by having despaired, we rest transparently in God.”  What does Kierkegaard mean by the phrase “to rest transparently in God”?  I think he means we give up.  We give up our pretense—of having a plan, of knowing—and finally, even of desiring.  Knowing that we do not know, giving ourselves to the Mystery, becomes the basis of all the hope that we can ever have, and paradoxically it becomes enough.  We become more and more ignorant, radically ignorant, and only then do we begin to become wise.  To rest transparently in God is to get rid of all of the clutter that gets between us and God, and to let the God stuff shine through us.

Our human dilemma is that we are presented with questions that we cannot answer:  Who am I?  What must I do?  What is the meaning of my existence?  But there are some things that we do know.  We know that truth is good, we know that kindness heals, we know that love redeems.  We can simply be present with what is, as opened-eyed as Molly my cat, as transparent as the Buddha.  To be fully human is to be continually tossed out of the garden.  To be fully alive is to always be not-knowing, trusting in the Mystery, trusting in the Love that is greater than whatever else is, and resting, at last, there.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Great Mystery, we live in so much fear all our days, and so much loneliness.  So often we feel we are not enough.  We ask this day that you would give us the courage to live without the answers, to trust in life itself.  We pray that we would be free—free to love more fully, free to give more willingly of ourselves, and in that freedom to know the presence of the Holy in our lives.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

May you know this day that you are loved, that you are worthy, that you are enough.