by Rev. Dr. Edward Frost, Summer Minister

A sermon given August 6, 2006

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

“This morning...I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island...” wrote Walker Percy in his novel The Moviegoer.  “...And what does such a castaway do?” Percy continues:  “why, he pokes around the neighborhood and he doesn’t miss a trick.” “Not to miss a trick,” Percy says, “is to be onto something.” And not to be on to something is to be in the state of despair.

My note to Santa Claus had included a couple of books, including the latest vampire sage by Anne Rice and John Irving’s A Son of the Circus. Since there were book-like packages under the tree, I assumed my wishes had been granted. But to tide me over the holiday period before the unwrapping, I re-visited my collection of Walker Percy novels and decided on The Moviegoer. I was reminded, as I read, that this is the work that perhaps most clearly—and entertainingly—plays out Percy’s observation that most of us are no more aware of our surroundings, particularly of the possibilities, the wonders, and the mysteries in our surroundings, than a fish is of being in water.

It was Percy who, some years ago, confirmed my own suspicion in one of his essays that many, if not most of us, are actually only energized, brought alive, by threats of impending natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods or hurricanes: not that we look forward to having our homes destroyed or our loved ones or other people’s loved ones killed or injured. But—in the face of potential disaster—SOMETHING IS HAPPENING!

The fire truck down the street; the police car next door; the troops poised to strike: Something is happening. Something takes us out of the ordinariness, the everydayness, the stultifying sameness of the unexamined life. Like a fish, suddenly aware of the water, we are suddenly aware of life and it is exhilarating. When we are aware of life, it becomes an adventure. We are onto something.

Not to be onto something is to be in the state of despair.

Despair is the condition which so engaged and weighted the 19th century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, known as “the melancholy Dane.” “Despair,” Kierkegaard wrote, is the “sickness unto death....the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.”

“Despair” and “desperation” have the same root. “Most,” said Henry David Thoreau, “...live lives of quiet desperation.” I always wondered about that. It seemed such a contradiction in terms. How can desperation be quiet? I’d thought of desperation as mad and mindless gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair, of heart-rending, if noisy, pathos. Despair can lead to all that carrying on—and to sudden acts of violence.

But Thoreau used the word purposefully to describe the lives of the townspeople around him. Desperation, says my dictionary, is the state of despair, of being without hope. And most people live lives of quiet desperation.

“Abandon hope all ye who enter here,” were the words Dante placed over the entrance to the inferno, to hell. Despair is the quiet abandonment of hope.

Somewhere along the way, did we stop believing?  When did we stop applauding in delight at simple surprises? When did the adult within us get the better of us and we began to grow, not up, but inward? Quiet. Despair. The specific character of which is precisely this: that it is unaware of being despair.

This is not depression I speak of. I’m intimately familiar with depression and I could tell you all about it but, thank God, I’m not in the mood. This is not the depression which anchors us to the bed, presses us into the chair before the TV set, nurses inconsolably from the bottle and plunges some, finally, into blessed oblivion. No, Percy speaks of the despair that does not know itself, the state of not being onto something, of not searching. Stolid, stultifying stuckness.

In quiet despair we go to work. We go to school. We care for our homes and children. Do what has to be done. We may even, occasionally, have fun and, by the world’s lights, we may even be successful. But our days have no sudden awakening in a new land. We see no footsteps to follow, no hills to crest for new vistas. We have seen it all before, done it all. We are not onto something.

Unless we are onto something, we live as if we were immersed in a long period of mourning—having forgotten what is lost, but continuing to wear the black arm band, doing nothing that would be inappropriate to grief. And what we have lost, says Percy, what we are in mourning for, is the loss of the world. The world is lost to us, he says, because we are not in it, not aware of it, not affecting it.

Perhaps what we mourn in part is, again, the loss of childhood, the loss of that childlikeness in which the world is so full of wonder and mystery. Beneath it all, if we were blessed with a generally happy childhood, we remember an excitement about our days: endless discoveries, fantastic adventures, new connections, myriad possibilities.

In childhood, it seems—let me speak for myself—in my childhood I was onto something almost all the time. How many times it was revealed to me what it was all (I thought) about! And how exciting it was! You don’t have to be onto the truth, you see. You simply need to be onto something, to have seen, if not how it is, how it seems to be; to have figured something out; to have made a new connection; to have realized that, all in all, being alive today is wonderful.

One doesn’t need to step to the edge of the pit—to come to the point of death—to realize that it is good to be alive. In fact, in my own experience, facing death and not dying resulted more in a relief that I was not dead than in a glorying in being alive. Not the same thing. If we have had a brush with death, we may be just as glad not to be dead; but that is not the same as being glad to be alive.

Zorba. If you haven’t read Katzanzakis’s Zorba the Greek or seen Anthony Quinn portray the lust-for-life Zorba, treat yourself. Zorba lives life in awe of the world about him. He lives—as in Walker Percy’s image—as if he awakened every day as a castaway with a whole new world to explore.

“The Boss,” Katzanzakis’s narrator, says of Zorba, “Things we are accustomed to, and which we pass by indifferently, suddenly rise up in front of Zorba like fearful enigmas...when he sees a man, a tree, a glass of water. Zorba sees everything every day as if for the first time.” “The Boss” says, “...as I listened to Zorba...I felt that the world was recovering its pristine freshness. All the dulled daily things regained the brightness they had in the beginning when we came out of the hands of God. Water...the stars, bread, returned to their mysterious, primitive origin and the divine whirlwind burst once more upon the air.”

Can we live with such freshness, with such daily rebirth into a world of wonder?

I mentioned Thoreau and the “life of quiet desperation.” Thoreau also thought most of the people he knew to be sleepwalking their way through life. He said, “We must learn to awaken and keep ourselves awake by the infinite expectation of the dawn”—that is, by living always in expectation of what comes next.

“I wish to learn what life has to teach,” Thoreau wrote, “and not discover when I come to die that I have not lived.”

If we are sleepwalking our way through our lives we expect nothing of the dawn. Each day, we assume, will be much like the next.

Shakespeare put it, in “Macbeth,”

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more; it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Well, certainly if that’s our understanding of how life is, that’s how it will be. Remember Thoreau said, “We must learn to awaken.” It is necessary to be deliberate, to make a conscious choice about being truly alive to the world, about living a life in which it is our constant expectation that we will discover something, that we will be “onto something.”

How do we know whether or not we are awake to life—that we are not immersed in desperation and missing what is there to be discovered? Soren Kiekegaard, recall, said that the specific character of despair is precisely this, that it is unaware of itself. Well, the only time I can recall asking myself if I was awake was when I was asleep. “Am I awake?” is not a question awake people ask themselves.

So, if in response to Walker Percy talking about beginning the day feeling like a castaway, poking around and not missing a trick you feel, “Lord, I’m lucky if I can find the bathroom in the morning,” you probably are not as alive as you could be. If you are not “onto something,” some idea transformed, some plan fresh and new coming into being, then, Percy says, you are, with the multitudes, in despair.

“98% of Americans believe in God,” says Percy’s protagonist in The Moviegoer, “and the remaining 2% are atheists and agnostics—which leaves not a single percentage point for a seeker.” “Have 98% of Americans already found what I seek?” he asks, “Or are they so sunk in everydayness that not even the possibility of a search has occurred to them?”

I think of those periods of my life in which I was convinced that I had found the way as being periods of stagnation, of being asleep. I was no longer onto something, no longer searching.

What I have learned is that to have accepted Christ, to have discovered God, to have adopted humanism—whatever it is we have found is but part of the whole. Wherever we find ourselves is part of the terrain, not the whole country. Not to budge from the spot we claim as truth is to miss the world.

One who has found what he or she chooses to be convinced is true now and for all time can never be onto something again. Tennyson’s Ulysses, aged, with so many grand adventures behind him, says “We are not that strength which once we were in former times; but what we are we are.” And, in Bobby Kennedy’s favorite words, Ulysses says, “Come, my friends, ‘tis not too late to seek another world.”

A while ago, I was approaching the time for a sabbatical. Everyone, myself included, assumed the sabbatical would be taken in England as had the sabbatical before it. For one thing, I had some assumptions about what beauty is and where to be in beauty, particularly natural beauty. Beauty, I already knew, was the rolling meadows of England, with sheep grazing by ancient hedgerows and a twelfth century church by the lane. Several other assumptions—such as assumptions about who I was—were linked to and locked into that one.

In time, by a series of what seemed to be coincidences, I developed an interest in American Indian culture. I was led to the book Seven Arrows, written by a contemporary Medicine Man. I was onto something!

I came to understand that I had been asleep. I knew that, if I wanted to explore, to move on, I needed to deliberately put myself in a context completely different from anything I had known. To everyone’s amazement, I announced that I wanted to spend my sabbatical in the desert and mountains of Arizona.

Some of the most transformative experiences of my life took place in solitary hours in those mountains and deserts. My body did things in the desert heat and on the rocky trails that I never dreamed it could do. My mind considered ideas it had never dared entertain. My spirit soared into spaces it had never known.

One of the things I learned is that it is often that which we scorn and which we determine has nothing to do with us which has the great possibility of being our Teacher. That’s also true of people, by the way. Those we scorn, those we hold ourselves away from, are often our Teachers waiting with the lesson for us to be ready.

I am well aware that that experience was a great gift. Not everyone is given that time and opportunity. But we can slough off our despair, waken from our sleep, and make discoveries from wherever we are.

If we are not too far gone, there are times when the divine spirit of creativity and transformation—the Spirit of Life—flows into our sleepy days and calls us to awaken. All that is required is the willingness to accept the challenge, consider the possibility that we are not as alive as we could be, and begin our exploration.

There are books to be read by authors we dislike about subjects we have no taste for.

There is music we know we don’t like. There is music we have never heard but know we wouldn’t like it.

Geology is boring, you say? Take a course in it.

You could never have been an artist? Take up painting.

Listen to people you don’t agree with—no, don’t talk to them—listen to people you don’t agree with.

The world is a larger place when we incorporate into our understandings—understandings of how the world appears to others.

Look alive! Wake up to your life as if you were a castaway. “And what does such a castaway do?” Walker Percy asked, “Why, she pokes around the neighborhood and she doesn’t miss a trick.”

Sooner or later, in your poking around, in your exploring, your following of trails and footprints, you will have the greatest experience of all: with showers of stars and clangings of bells, with a rush of life you will call out, “Hey, I think I’m onto something here!”

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Copyright 2006, Rev. Dr. Edward Frost.  All rights reserved.