A Spirituality for the Real World
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island,
Sunday December 15, 2002
***
I’ve had a lot of things on my mind this past week, not the least of which (as you may have noticed) was that last Friday happened to fall on the 13th of the month. I don’t really consider myself a superstitious person, but I’m not exactly the kind of guy who likes to go around smashing mirrors and walking under ladders just to prove a point either, so whenever Friday the 13th pops up on the calendar I tend to hunker down a little if I can, simply as a sign of respect to the powers of the Universe which are beyond my effective influence and control.
There are enough crazy things going on right now in my life and in the world for that matter; there’s no reason whatsoever to tempt fate simply by pretending to be more rational and reasonable than I really am. Here we are, in the season of peace on earth, goodwill to all, getting ready to go to war in a far away land simply to settle old scores against a man who is basically just easier to find than the one we’ve been trying to find up until now...and then I heard on the radio this morning that the President has just authorized the CIA to assassinate the ones who are too difficult to capture. And I’m sure it all makes sense to someone, maybe it even makes sense to some of you, but it sure doesn’t make much sense to me.
But of course, I’m not a professional politician. I’m a preacher, a “cleric,” a spiritual leader, and these days religion and spirituality are often characterized as “superstition,” and not particularly relevant to the "real world." Religion has to do with something "out there," not something worldly, but something “not of this world:” heaven, or the afterlife. Never mind all this business about a virgin birth, glorious angels and roses blooming in winter, talking animals and stars in the sky...what about Peace on Earth, Goodwill to All, loving your enemies and turning the other cheek, giving the shirt off your back, walking the extra mile? These may all be fine and good in some other, more perfect place, but they just don't add up in the here and now. Peace and Justice are fine ideals, but one has to be realistic in order to survive: it's a tough world out there, and nice guys finish last.
Likewise, those of us who do aspire to a more spiritual relationship to the Universe are typically perceived as somehow "different" from normal human beings. Spirituality is for idealists and romantic dreamers, monks and artists, people who live with their heads in the clouds, but whose feet perhaps don’t quite seem firmly planted on solid ground. We may admire them for their virtues, but we would never really trust them to manage our business affairs. It's not that we doubt their sincerity or good intentions; it's just that we question their competence to function in the real world. Or as J. Paul Getty once observed, the meek may well inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights.
Saint Francis may well have loved the little birds, but its a jungle out there, and it takes a hard-nosed, tough-minded pragmatist to be able to take the bull by the horns and bring home the bacon (which, if you stop to think about it, is a very special skill indeed, since bacon comes from pigs, and bulls are best known for an entirely different product altogether). But there you have it in a nutshell: the conventional wisdom of contemporary American existence. When it comes to surviving in the real world, spirituality is for the birds; what we really need is a real go-getter, with both feet on the ground.
And yet somehow I find this conventional wisdom unconvincing. I want to feel free to aspire to high ideals and noble purposes without being thought of as naive or gullible; I want to soar with the birds just for the joy of it, without worrying about whether I'm a winner or a loser. I crave that sense of peace that comes from the experience of being "at-one" with the ultimate; I want the quiet confidence to live my life in harmony with a reality felt but not seen, without being thought of as ineffectual or incompetent. I want to live spiritually in the real world, just as I am, neither a saint nor a sucker. I want a life that is somehow fulfilling in its own right, without the constant need or desire to compete and keep score.
But how does one achieve such a life? It's a question I ponder constantly, working in the kind of job I do. And I don't know that I'll ever be able to give you all the answers, but I can suggest some places we might all start, small ways in which we can begin to bring to our lives a spiritual quality which can endure even the pressures of day to day living. Like tiny seeds, once planted in fertile soil they will grow; and with proper cultivation, who can say what fruits they will bear?
We might begin, for example, by making the commitment to behave more kindly toward our fellow creatures. Kindness is a quiet and subtle virtue -- it benefits, I suppose, from a certain level of compassion and empathy, but all that is really required is the desire not to be hurtful to others, and the willingness to act on that desire. Given the conventional wisdom of our culture, there is a tendency, I think, to associate kindness with weakness; but in fact the exact opposite is true. Violence and cruelty are typically the products of fear; we strike out at others because we feel threatened and are frightened for our own safety. In sharp contrast, it takes a certain amount of courage to be kind, to be concerned about another person’s well-being rather than always thinking only of one’s own.
There’s a certain kind of wisdom that accompanies kindness as well. When we limit our thinking only to ourselves and our own welfare, when we are constantly suspicious of strangers and defensive in their presence, we become shortsighted and often inadvertently create precisely the kind of antagonistic situation we had hoped to protect ourselves from. But when be behave kindly toward others as a matter of course, we will typically discover that our kindness is returned to us in kind, and that the world is filled with our friends. And this wisdom: the insight that we are all more alike than we are different, is one of the four cornerstones of a Spirituality for the Real World, part of a solid foundation on which the rest of our religious lives can be built.
And then we might also resolve to live our lives honestly. Honesty may seem a rather trivial virtue to serve as a cornerstone of our religious lives, but the kind of honesty I'm talking about goes a little bit beyond a mere "Thou shalt not lie" and "Thou shalt not steal." I’m sure we're all pretty much honest people; we generally don't steal candy from little babies, we don't cheat (much) on our Income Tax. But I'm talking about a life that is scrupulously honest: a life which is committed first and foremost to the service of truth, and which views integrity as its most precious possession; an honesty which cannot be cheated or swindled because its overriding concern is about a fundamental fairness for all of the parties to a transaction, and which remains true to that principle even when no one is watching, and there is no danger whatsoever of being found out.
This sort of honesty is rare indeed, although perhaps not nearly so rare as some might think. I once read a report about a sociologist who set out to test the honesty of New York City taxi cab drivers, by pretending to be a wealthy foreigner unfamiliar with the city and incapable of speaking fluent English. The experimenter would ask, in a heavy, halting accent, to be taken to an address just a few blocks up the street. Of the hundred or so taxis this researcher hailed, only one took him on a needlessly expensive scenic tour of Manhattan before delivering him to his destination; the rest either pointed out the location he was trying to reach and suggested politely that he could walk, or let him in their cabs and drove him directly to the door. A few even refused to charge him for the ride, and almost everyone warned him that he needed to be more careful in the future, since everyone knows that most New York cab drivers can't be trusted.
A third thing which we might do is to commit ourselves to living life generously. Generosity in this sense means more than merely sharing of our wealth and our resources, as important as this may be. It also means being generous in our relations towards others: learning to be patient, and tolerant of another's foibles; learning to be forgiving, and compassionate, even “liberal.” It's a strange quirk of spiritual arithmetic: the more of ourselves we are capable of giving, the greater in fact we ourselves become. We can't take it with us, either our time or our money; all that endures is that which we leave behind, through the act of passing it on to others. Learning to live life generously gives us the power to make an impact on this world, to change it for the better in ways that will survive us.
Generosity is something we hear a lot about this time of year. The Christmas season is the season of giving -- so much so that it becomes easy to feel overwhelmed by the perceived “obligation” of generosity: to our friends and family, to charities, and those less fortunate than ourselves. When the pressures and expectations of generosity begin to feel oppressive, it can likewise seem natural to want to “withdraw” into ourselves and shut the door to the outside world. But when we shut ourselves off from those who have their hands out to us, we are doing much more than merely refusing them a handout. We are not just “cutting them off,” we are cutting ourselves off from them as well. If the requests seem excessive, it’s because we don’t really know or understand our own limits and limitations; our generosity should flow freely, even liberally, from our own sense of abundance, rather than being driven solely by someone else’s sense of need or expectation. And this is the tricky part of the equation. Because generosity requires sacrifice; there’s no doubt about it. But the result should never be merely a transfer of resources from one pocket to another: rather, authentic generosity makes possible authentic sharing as well: shared abundance, shared sacrifice, shared suffering, shared success. And ultimately shared joy as well. Generosity is a process, a style of relationship based on kindness and honesty, in which each is the giver and each is the receiver.
A fourth thing which we can do to bring a greater spiritual quality to our everyday lives is to commit ourselves to living life simply. Simplicity is perhaps the most complicated of the virtues I will discuss here this morning; it's ironic, in a way, but that's just the way the real world works. I know many people (and I'm sure you do too) who go to great trouble to make their lives simple. They only shop in special stores, or from special catalogs; they eat only special food grown on special farms in a special way; their homes are full of complicated gadgets designed to make their lives less dependent upon modern civilization and the global economy. Often times they will express a desire to “get off the grid” and "go back to the land" completely-- to grow their own organic food, generate their own power (through wind turbines or photovoltaic cells or low-level hydroelectric projects), recycle all their garbage and compost their sewage, even sew their own clothes with cloth woven from wool they have sheared from their own llamas.
It’s amazing how complicated a simple life can be.
Don't get me wrong: I admire this type of lifestyle tremendously, in much the same way that I admire the lifestyle of Trappist monks, who still organize their days according to the rhythms of Medieval times. But for my part simplicity begins with the willingness simply to be better aware of one’s surroundings, to reject the simple-minded solutions of the consumer marketplace, with its false economies of scale and mismeasures of productivity, which are often merely reflections of things like abusive sweatshop labor or reckless environmental plundering, and the ability of the powerful to shift the true costs of production onto the less fortunate while retaining the profits for themselves, and “passing the savings on to you.”
I'm a great believer in the efficacy of KISS -- "Keep it Simple, Stupid." Things tend to get complicated of their own accord; the discipline of simplicity is learning how best not to contribute to that process. Simplicity is about learning to differentiate between the essential and the extraneous, the sublime and the absurd; it's the ability to distinguish between substance and appearance, and to identify real value. It’s the philosophical principle of Occam's Razor, the law of Parsimony, brought down to the level of authentic frugality, and unit pricing.
There is another dimension to the virtue of simplicity as well. The word simple is sometimes used as a synonym for foolish; spiritual simplicity reflects a willingness to indulge in a little foolishness ourselves, to chuckle harmlessly at one's own silly foibles without really worrying what the neighbors will think, and to enjoy "childish" pastimes even when we know full well that we are no longer children; to be as kind, and as honest, and as generous with our own selves as we aspire to be toward those around us.
Kindness, Honesty, Generosity, and Simplicity may not seem like much, but these are the qualities from which it all begins, and they are always available to us, as near to our hearts as breathing out and breathing in. Together they can form the foundation of a spirituality for the real world: a spirituality which is neither naive nor superstitious, but contains within it the power to transform our lives, and in time perhaps the rest of the planet as well.
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island,
Sunday December 15, 2002
***
I’ve had a lot of things on my mind this past week, not the least of which (as you may have noticed) was that last Friday happened to fall on the 13th of the month. I don’t really consider myself a superstitious person, but I’m not exactly the kind of guy who likes to go around smashing mirrors and walking under ladders just to prove a point either, so whenever Friday the 13th pops up on the calendar I tend to hunker down a little if I can, simply as a sign of respect to the powers of the Universe which are beyond my effective influence and control.
There are enough crazy things going on right now in my life and in the world for that matter; there’s no reason whatsoever to tempt fate simply by pretending to be more rational and reasonable than I really am. Here we are, in the season of peace on earth, goodwill to all, getting ready to go to war in a far away land simply to settle old scores against a man who is basically just easier to find than the one we’ve been trying to find up until now...and then I heard on the radio this morning that the President has just authorized the CIA to assassinate the ones who are too difficult to capture. And I’m sure it all makes sense to someone, maybe it even makes sense to some of you, but it sure doesn’t make much sense to me.
But of course, I’m not a professional politician. I’m a preacher, a “cleric,” a spiritual leader, and these days religion and spirituality are often characterized as “superstition,” and not particularly relevant to the "real world." Religion has to do with something "out there," not something worldly, but something “not of this world:” heaven, or the afterlife. Never mind all this business about a virgin birth, glorious angels and roses blooming in winter, talking animals and stars in the sky...what about Peace on Earth, Goodwill to All, loving your enemies and turning the other cheek, giving the shirt off your back, walking the extra mile? These may all be fine and good in some other, more perfect place, but they just don't add up in the here and now. Peace and Justice are fine ideals, but one has to be realistic in order to survive: it's a tough world out there, and nice guys finish last.
Likewise, those of us who do aspire to a more spiritual relationship to the Universe are typically perceived as somehow "different" from normal human beings. Spirituality is for idealists and romantic dreamers, monks and artists, people who live with their heads in the clouds, but whose feet perhaps don’t quite seem firmly planted on solid ground. We may admire them for their virtues, but we would never really trust them to manage our business affairs. It's not that we doubt their sincerity or good intentions; it's just that we question their competence to function in the real world. Or as J. Paul Getty once observed, the meek may well inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights.
Saint Francis may well have loved the little birds, but its a jungle out there, and it takes a hard-nosed, tough-minded pragmatist to be able to take the bull by the horns and bring home the bacon (which, if you stop to think about it, is a very special skill indeed, since bacon comes from pigs, and bulls are best known for an entirely different product altogether). But there you have it in a nutshell: the conventional wisdom of contemporary American existence. When it comes to surviving in the real world, spirituality is for the birds; what we really need is a real go-getter, with both feet on the ground.
And yet somehow I find this conventional wisdom unconvincing. I want to feel free to aspire to high ideals and noble purposes without being thought of as naive or gullible; I want to soar with the birds just for the joy of it, without worrying about whether I'm a winner or a loser. I crave that sense of peace that comes from the experience of being "at-one" with the ultimate; I want the quiet confidence to live my life in harmony with a reality felt but not seen, without being thought of as ineffectual or incompetent. I want to live spiritually in the real world, just as I am, neither a saint nor a sucker. I want a life that is somehow fulfilling in its own right, without the constant need or desire to compete and keep score.
But how does one achieve such a life? It's a question I ponder constantly, working in the kind of job I do. And I don't know that I'll ever be able to give you all the answers, but I can suggest some places we might all start, small ways in which we can begin to bring to our lives a spiritual quality which can endure even the pressures of day to day living. Like tiny seeds, once planted in fertile soil they will grow; and with proper cultivation, who can say what fruits they will bear?
We might begin, for example, by making the commitment to behave more kindly toward our fellow creatures. Kindness is a quiet and subtle virtue -- it benefits, I suppose, from a certain level of compassion and empathy, but all that is really required is the desire not to be hurtful to others, and the willingness to act on that desire. Given the conventional wisdom of our culture, there is a tendency, I think, to associate kindness with weakness; but in fact the exact opposite is true. Violence and cruelty are typically the products of fear; we strike out at others because we feel threatened and are frightened for our own safety. In sharp contrast, it takes a certain amount of courage to be kind, to be concerned about another person’s well-being rather than always thinking only of one’s own.
There’s a certain kind of wisdom that accompanies kindness as well. When we limit our thinking only to ourselves and our own welfare, when we are constantly suspicious of strangers and defensive in their presence, we become shortsighted and often inadvertently create precisely the kind of antagonistic situation we had hoped to protect ourselves from. But when be behave kindly toward others as a matter of course, we will typically discover that our kindness is returned to us in kind, and that the world is filled with our friends. And this wisdom: the insight that we are all more alike than we are different, is one of the four cornerstones of a Spirituality for the Real World, part of a solid foundation on which the rest of our religious lives can be built.
And then we might also resolve to live our lives honestly. Honesty may seem a rather trivial virtue to serve as a cornerstone of our religious lives, but the kind of honesty I'm talking about goes a little bit beyond a mere "Thou shalt not lie" and "Thou shalt not steal." I’m sure we're all pretty much honest people; we generally don't steal candy from little babies, we don't cheat (much) on our Income Tax. But I'm talking about a life that is scrupulously honest: a life which is committed first and foremost to the service of truth, and which views integrity as its most precious possession; an honesty which cannot be cheated or swindled because its overriding concern is about a fundamental fairness for all of the parties to a transaction, and which remains true to that principle even when no one is watching, and there is no danger whatsoever of being found out.
This sort of honesty is rare indeed, although perhaps not nearly so rare as some might think. I once read a report about a sociologist who set out to test the honesty of New York City taxi cab drivers, by pretending to be a wealthy foreigner unfamiliar with the city and incapable of speaking fluent English. The experimenter would ask, in a heavy, halting accent, to be taken to an address just a few blocks up the street. Of the hundred or so taxis this researcher hailed, only one took him on a needlessly expensive scenic tour of Manhattan before delivering him to his destination; the rest either pointed out the location he was trying to reach and suggested politely that he could walk, or let him in their cabs and drove him directly to the door. A few even refused to charge him for the ride, and almost everyone warned him that he needed to be more careful in the future, since everyone knows that most New York cab drivers can't be trusted.
A third thing which we might do is to commit ourselves to living life generously. Generosity in this sense means more than merely sharing of our wealth and our resources, as important as this may be. It also means being generous in our relations towards others: learning to be patient, and tolerant of another's foibles; learning to be forgiving, and compassionate, even “liberal.” It's a strange quirk of spiritual arithmetic: the more of ourselves we are capable of giving, the greater in fact we ourselves become. We can't take it with us, either our time or our money; all that endures is that which we leave behind, through the act of passing it on to others. Learning to live life generously gives us the power to make an impact on this world, to change it for the better in ways that will survive us.
Generosity is something we hear a lot about this time of year. The Christmas season is the season of giving -- so much so that it becomes easy to feel overwhelmed by the perceived “obligation” of generosity: to our friends and family, to charities, and those less fortunate than ourselves. When the pressures and expectations of generosity begin to feel oppressive, it can likewise seem natural to want to “withdraw” into ourselves and shut the door to the outside world. But when we shut ourselves off from those who have their hands out to us, we are doing much more than merely refusing them a handout. We are not just “cutting them off,” we are cutting ourselves off from them as well. If the requests seem excessive, it’s because we don’t really know or understand our own limits and limitations; our generosity should flow freely, even liberally, from our own sense of abundance, rather than being driven solely by someone else’s sense of need or expectation. And this is the tricky part of the equation. Because generosity requires sacrifice; there’s no doubt about it. But the result should never be merely a transfer of resources from one pocket to another: rather, authentic generosity makes possible authentic sharing as well: shared abundance, shared sacrifice, shared suffering, shared success. And ultimately shared joy as well. Generosity is a process, a style of relationship based on kindness and honesty, in which each is the giver and each is the receiver.
A fourth thing which we can do to bring a greater spiritual quality to our everyday lives is to commit ourselves to living life simply. Simplicity is perhaps the most complicated of the virtues I will discuss here this morning; it's ironic, in a way, but that's just the way the real world works. I know many people (and I'm sure you do too) who go to great trouble to make their lives simple. They only shop in special stores, or from special catalogs; they eat only special food grown on special farms in a special way; their homes are full of complicated gadgets designed to make their lives less dependent upon modern civilization and the global economy. Often times they will express a desire to “get off the grid” and "go back to the land" completely-- to grow their own organic food, generate their own power (through wind turbines or photovoltaic cells or low-level hydroelectric projects), recycle all their garbage and compost their sewage, even sew their own clothes with cloth woven from wool they have sheared from their own llamas.
It’s amazing how complicated a simple life can be.
Don't get me wrong: I admire this type of lifestyle tremendously, in much the same way that I admire the lifestyle of Trappist monks, who still organize their days according to the rhythms of Medieval times. But for my part simplicity begins with the willingness simply to be better aware of one’s surroundings, to reject the simple-minded solutions of the consumer marketplace, with its false economies of scale and mismeasures of productivity, which are often merely reflections of things like abusive sweatshop labor or reckless environmental plundering, and the ability of the powerful to shift the true costs of production onto the less fortunate while retaining the profits for themselves, and “passing the savings on to you.”
I'm a great believer in the efficacy of KISS -- "Keep it Simple, Stupid." Things tend to get complicated of their own accord; the discipline of simplicity is learning how best not to contribute to that process. Simplicity is about learning to differentiate between the essential and the extraneous, the sublime and the absurd; it's the ability to distinguish between substance and appearance, and to identify real value. It’s the philosophical principle of Occam's Razor, the law of Parsimony, brought down to the level of authentic frugality, and unit pricing.
There is another dimension to the virtue of simplicity as well. The word simple is sometimes used as a synonym for foolish; spiritual simplicity reflects a willingness to indulge in a little foolishness ourselves, to chuckle harmlessly at one's own silly foibles without really worrying what the neighbors will think, and to enjoy "childish" pastimes even when we know full well that we are no longer children; to be as kind, and as honest, and as generous with our own selves as we aspire to be toward those around us.
Kindness, Honesty, Generosity, and Simplicity may not seem like much, but these are the qualities from which it all begins, and they are always available to us, as near to our hearts as breathing out and breathing in. Together they can form the foundation of a spirituality for the real world: a spirituality which is neither naive nor superstitious, but contains within it the power to transform our lives, and in time perhaps the rest of the planet as well.
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 2:57 PM
