A New Year's sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
January 5, 2003
A year is ended; another begun. What we call the beginning is often the end and to make an end is to make a beginning, or so says T.S. Eliot. And any action is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat, he says. Or worse: to an illegible stone. What does it all mean? And that is where we start.
We are joined, for the sake of our lives and for the sake of the world, in a work much like that of an artist, so I read Albert Camus' remarks on art, spoken 35 years ago in Sweden, but pretty much to the point here, this morning. Where he speaks of art, we may think of religion.
He carries on in that lecture about "art for art's sake" — removed from reality, frivolous, which time will not remember. He contrasts that with propaganda, which banishes truth and reality. He wants to know what real and authentic art is.
New Year's is a good time to ask the same question of our religion.
The Bishops, we know, went for propaganda. The truth had to be subverted to the honour of The Church, capital T, capital C, no mere institution of men and women but divine, it insists, so we may not admit the truth about it. Its answers as well as its choice of questions must stand despite all evidence, despite science, despite the realities of the soul. Its authority must be maintained, at any cost. I grew up and spent my youth in churches, various ones, all of these Protestant, where propaganda also reigned. It saw what it wanted to: it was bad art.
Or there's religion for religion's sake. It's hard to explain what we're doing or why we're doing it to anybody who doesn't share our arcane churchly world, and we never have to explain it to ourselves if we don't want to, but it keeps us busy.
Camus' answer to this unworthy art is not for the fainthearted. And we are joined, for the sake of our lives and for the sake of the world, in a work much like that of an artist. Here is Camus' answer:
Well, our era is one of those fires whose unbearable heat will doubtless reduce many a work to ashes! But as for those which remain, their metal will be intact, and, looking at them, we shall be able to indulge without restraint in the supreme joy of the intelligence which we call "admiration."
One may long, as I do, for a gentler flame, a respite, a pause for musing. But perhaps there is no other peace for the artist than what he finds in the heat of combat. "Every wall is a door," Emerson correctly said. Let us not look for the door, and the way out, anywhere but in the wall against which we are living. Instead, let us seek the respite where it is — in the very thick of the battle. For in my opinion . . , it is there. Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope.
What is this, then, about the heat of combat? The door in the wall against which we are living?
It says I'm going to talk about Time. I am. The Mystery of Time. Eliot's poem points out that "history is a pattern / Of timeless moments." He says the present is "the intersection of the timeless moment."
First, about these times. The gods have not spared us from living in an interesting era. In his foreword to State of the World 2002, Kofi Annan says
Fifteen years have passed since the World Commission on Environment and Development presented its historic report, Our Common Future, to the United Nations General Assembly. The Commission's recommendations — presented unanimously, without reservations or footnotes . . . called for a fundamental reordering of global priorities. . . . At the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, governments . . . committed themselves to an unprecedented global effort to free our children and grandchildren from the danger of living on a planet whose ecosystems and resources can no longer provide for their needs.The . . . breakthrough achieved at Rio has not, however, proved decisive enough to break with business as usual.
I guess not. Our own nation has turned contemptuously away from the vision of Rio and its course of care for the health of the earth and its people, and is interested in the United Nations only when it can help out with a war. It has founded it actions on a tragic misapprehension of what it is that makes for peace. America has chosen weapons and warfare as the universal solution to challenges of life:—
And so we cannot do anything about climate change because the science, says our president, is not conclusive. Instead a new rule, promulgated the Administration on the last day of 2002, will let thousands of aging coal-fired power plants and other industrial sites escape pollution controls, which it says are too expensive.
But there is no hesitancy about spending hundreds of billions of dollars — seven billion now and $238 billion later — on a strategic missile defence plan that virtually all the available science already says doesn't work, a system announced in a British newspaper headline as "the Premature Birth of the Son of Star Wars."
And I wonder — will next month bring a war to distract from the government's failure to find Bin Laden, or will war be held off a year so that the fear of whatever it is Iraq might do to America and the world can be held over the nation as a reëlection campaign theme, a campaign that won't have to be conducted in what could be the disastrous aftermath of a war?
It has been a year in which the attack on the World Trade Center has been shamelessly transferred into justification for arctic drilling and into justification for a secretly-formulated energy policy apparently dictated by the oil industry, Enron in particular, that adds up to consume, consume, burn, burn; the systematic elimination of the regulation of industry, justification for funding for the missile shield, for managed news; a year of insistent use of September 11 to define America's correct role in the world as one of initiating and waging virtually perpetual war;—
At just about this hour, right now, Archbishop Tutu of South Africa is telling a British television audience, and I quote: `To see a powerful country use its power frequently unilaterally, I mean the United States says, "You do this" to the world — "If you don't do it we will do it" — that's sad, that's sad.'
It has been a year when anyone who questions all this or dares ask why it is that the regard in which America is held by the nations of the world has steadily fallen in the last year, why it is that they hate us out there, what it is about America's way of being in the world that might be contributing to that —
a year when to ask these things is to be branded and denounced as anti-American, disloyal, or at least inappropriate.
It has been a year culminating an era of failure of the political leadership, and the intelligentsia, and the media, during which truth has been hard to come by and vision even harder.
It's been a year when for the first time since 1945, our nation's policy is to consider using high-yield nuclear weapons on a first-strike basis.
The opposition is all but silent. The Massachusetts legislature reëlects the champion of big-money political campaigning and dealmaking. And political leadership has become the art of the buying time, putting off the crucial decisions.
And as we were saying, that is where we start this new year. And religion, like art, that is worth the ground it takes up, must stand both in this culture and against it. It must find creative ways to speak to that culture and to act to redeem it. To act how? And any action is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat, Eliot says. Or worse: to an illegible stone. What does it all mean? That is where we start.
And what is it in your life? That is where we start. These are the times for our setting forth:
Right here, in time, a moment in time, in the flow of the mystery of time.
The mystery of time:
The physicist Julian Barbour is one of many now arguing that time is an illusion; that time is just a cosmic convenience that keeps everything from happening all at once.1 He writes,
In any instant, we are aware of many things at once. Through memories we are, as it were present simultaneously in many different Nows . . . Our memories are pictures of other Nows within this Now, rather like snapshots in an album.2 . . . Quantum cosmology — and hence our universe — is timeless.3
Or there's T.S. Eliot — "history is a pattern / Of timeless moments," he says, and this moment is "the intersection of the timeless moment."
So let us leave our times, troubled as they are, aside, just for the moment, and think about time. It's a spooky subject. Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist, pointed out that the fabric of reality is not only stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
We experience this Mystery of Time in at least three distinct ways.
Like a circle, there is the natural movement of time, like the clock that always returns to where it began, endlessly, or like the south face of the tower clock in the Bangor church, that is right twice a day because time moves inexorably round whether the hands do or not. The Greeks were preoccupied with this kind of time, oriented toward the seasons and shortening and lengthening days, around and around, repeating cycles.
Or like a line, there's historical time, the linear course of cultures and civilizations. The Judaeo-Christian Bible is oriented toward this kind of time, a line with past and present and future. Religion oriented toward this kind of time has often gotten fixated on some kind of perfect past before sin messed everything up, and it tries sometimes to return to the original golden age. Sometimes religion seems largely to be about nostalgia. Or maybe it's a yearning for a golden age to come, or maybe a dread of future ages of fire or ice. A dream of a golden age to come can be a creative force but in truth there's noplace other than the present to live.
So there's this other kind of time, and that's what I'm interested in today. I don't know what to call it. It's not a line and not a circle, I haven't got an image for it. Meister Eckhart, in the 13th century, called it the "eternal now." Kierkegaard called it "the pregnant moment." The New Testament calls it "kairos," as contrasted with clock-time, or "chronos." Kairos.
It's not subject to mathematical or chronological measurement, because, like the infinitely small, infinitely dense particle from which the universe came, it holds the wealth of all time. It's qualitative time. The theologian Tillich described eternity in these terms. By eternity, he didn't mean a forever that he didn't believe in. He meant the infinite depth dimension of time, right here, right now.
Maybe you can remember when you have experienced eternity in a moment and your life changed. It's what the last hymn is about. Words of the great Transcendentalist William Channing Gannett: "The soul has lifted moments, above the drift of days, when life's great meaning breaketh in sunrise on our ways."
The day King was shot was one of those for me. Or a moment years ago at Great Pond in Connecticut, with its profusion of life, noble and great and glorious, even though I could never find the place again. And when our now-corrupted Environmental Protection Agency sells out the interests of the earth itself for some short-sighted commercial and political interest, and I begin to rage in a way some friends will never understand, it's got something to do with that day at Great Pond.
I could speak of many more such transformative moments, and so could you, where moral imagination is born. Moral imagination.
You cannot ever understand a human being without reference to these moments of time in their lives. To explain why people have chosen the lifeworks that they have, have the passions and drives that they do, you have to go back to those moments. The World in a grain of sand, Heaven in a wildflower, Eternity in an hour.
Which is what Emerson meant when he wrote,
There is a difference between one and another hour of life in their authority and subsequent effect. Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.
And really the sermon is about that kind of time, and that is why I started where I did, with the present dangerous moment of chronological time, because this moment holds threats, possibilities, and challenges that feel to us overwhelming, and we feel feeble in the face of it, don't we?
There is, therefore, another feature of this "kairos"-kind of time that we ought to know about. It is full of powers and energies. Maybe that's what it is in us that resonates with fantastic stories of Tolkein's Ring trilogy. Even the trees seem to rise up to defend the earth and its people. Have you known those days — when great stores of energy seemed to open up within you, and you achieved things you still cannot quite account for, with a preternatural energy? when creative, transformative powers seem to appear?
I am going to insert here a rather odd-sounding passage from the great Sri Aurobindo, from his book, The Hour of God. But listen: it is strange, and magnificent.
In the hour of God, cleanse thy soul of all self-deceit and hypocrisy . . . that thou mayst look straight into thy spirit and hear that which summons it. Cast aside all fear, for the hour is often terrible, a fire and a whirlwind and a tempest . . . but he who can stand up in it to the truth of his purpose is he who shall stand. . . . Nor let worldly prudence whisper too closely in thy ear; for it is the hour of the unexpected.
It's in the thick of the battle, says Camus, who knew about the thick of battles; — it's in the unbearable heat. The only door is in the wall against which you are living. Any action is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat, to an illegible stone. Nor, says Aurobindo, nor let worldly prudence whisper too closely in thy ear, for it is the hour of the unexpected. It is an hour that calls for the cleansing of souls from self-deceit and hypocrisy, a time to look directly into our spirits to hear what it is that summons us. I believe that's the kind of religion we need now.
Here we start, in the face of all this tumult and danger — with — great joy! In the very midst of the sound and the fury of our history, cried Camus: "Let us rejoice." Let us rejoice, indeed — I paraphrase him — at having witnessed — at least for ourselves; it will come for the general public later; it has to start somewhere — let us rejoice for having witnessed the death of a lying and comfort-loving era and at being faced with cruel truths. Let us rejoice as humans because a prolonged hoax has collapsed and we see clearly what threatens us. And let us rejoice as Unitarian Universalists, torn from our sleep and our deafness, forced to keep our eyes on destitution, prisons, and bloodshed. If, faced with such a vision, we can preserve the memory of days and of faces, and if, conversely, faced with the world's beauty, we manage not to forget the humiliated, then our lives and our spiritual movement will gradually discover their strength.
And we shall be able to admit that this ordeal contributes to our chances of authenticity, and we shall accept the challenge. And to tell the truth, wisdom has never declined so much as when it involved no risks and belonged exclusively to a few humanists buried in libraries. But today, when at last the wisdom we cherish has to face real dangers, there is a chance that it may again stand up and be respected.
One may long for a gentler flame, a respite, a pause for musing. But perhaps there is no other peace for us than what we find in the heat of combat. "Every wall is a door." Let us not look for the door, and the way out, anywhere but in the wall against which we are living. Instead, let us seek the respite where it is — in the very thick of the battle. For in my opinion, and this is where I shall close, it is there. Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope.
2 55f.
3 59.
Albert Camus, his lecture "Create Dangerously,"
delivered at Uppsala University in 1957, on the subject of Art; and I think, very much to the point on the subject of Religion, too.
from Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. Translated from the French by Justin O'Brien. New York: Modern Library: 1963, 190ff; first published Alfred A. Knopf, 1960.
An Oriental wise man always used to ask the divinity in his prayers to be so kind as to spare him from living in an interesting era. As we are not wise, the divinity has not spared us and we are living in an interesting era. In any case, our era forces us to take an interest in it. . . .
To create today is to create dangerously. . . .
What characterizes our time, indeed, is the way the masses and their wretched condition have burst upon contemporary sensibilities. We now know that they exist, whereas we once had a tendency to forget them. And if we are more aware, it is not because our aristocracy, artistic or otherwise, has become better — no, have no fear — it is because the masses have become stronger and keep people from forgetting them. . . .
Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and this is its whole secret. And thousands of concentration camps and barred cells are not enough to hide this staggering testimony of dignity. . . . Man's unbroken testimony as to his suffering and his nobility cannot be suspended; the act of breathing cannot be suspended. . . .
My conclusion will be simple. It will consist of saying, in the very midst of the sound and the fury of our history: "Let us rejoice." Let us rejoice, indeed, at having witnessed the death of a lying and comfort-loving Europe and at being faced with cruel truths. Let us rejoice as men because a prolonged hoax has collapsed and we see clearly what threatens us. And let us rejoice as artists, torn from our sleep and our deafness, forced to keep our eyes on destitution, prisons, and bloodshed. If, faced with such a vision, we can preserve the memory of days and of faces, and if, conversely, faced with the world's beauty, we manage not to forget the humiliated, then Western art will gradually recover its strength and its sovereignty. . . .
But we shall be able to admit that this ordeal contributes meanwhile to our chances of authenticity, and we shall accept the challenge. . . . If liberty has become dangerous, then it may cease to be prostituted. . . . And . . . to tell the truth, wisdom has never declined so much as when it involved no risks and belonged exclusively to a few humanists buried in libraries. But today, when at last it has to face real dangers, there is a chance that it may again stand up and be respected. . . .
Well, our era is one of those fires whose unbearable heat will doubtless reduce many a work to ashes! But as for those which remain, their metal will be intact, and, looking at them, we shall be able to indulge without restraint in the supreme joy of the intelligence which we call "admiration."
One may long, as I do, for a gentler flame, a respite, a pause for musing. But perhaps there is no other peace for the artist than what he finds in the heat of combat. "Every wall is a door," Emerson correctly said. Let us not look for the door, and the way out, anywhere but in the wall against which we are living. Instead, let us seek the respite where it is — in the very thick of the battle. For in my opinion, and this is where I shall close, it is there. Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope.
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. . . .
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
Albert Camus: —
One may long . . . for a gentler flame, a respite, a pause for musing. But perhaps there is no other peace for [us than what we find] in the heat of combat. "Every wall is a door," Emerson correctly said. Let us not look for the door, and the way out, anywhere but in the wall against which we are living. Instead, let us seek the respite where it is — in the very thick of the battle. For in my opinion, and this is where I shall close, it is there. Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope.
A year has flown and another presents itself and the flow of time has us wondering, yearning, fearing. We wonder what summons will come to us, what hopes realized or dashed, what meaning will become visible for us to discern in the passage of our days.
Our minds and hearts are filled with noise and clutter gathered in our passage through these days. We have had moments of clarity and we hunger for more, so that our place and our work might be clear to us and so that our days might be lighted with joy.
And thus we gather: and quiet ourselves in the trust that some deep intelligence may rise from deep places within us, and noble purposes and profound energies may guide our hands, and that, fully grasping the difficulties and challenges of this time, we shall discover in our selves and in our gathering a roaring engine of healing and creation, and know the Love from which flows all our loving interactions, and know it to be the force and strength and meaning and soul of our living, in this day and in all days to come.
In this silence, let it well up, let it cleanse and heal and summons us.