W O T T H E H E L L

The other day, I think last Tuesday, I noticed a nasty chilly draft, blowing directly toward the right.

For this week's sermon I decided to compose a long epic poem. I wrote it Tuesday night. But the next day, when I saw that it was composed entirely of profanity, I knew I had to start over. Since I couldn't read what I wrote, I've incorporated another epic poem into this, one written by somebody else, but we'll get to that.

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Last week I spoke of the Edge, where people like us Unitarian Universalists have to dwell, and push boundaries. Then I read this editorial leader in a British newspaper:

This was the week . . . when the US declared itself a different country. That's what will leave a historic mark. The capture of the Senate makes possible the advance of materialistic individualism on many fronts. State and community are in retreat. Corporate power, instead of being shamed by its recent crimes, can be expected to advance.

Dozens of conservative federal judges with lifetime tenure await confirmation they can now expect to get. This will permanently reorient constitutional trends. The slashing of forests and the drilling of wilderness, by timber and oil interests newly let loose, will be still less reversible. The rich men's tax cuts of 2001 will be secured against revision, and other tax cuts added. The 40 million Americans without health insurance can expect to remain that way. Axioms of inequality will be engraved deeper into the pillars of American society.¹

Just in case you forgot about last Tuesday. But this is not an apology for the losing party, either. Neither side set any great national goals that don't involve giveaways of one sort or another. Neither challenged the American people in any way. Neither attempted to inspire us.

In Massachusetts, the people voted to halt bilingual education, and to maintain the system of big-money elections, and darn near a majority — 45 percent — voted to revoke the income tax.

The Edge gets lonelier, doesn't it?

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It is a sobering thought, and frankly a depressing one, to realize that I will not live long enough to see the earth recover from the pollutants that will not now be spared the ground and sky and rivers and sea with almost no one left to prevent it happening; will not live long enough to see the judicial system recover enough to serve the interests of justice; will not live long enough to see a reversal of the fantastically escalating chasm between rich and poor, those with health care and those without it, those with access to power and those shut out.

Sobering. Depressing. You felt all that this week, I guess. I could pretend you didn't feel that and ignore it and do a tap-dance or something. But it wouldn't work, would it? The Edge gets lonelier.

v

Oh, my title. Sky called me Friday. Sometimes while we're still working on the Order of Meeting I fill in blanks with strange words. She thought I'd done that with the title this week. No, I said, that's the title.

In the language of the great mystical writers through the ages, one finds terms denoting aspects of the spiritual life that may bring a clarity to our understanding. It's just such a term that I've used — denoting a quality that will be helpful in these times. It is a kind of technical term, to be found in the soaring passages of the mystic Archy.

The term, Wotthehell, comes from Archy & Mehitabel, composed by the mystical cockroach Archy, though we are given to understand that the author, Don Marquis, had something to do with this. If you didn't know, you should know that Mehitabel is a cat. Not a mainstream cat. Kind of a disreputable alley-cat. So just now when we might be suffering a bit of that out-in-the-cold feeling, I offer you this passage of the epic poem composed by Archy the cockroach in Don Marquis' Archy & Mehitabel.

well boss I saw mehitabel
last evening
she was out in the alley
dancing on the cold cobbles
while the wild december wind
blew through her frozen whiskers
and as she danced
she wailed and sang to herself
uttering the fragments
that rattled in her cold brain
in part as follows

dance mehitabel dance
caper and shake a leg
what little blood is left
will fizz like wine in a keg

whistle a tune north wind
on my hollow marrow bones
i ll dance the time with three good feet
here on the alley stones

freeze you bloody december
i never could stay a pet
but i am a lady in spite of hell
and there s life in the old dame yet

eight of my lives are gone
it s years since my fur was slicked
but blow north wind blow
i m damned if i am licked

i will not eat tomorrow
and i did not eat today
but wotthehell i ask you
the word is toujours gai²

v

And to the upcoming catastrophes, not that I know what they're going to be, though some of them are predictable, but we can be sure they're coming because they always do, I say, Wotthehell.

T.S. Eliot prayed, "Teach us to care and not to care."

And as far as I'm concerned, Mehitabel the cat's song "Wotthehell" is an anthem in the religious person's life. Because Wotthehell is the capacity to discern the passing concern from the enduring value, the truly important from the not-so-important, the external accident from the internal essence, the external accident from the internal essence.

And even more than that: It's the capacity to discern the difference between the situation as it exists now as the facts tell us — and the vision of the human possible as our hearts tell us. It is to dare to ask not Why, but Why Not?

So what setback has settled in in front of you, in front of us? What obstacle to the pursuit of your dreams, your inner destiny, your bliss? You might take this setback too seriously. Decide the struggle isn't worth it. Blend in, quit fighting, figure out how to play the game on their terms with their bottom line.

Wotthehell is the capacity to judge the relative weight and value of things. It is a mark of a spiritually attuned person. It's a capacity each of us needs countless times in the course of any day, not just in the face of the Big Obstacles. A disordered sense of proportion unable to judge the relative importance of things is a mark of mental and spiritual unhealth. Nor can we rely on society outside ourselves to tell us what's important: just take a look at votes on the ballot questions.

Wotthehell is the inner capacity to know the relative weight and value of things.

And Nonetheless is what you have after you cease to form your agenda around the Wotthehell-quality issues of life.

Wotthehell and Nevertheless: both of these are inner capacities we need every day. A community or a congregation needs them too.

You've probably read the story of the founding of Lake Wobegon by Unitarian missionaries as recounted by Garrison Keilor. To review: these Boston Unitarians felt they had been given a special mission to convert the Indians by means of interpretive dance. We read that, although they felt experienced this call in mid-June, they got side-tracked with an endless round of receptions and parties so that they didn't leave Boston and entrain for Minnesota until September 21.

And after one night in what is now Lake Wobegon, they awoke to a foot of snow. Their once-keen sense of mission was frozen out, snowed under. They gave up.

They weren't very good at judging the relative weight and value of things, and got overwhelmed by obstacles, and failed.

And when it was all over there was lots of recrimination to go around. Just who was it, anyway, who scheduled all those receptions and parties so it took them three months before they began their trip, getting there just as the weather got ugly?

But then, with what, it must be said, was not actually a very compelling mission, it really seemed that they lacked any compelling Nevertheless to keep them going.

v

In difficult times, threatening times, times of adversity — we must never be drawn away from our compelling mission — what this time demands of us — to indulge in trivia, fighting each other, nursing grudges, holding on to hurts. To all of these we have to learn to say, Wotthehell.

And individually, your own part in that mission is a nevertheless so important that no self-doubt, and nobody else's doubts about you, must divert or deter you. A community like ours is here, in part, to help each of us understand our rightful place in this work, this mission — and to take that place. To all the trivia and troubles that would keep you from your human calling, your part in the work of these times — just say Wotthehell.

v

Nonetheless. The vision we hold precious. The trust, love, and commitment of a community of people. The talents and callings we bring. The vision of compassion, justice, freedom, and the unfolding possibilities of our lives. The hope of peace on earth. The faith that wells up from the truth of our hearts, that is more true than the facts; and the passion that fuels our work, that is stronger than insuperable obstacles.

There's a song the freedom riders used to sing. It was a favorite of my boss at the UUA, when I was on staff there, Dr. Loretta Williams, which meant that anybody who worked in the Department of Social Justice was bound to know it too before long. It was the theme of the public TV series she helped to produce on the civil rights movement, Eyes on the Prize, taken from this song:

We're gonna board that old Greyhound,
Carrying love from town to town,
Keep your eyes on the prize,
Hold on, hold on.

The only thing we did wrong,
Stayed in the wilderness a day too long,
Keep your eyes on the prize,
Hold on, hold on.

But the one thing we did right,
Was the day we started to fight,
Keep your eyes on the prize,
Hold on, hold on.

Keep your eyes on the prize. There are lots of things to divert us from the prize.

And we have the capacity to recognize it. Nothing is quite so central to a spiritually attuned life than the cultivation of this capacity: to judge the difference between the passing concern and the enduring value. To judge the difference between our fears and our inmost vision. To judge the difference between the facts on the ground and the truth in our minds and souls.

The fifteenth century Indian poet Kabir knew that capacity hidden at the center of our lives. He spoke of the exterior of our lives as a clay jug enclosing great treasures we may neglect, but they are there.

Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains, and the maker of canyons and pine mountains!
All seven oceans are inside, and hundreds of millions of stars.
The acid that tests gold is there, and the one who judges jewels.

The acid that tests gold, and the one who judges jewels. Yes. The capacity in the chaos to see the treasures that cannot be taken, the people and the possibilities and all that really matters, all that is really urgent —

v

Now if we've got our heads and hearts clear on both the Wotthehell and the Nevertheless, then let's proceed directly to what we've got to do.

We will have to go about our work — each of us finding our most essential life-work, all of us together devoting ourselves to our vital, essential work as a Unitarian Universalist spiritual community — as we have never done before. We will have to commit, and dream, and work. We will have to be very creative and fairly gutsy.

We will not be able to afford to think small or to be small. It will never be the case that everybody will want to be a part of a dynamic Unitarian Universalist congregation because we do believe in something, are committed to something that contradicts many of the prevailing assumptions of the day, something that will not be welcomed by all the powerful interests out there. No, our message will not please everyone. But we ought to be a large and powerful force. There are many out there who belong here, whose energies and passions ought to be joined with ours.

As we dream and commit, we cannot afford to be too cautious or timid. As we learned last Tuesday, excessive timidity and caution are neither compelling nor inspiring. When we're too ambivalent about our own mission and work in the world, our budget is anemic, we're afraid to invest wholeheartedly in the things we say we believe in, we sweat over the cost of doing what we have both the capacity and the duty to do. We will have to enlarge the scope of our dreaming and daring.

A candle is for burning,

and lives are for living.

v

But there's another spiritual capacity that's just as essential, and it's laughter, when it comes not from the surface, but from some deep place.

Wotthehell. If you cannot laugh at what is, you cannot dare to dream what might be.

Laughter requires consciousness. I don't mean simply that shallow response to comical situations that has everybody chuckling, or the nervous laughter done at somebody else's expense, oozing out of a resentment.

I mean the human capacity that requires consciousness, the sense of humor that Schopenhauer called "the only divine quality" we have. It comes out of a perception of what T.S. Eliot called "the laughter at the heart of things." There is nothing superficial about this capacity and it cannot exist in anyone who is unwilling to explore the darkness and suffering in life. In fact, a sure clue of its lack is the compulsion always to "lighten things up," evade the tragic darkness of being, dodge any conversation or consideration that seems "heavy" with nervous laughter or abrupt change of subject. No, not that. Soul-deep laughter that sees it all and feels it. Wotthehell.

v

Nevertheless. Elie Wiesel calls this Nevertheless And yet. They are his two favorite words. "Sometimes," he writes in his memoirs, "we must try, even if it is for nothing. Sometimes we must try because it is for nothing. Precisely because death awaits us in the end, we must live fully. Precisely because an event seems devoid of meaning, we must give it one. Precisely because the future eludes us, we must create it."⁴

1 Hugo Young. The Guardian, Thursday November 7, 2002.

² Don Marquis. archy & mehitabel. New York: Doubleday, 1927. For the entire poem, see pp. 195-202.

³ Lauren Van der Post, quoted in Helen Luke. "The Sense of Humor," in The Way of Woman. New York: Doubleday, 1995, p. 77.

⁴ Elie Wiesel. All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs. New York: Knofp, 1995, p. 17.

Readings

Rabindranath Tagore:

In the Sanskrit Language the bird is described as "twice-born" — once in its limited shell and then finally in the freedom of the unbounded sky. . . . In all departments of life man shows this dualism — his existence within the range of obvious facts and his transcendence of it in a realm of deeper meaning.

Having this instinct inherent in his mind which ever suggests to him the crossing of the border, he has never accepted what is apparent as final, and his incessant struggle has been to break through the shell of his limitations. . . . The best wealth of his civilization has been achieved by his following the guidance of this instinct in his ceaseless adventure of the Endless Further. His achievement of truth goes far beyond his needs and the realization of his self strives across the frontier of its individual interest. This proves to him his infinity and makes his religion real to him by his own manifestation in truth and goodness. . . .

We have the age-long tradition in our country  . . . that through the process of yoga man can transcend the utmost bounds of his humanity and find himself in a pure state of consciousness of his undivided unity with parabrahman. . . . And he is God, who is not merely a sum total of facts, but the goal that lies immensely beyond all that is comprised in the past and the present.

The Religion of Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1931, 204-206.

Andrew Harvey:

Any spiritual vision that does not ask us to calmly face the appalling facts is, I believe, whether consciously or unconsciously, conspiring in our infantilization and so in our destruction. . . .

The only response that I find honorable in this potentially terminal situation is that of dedicated love. Whatever happens, whatever horrors of destruction unfurl upon the world, however terrible the suffering of human beings and nature becomes, such a response keeps the heart open and keeps alive courage and compassion."⁴

—Andrew Harvey. The Return of the Mother. Berkeley: Frog Ltd., 1995. 436f.

Parting

Elie Weisel:

Sometimes we must try, even if it is for nothing. Sometimes we must try because it is for nothing. Precisely because death awaits us in the end, we must live fully. Precisely because an event seems devoid of meaning, we must give it one. Precisely because the future eludes us, we must create it.

Meditation

We know not where leads the road before us

But we gather ourselves to the road that beckons us and we walk on,

carrying hurt and fear and broken hopes

yet carried forward by a great engine in the heart

that takes up the hurt and fear and broken hopes

and wrings out of these

something fresh

and strong

and vital and true and pure

And so do we find the truth of our hearts,

And so do we find our way forward

and we walk on

and gather all that is most authentically our selves

and leave the rest behind.

So let us find the ravishing harmony of the light and the darkness

Find in this time the truth of our lives

and our vital work

May we hear beyond the noise and tumult that seem so real

May we hear the resounding music that flows from the Silence.