Relative Freedom

So about a week ago, I had the great pleasure of being at Red Rocks amphitheater with Kyle Heimer.  Kyle has an extra ticket for the rock band Rush--a longtime favorite of mine.  The band has been around for 42 years now--a year longer than I have.  I think part of their longevity is their flexibility—they keep growing and changing over time, and, to me, their longevity is also about the quality of the lyrics.
The drummer, Neil Peart, their primary lyricist, is clearly a bright fellow--interested in politics, religion, and literature---his songs reflect an intellectual curiosity and a libertarian humanist sensibility.
One of my favorite songs by the band is titled Freewill.  Now I'm not claiming this is deep philosophy, but as many of you know, I've done my time immersed in baroque philosophy--complex, esoteric, and mostly at a ridiculously far remove from anything resembling real life.  As I've said in the past, I no longer have much interest in grand philosophical systems that don't speak to how I live my life day to day. Besides, I think most of us draw tremendous comfort and meaning from the soundtracks of our lives.  Music is where I and many others turn for comfort, energy, and connection.
Anyway, back to Rush and that much-loved song of mine.  The final stanza and chorus are:

"Each of us
A cell of awareness
Imperfect and incomplete.
Genetic blends
With uncertain ends
On a fortune hunt that's far too fleet.

You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill;
I will choose a path that's clear
I will choose freewill."

I love the clarity of the song--philosophy lessons that last five minutes twenty-four seconds are about what I have patience for these days.
    So there we are, my sermon on fate, destiny, freewill, and freedom done in less than the length of a pop song.  I believe we are free to make choices, to choose our lives.  Thanks for coming, be good, see you next time.
    Well, maybe it's not that simple. I have to admit that the more I researched the subject, the more I pondered, the more daunted I became. Fate, destiny, is a complex hard topic—I initially, foolishly, thought it would be pretty simple. I don't believe in an external controlling intelligence and so fate goes poof---if there's no grand designer, there's no grand design. And yet the more I thought about what fate and freedom actually means, the more I realized the complexity involved. If I were a parish minister rather than a chaplain, this is a sort of topic I would engage as a series rather than a one off.
First, I think I need to define what I'm talking about here. What I am addressing here is capital F Fate or capital D Destiny—a preordained, predetermined path or outcome for one's life. A belief that someone or something has created an order that pushes or pulls one toward a particular end. Here's where I begin to get tripped up. This seems a slam-dunk as I don't believe in this kind of external intelligence, and yet I do believe that we are all embedded in webs of connection we can barely understand. Do these webs constitute enough of an independent intelligence to influence our lives? I think they do, but there are no simple answers here. I also think we need to expand our definition of fate and destiny, perhaps with a small f and d, and so reshape our concepts of influence and connection. I do not believe that the God of the Bible has determined the course of my life, but I do believe that a million little notes, some heard, some beyond my perception create the soundtrack of my life—some days Rush and Jethro Tull, some days John Denver and Sheryl Crow, sometimes Vivaldi or Mozart, and sometimes it's just elevator music.
I do believe we are free, but every decision, every relationship, every action, every philosophical/theological stance, every motion and moment happens in a context.  We do not live our lives in a vacuum. We are free, but it is a relative freedom.  And by relative freedom I don't mean the fact that my mother is 1500 miles away—although, trust me, with my family that is a sort of freedom.  Rather I mean that I am relatively free given the psycho-social dysfunctional family psychopathology I have acquired, the physical and disease process damage this body has sustained in 41 years, the cultural biases I have—both as a middle-class liberal east-coast born American white male and as an Ashkenazi Jew, the educational and career-based opportunities and limitations that I have---in short, all the chosen and imposed, conscious and unconscious restrictions in and around my life have an impact on both my sense of freedom and the reality of that freedom.
Now having just admitted my impatience with complicated philosophy, that little litany of disclaimers I just offered sounds a lot like complicated philosophy.  Oh well, you can take the boy out of the philosophy department.
Let me try and simplify what I mean.  I am free because I perceive myself making choices, and yet, at the same time, I am not free because my choices are subject to so many influences that are very real. I can, and sometimes try to, deny these elements in my life, very real elements that shape my destiny as surely as any god.
How can I consider myself truly free with so many forces pushing on my decisions? Do these forces not constitute some kind of fate or destiny.? You might call this negative-destiny—not in the sense that it is necessarily bad, but rather that many of the conscious and unconscious restrictions on my decisions have a fairly strong limiting effect on what I do. I have commitments to my family--Julia, Benjamin; to my employer, Memorial; this congregation and the UUA; friends; and so on---to meet those commitments I do not just take off for Nepal on a whim nor do I behave in ways that are strongly inconsistent with those commitments. Just a small example, a friend recently ended his employment at Memorial. Some friends threw him a party to which I was invited—at Hooter's. It may seem a silly thing, but I really thought about whether I should go. I don't particularly approve of their business model—it feels exploitative. I try to be aware that my role as a minister and a chaplain means that I represent something to a number of people. I've heard other ministers say the same thing. Although I have much less theological baggage to deal with due to the nature of our tradition, ministers are invested with certain expectations by their religious communities. And this too, is perhaps, a form of fate. And this is a form of fate, and a loss of freedom, that everyone deals with in different ways. The prejudice our congregations sometimes hold against those who are conservative in their politics or those who serve in the military is also a sort of predestination that we carry out and make people more or less comfortable in our churches. A person who walks in here wearing a cross and a military uniform is, you could say, destined, to get a different welcome than the person who walks in wearing tie-die and Birkenstocks. Perhaps not a strongly different welcome, especially at this church, and it is not a very substantial form of destiny, but you get the point. Everything we bring to an encounter, visually and symbolically and historically contributes to determining outcome. It's a form of mini-destiny.
I'm not going to speak this morning about Augustinian or Calvinistic conceptions of Predestination except to say that I don't believe them in the slightest. I spent time reaquainting myself with those concepts and they still make head and heart hurt. I don't believe that many Unitarian Universalists are interested in a God who has already, more or less randomly, chosen who will go to heaven and who will go to hell regardless of any behavior or choice. Grace is, those folks claim, purely a gift from God that humans in their post fall-from-Eden state of depravity neither merit nor can earn being incapable of good. Some of our ancestors, like Michael Servetus, died denying such capricious and demoralizing theologies, and I don't think many of us have much more stomach for such ideas. Also, freewill is either true or it isn't. If some god has already determined the exact shape of my life then I don't really have freewill. Variations on the theme—God doesn't choose, but is aware of all possible choices and knows which one I will choose, or God knows the final outcomes but not the small details still turn people into puppets. I readily grant that freedom and freewill are complex ideas, but I have always and will continue to resist any theology or philosophy that denies the basic integrity, worth, and inherent potential nobility and beauty of the individual human being.

What piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!
I am not completely free, no one but a psychopath on a desert island is or could be, but I am blessed to live in a time and culture that accords me about as much potential freedom as any human being has ever enjoyed in the history of civilization. I will not throw away the benefits of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the American Revolution to a theology that demeans my basic humanity. I will, on the other hand, try to preach one that enshrines humanity's best efforts to shed the shackles of tyranny, dogma, and ignorance. Let me stop this portion here. I don't want this to be a barnburner sermon, but this is something I feel passionate about and proud of our heritage.
But whatever fate may be embedded in my genes and imposed by environment or personal history is still not the "foretold in the stars" destiny most people mean by the word.  Here's where things get hard for me.  I am not particularly fatalistic.  I don't believe in some foreordained destiny--at least I don't think I do.  My problem here is that I cannot deny the presence of what feel like moments that seem beyond random, beyond pure chance, moments that are, indeed, significant and do seem to reflect some kind of path or pattern to my life. Various people have noted these sorts of events. Mythologist Joseph Campbell said that when we follow our bliss, "a thousand unseen helping hands" aid us in our journey. He's not alone in feeling that way, WH Murray, a Scottish mountaineer, beautifully wrote:
"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets: Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."
And I have experienced Providence, these unseen hands. Moments of change in which opportunity seems to arise to be placed like a gift of tremendous value in hands.
 Maybe I just need to return to my Buddhist roots. The concept of karma makes sense to me in a sort of Newtonian physics way. My present and future are partially determined by my past in that I make choices, which lead to other choices, and so on—perhaps even across lives. I'd like to believe that the universe recycles. Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hahn, speaks of Interbeing, his name for the older, quite complex doctrine of Pratitya Samutpadha—web of interconnection. Of course, we don't need to go much further than our own principles which also point to the interdependent web of life and although we tend to understand that as physical ecology, I believe it also applies to metaphysical ecology. We are connected.
At least a few words need to be said about the darker side of fate, karma, destiny.  Throughout history, various regimes have used such metaphysics to justify social order and control.  Throughout history we have used various conceptions of fate to offer cover for our darker intentions. We have used biblical “evidence” to define Africans as the "children of Ham" and so subject to slavery, we have justified a repressive caste system in India under the guise of Karma, and leveled charges of blood libel against Jews for murdering Christ and thus given sanction to persecution and murder. The list goes on for ways we have claimed fate as authority for injustice.
But do we say we don't believe in corporate fate, that a whole group can be held responsible for the actions of another generation?  And yet how do we acknowledge the role of past foreign policy plays in creating the conditions for our current challenges---or do we simply continue to place all the blame on the Other? Do we ignore the complexities of Colonialism when we throw up our hands and wonder why the Middle-East is rife with discord or Africa is filled with corruption? Do we deny our complicity in some of the world's most intractable problems and then feign ignorance when these tragedies begin to wash up upon our shores?
A sense of Fate or Destiny has tremendous potential to shape our understanding of events both personal and global.  None of us get to make choices that are completely free and with no relationship to past, present, or future. And this brings me back to that Rush song, Freewill, and a new insight for me into the very lyrics I quoted earlier. “Each of us, a cell of awareness, imperfect and imcomplete.” I have no idea what Neil Peart meant by those words, but as someone who writes and preaches on a regular basis, I've come to understand that what I write and say sometimes has strikingly little to do with what my audience reads or hears. And so, whatever Neil meant, I now see connectivity in the midst of his ode to freedom. “Each of us a cell of awareness” perhaps recognizes the organic nature of our bonds to each other—cells within a larger organism—moving towards perfection and completion only to the extent that we recognize our role in the larger body. I will never deny both the reality and necessity of freewill, but I increasingly have a appreciation of how much I am both director and player in this bizarre performance that is life. To quote Shakespeare once again:
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts
We have fates and destinies, but they are created by us through organic complex connections that are given divinity and holiness through the relationships we build, the choices we make, and the wisdom we earn.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernst Henley
written 1875 from his hospital bed

The Ben I’ll Never Be

[please note that sermons are primarily spoken works rather than written ones--what preaches well may not be read well. Forgive any grammatical or spelling errors--life is rather busy these days.]

You're either a poet
Or you're a lover
Or you're the famous
Benjamin Stone.
You take one road,
You try one door,
There isn't time for any more.
One's life consists of either/or.

So goes the opening stanza of “The Road You Didn’t Take” from the Sondheim musical, “Follies.” I’ve never seen it performed, had never even heard of it until a cover version jumped out at me from a Mandy Patinkin album. And I mean jumped out. The song spoke to something I had been struggling with.

I’m at an age, I guess middle-age, where I’m gradually watching the rapidly flowing hopes and intentions of the first half of my life slowly solidifying into firmer, clearer, less malleable patterns. I say this with a little sadness, but not much. I am lucky enough to be aware, most of the time, that whatever I've lost, the broad potential of who I might have been, has been replaced by a fullness of actual existence that is certainly not perfect, but satisfying.

And yet, I can’t help but feel some sense of loss as my life takes a more settled form. Although being a hospital chaplain rapidly destroys any sense of complacency about life's predictability, still, I have been experiencing an awareness of how some doors, once walked through, can't be opened again and the place you find yourself in on the other side becomes your whole world, never really having seen the one-way sign. Put more simply, roughly halfway through life’s journey, I’m increasingly aware of how my choices have shaped my life far more than any external force. Those choices have created the man I am: strengths, talents, failings and foibles. Whatever nature may have given me, I have nurtured through choice and habit into the shape I see in the mirror. 2300 years ago, the Greek philosopher Aristotle himself observed “we are what we repeatedly do; excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.” Our life is defined not only by the major turning points but also, perhaps even more so, by the tiny, gentle, near infinite swipes of daily action that over time wear away the indeterminate forms of childhood into the more fixed images of maturity.

This was one of the paradoxes of life that the Buddha pointed out 25 centuries ago. I am both the same person I was when I was 5, 15, 25, and 40 and yet completely different than I was at those ages. My mind is different, my body different. Tremendous changes and yet I am me. The Buddha used this little thought experiment to illustrate how little coherence the idea of a permanent self possessed. For me it just emphasizes the role of choice. One Nathan might have gone to medical school as he had intended when he was 19. A very different Nathan might have never spent a year in Japan, might have finished a PhD, might have married Trisha, Leslie, Leea, Cindi, or Jordana. Might not have married, might have joined the FBI, might have moved to Pittsburgh instead of Colorado Springs, might have said no to being a parent, might have said yes to the job offer he got from Penrose two days before Memorial made an offer, might have, might have, might have. Every no is a yes to some other life and vice verse of course. Every yes is a no to another potential path.

And this is true for every one of us here today. A billion small decisions, leading to a million slightly bigger ones, leading to a 100,000 more significant ones, leading to the hundreds of fairly important choices leading to a few dozen truly epic ones---all of which reinforcing the one decision we make each and every moment of every day—to be alive—and to be alive is to make choices.
And this is why my words this morning are hopefully more than just a peek into a fellow congregant’s midlife crisis. I wouldn’t preach about this if I didn’t feel that this was a shared experience. We may have diversity in age, belief, work background, family structure, place of origin, and so on, but regardless of any way we might distinguish ourselves from one another, I think relatively early on we start to get the sense that there is not a reset button for life. The inevitability of choice touches us all. A choice made today leads me on to another choice which leads to another choice and so on. Each particular tree of life that our decisions shape has a unique structure and is only one of thousands if not millions that we might have watered, fed, and pruned over the course of a lifetime. You might feel you’ve wandered off-course, made bad choices, and hopefully, ultimately, found your way back to the intended but no matter then final outcome or destination, the path you took is unique.

You may well still feel off-course, adrift in a sea of confusion. To some extent, many if not most people do. But the story only comes to an end when we come to an end, and no one gets to skip ahead to read the final chapter of their life. For better or worse, we never know what the next hour, day, or year hold. And yet you still have decisions to make. Even in the face of those events that are not choices—random accidents of fate or biology—as long as you have capacity for decision-making, you must make decisions. Whether that choice is to crawl into a closet or take on the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” the question is not ultimately, with all respect to Mr. Shakespeare, “to be or not to be” but rather what choices do you make here and now, how you choose to be in the face of “The heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” as Prince Hamlet observes.

This is the Hindu and Buddhist doctrine of Karma. Like so many other religious ideas, karma gets oversimplified, turning into some cosmic tit for tat—I step on an ant so I get crushed by a falling piano as if life and the universe were only slightly more subtle than a roadrunner cartoon. Karma,at its most basic, tries to remind us that we are ultimately responsible for our own lives. Not that we are in control, for control is a profound illusion. No, not control but responsible, we are the ones who are able to respond to the circumstances in front of us, and the way we respond today creates the choices we face tomorrow and so forward through this lifetime. Few things are truly in our control, but how we choose to respond is. It may seem something of a paradox. I am not in control of my life, and yet I am responsible for it. I believe that single sentence represents an important spiritual truth. To be responsible but not in control points to the fine balance between clutching at circumstances too possessively and being a mere passenger on your life’s journey.

There are, of course, events and conditions that no one consciously chooses. Though this depends on how far you are willing to take the concept of karma and reincarnation. Some would argue that even those circumstances that seem outside of one’s control—being born into profound poverty or illness are choices that some part of you made in a former lifetime. Not punishment, but setting your soul up for a classroom you know you need even as you forget signing up for the course. I don’t know if I believe that. I’m not so sure my childhood friend Doug somehow chose to be hit by a drunk driver or my uncle Jerry chose to contract a deadly lymphoma cancer. To be honest, I’m not sure it matters. Whether this life is set up by a previous one or not, regardless of the profound unfairness or tragedy that you find in front of you, you still make choices about how you will respond. Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and founder of the Logotherapy school of psychology, taught this. One may well not be in control of one’s circumstances, but one is in control of how one reacts to them and ultimately what meaning you then draw from that experience.

But life’s journey, no matter how long, comes to an end—at least in this form. Last week Roger spoke to us about German minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer. American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was an influence on the Bonhoeffer. Let’s take a moment and join together in a responsive reading based on Niebuhr.

"Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness."

“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime, therefore, we are saved by hope.” Our choices create ripples that potentially far beyond the boundaries of our own lives. Few of us will lead lives that ensure our memory in history books, but the challenge of time has always meant investing our offspring with the hopeful mandate to carry some part of ourselves into the future with them.

For better or worse, some part of me sees in my Benjamin an hourglass counting down my own days. Nothing in my life to this point has caused me to throw myself so forcefully into the future as the birth of my child. When he is 10, I’ll be 50, when he is graduating from college, I’ll be around 60. If he waits as long as we did to have children, I’ll be 80 before I see a grandchild. Will I make it to all those events? Will I be in good health? Who will I be then? Will Julia be with me? Will Ben? Surely I will not be who I am now, but not someone else either. And so even as I see in Benjamin a reflection of my own mortality, I also see the future as naturally belonging to him in a very real sense. The last line of the song I mentioned before is “the Ben I’ll never be, who remembers him.” For me that echoes both the slow solidification of my life—all the Nathan’s I’ll never be—as well as the beauty and challenge of the unknown future that my child will see, and a powerful reminder of the separateness of his life from mine. He has his own choices to make. I don’t get to live his life.

Later today it will be my honor to participate in installing the Reverend Roger Butts as the minister of this church. I don't want to force a connection from this sermon to the celebration this afternoon, but I do see a natural correspondence between the two. Because, here, in this church, in this faith, we make choices. We are not at the whim of supernatural forces, corrupt by some long ago sin, unable to act on our own. Ours is an empowering faith that believes we can act in our own lives and in the world. Indeed, the current issue of UU World magazine asks us if can make choices to be more inclusive.

And we must make choices, Unitarian Universalism is far too this-worldly to be able to afford adherents who are passive observers. I want echo Rev. Roger’s sermon from last week when I say that our faith must be an active one. In the Internet age, many, if not most of us, are inconsequentially immortal, being consigned to the archives of google and facebook forever. Let that not be your only legacy to the world. Here your decisions matter. Just like individuals, congregations make choices. Who will we be collectively? Will we choose to meet our growth and decide to welcome it even as it calls us to even greater changes. Can we bid good-bye to the churches we might have been and embrace the one we are now and might become? What will our impact be in the lives gathered here? What will our choices mean for the Colorado Springs community? How will we teach our children? For this is the role of RE, to pass on our spiritual genetic material, knowing and accepting the inevitable changes, but hoping to see our reflection looking back at us. I, as do many Unitarian Universalist ministers, believe our religious education programs must not only educate broadly about other traditions and life skills, but increasingly teach children why they should choose to be life-long Unitarian Universalists. We don’t have to be too shy about believing our tradition is right and noble and good. If you thought that someplace else was better, why wouldn’t you be there. I believe this is the best place, best tradition for my family and me. And while I accept his freedom of choice, I want my son to be a Unitarian Universalist. Some choices are better than others. He will hopefully learn to choose good foods and a healthy, sustainable lifestyle over eating and producing primarily garbage; and he will hopefully learn that it is better to be open-minded, tolerant, and engaged—and part of a long tradition of women and men who have lived and died for those ideals.

Because ultimately, we need to be living for something beyond the material, choosing something bigger, broader. For me this is the point of transcendental spirituality. Not to point us to a heavenly realm beyond this one, not to suffuse this plane of existence with invisible angels and demons, but to call us to an existence that transcends the physical by redirecting us to a deeper relationship with ourselves and others—and choices we make.

And that is what I forget when I get caught up in seeing only the end points marked by Ben's rapid growth. I see myself at 60 when he is 20, but what I forget to see is me at his college graduation, I see myself at 80, but I forget to see being at his wedding to some strong, bright woman or man—I forget all the joys and difficulties we will hopefully live through together. The relationship that I will nurture with intention and love over those years. Perhaps this is part of what Niebuhr means, “Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope.”

To cast myself too far into the future is to leapfrog the life lived between here and there. And many of us do that to ourselves constantly. I can't wait for next weekend, I can't wait for summer, I can't wait for school to end or start, I can't wait, I can't wait. And we sometimes forget that looking forward can sometimes turn into a looking past this moment, these choices. Worrying about the Nathan or Ben I'll never be, the doors that have closed, the roads not taken, can shut my eyes and stop my ears and close my heart to the Nathan or Kelly, or Joe, or Roger, or Diane we are right now.

It doesn't matter what occasions the crisis—teen-age, middle-age, old-age. The cause is far less important than the spiritual reality that we increase our pain and difficulty when we remove ourselves from ourselves through regret, desire, hate or any emotion based in emotional and spiritual dislocation. If I only had done this...if I only had that, if he, she, it, they would only go away, change, or die. Regret turns us to the doors that are closed, the decisions over and done with and robs us of the true power we have, to choose how we meet our circumstance here and now.

In recent years, I've become increasingly impatient with abstract theologies and philosophies. Which, if you've known me long enough, is an astounding change. Ten years ago I was at Boston University working on a doctorate in Philosophy of Religion. All I wanted to study was abstracts, I had even written a master's thesis on philosophy of mysticism that was incomprehensible enough to be considered pretty good. But I think my preference then for abstracts primarily served to insulate me from realities and choices that were harder to deal with. Now I want all spirituality to accord with the old African proverb, “when you pray, move your feet.” Your life, your faith, your church, your city and country are made up of actual choices. I don't care how many angels can dance on the head of a pin—doing the jitterbug or dancing cheek to cheek notwithstanding—all I want to know is how they chose to dance.

I hope this day and all your days to come you make healthy, compassionate, and brave choices for your church and your world, for those you love and who will have their own futures, and most of all, I hope you make bright and beautiful choices for yourself.

Stop the Intensity

Well, you got trouble, my friend, right here in River City. Trouble—or at least a lot of people want you to think so.

I was miserably sick with Swine Flu last month, as I lay about feeling wretched, I experimented with watching “TV” on my computer. This was a big change for me. I usually get most of my news from rather sober sources—The New York Times, The BBC, NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. I watched Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh with a horror I normally associate with particularly gory traffic accidents, and I was struck over and over by the intensity of the media. The right, out of power for the moment, seem the loudest now, but the left has its share as well. Keith Olbermann didn't always strike me as “fair and balanced.” Regardless of which side you listen to, the tone is pretty shrill and, speaking frankly, kind of scary. It doesn't take long kneeling at feet of these impoverishing prophets to be pretty sure the world is going to end sometime soon. Fear and intensity seem to be such dominant forces in our public conversation. I started wondering about what this does to us: physically, psychologically, and spiritually.

I know this stuff isn't new, this seductive shouting of fear and doom. When Thomas Jefferson ran for president a lot of people were deeply alarmed and didn't hesitate to warn us of the consequences of his election. A Connecticut paper claimed that electing Jefferson assured us a future in which “murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will all be openly taught and practiced; the air will be rent with the cries of the distressed; the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes.”

Humans have always used fear to define good and evil, insider from outsider, saved from damned. It seems to me though that the yellow journalism, mudslinging, and schadenfreude of yesteryear was maybe the equivalent of beer and whiskey, while the current crop is far closer to crack and crystal meth. I think instinct, added to the incredibly pervasive and calculated nature of modern media, has created a far more fraught environment.

What we're struggling with here is our own animal nature. Not some deep bestial aggressiveness and certainly not some sense of Original Sin calling us defiled for the mythical action of some long ago fig-leafed couple, but just simple, adaptive biology—in a word, evolution. Our species has grown and changed and adapted over a vast reach of time.

We evolved in a state of privation, never having enough. Our bodies, like those of other animals, often went through periods where food was scarce. When nourishment was available, you gorged yourself because it wasn't clear when the next opportunity would come. We may have culturally and materially developed to the point where that kind of deprivation is only the province of the truly poor, but our bodies don't know the difference. Our brains reward us for eating certain types of food because biologically speaking they ensure survival—primarily fat and sugar. And, have no doubt, the massive corporations who design our food know exactly the mix that is most likely to result in that nice flood of dopamine and endorphins. Actions that are conducive to survival produce this wash of chemicals that we perceive as pleasurable—and so we want to do it again and again. Food and sex are among the strongest of these reactions—both very pleasurable, both completely central to the survival of our DNA, and both exploited every single moment of every single day.
But those aren't the only two signals important for survival or easy to exploit—fear is profoundly important as well. Imagine a creature that paid little attention to the sensation of fear—they hear the growl of the predator, pause for a moment, but then go back to feeding peacefully. There is a scientific name for this kind of creature—lunch.

Our nervous systems naturally key in on unique or intense environmental cues—they might indicate a threat. So the media, food and advertising industries have to constantly look for what is new, startling, shocking if they are to capture our attention. There is a ratcheting-up process that leads us from horror movies starring Bela Lugosi to the the Friday the 13th movies to the latest crop of what are known as torture porn movies which push boundaries ever further. We go from a quarter pounder with cheese being indulgent to the latest Carl Jr's inventions with a pound of meat, bacon, cheese, and guacamole with enough calories to meet the needs of the average Ethiopian family for a week. Everything has to be bigger, louder, sharper.

High intensity stimulates our brains. When Glen Beck openly weeps on camera, when Keith Olberman raises his deep, resonant voice to sternly and aggressively correct the Republican leadership--we are stirred. Strong emotion elicits strong reactions in us. To our brains, we are still tribal creatures—dependent on social signals for our place in the group and for our survival. If someone in the tribe was deeply upset we needed to respond—they were likely upset by something that was a threat to us. We didn't have time to determine if the threat was real—we had to react. Doubt any of this, go to a horror movie, see if you get worked up even though you know that every moment of it is absolutely fake. Our primal brain doesn't take account of special effects—there are just effects.

There is an old adage about dysfunctional and addictive relationships—intensity is not intimacy. Many of us confuse the two. The internet and television with their 24-hour all-you-can-eat buffet of noise, body parts, violence, hatred, and pain feeds us plenty of intensity. Remember the old news saying, “if it bleeds, it leads.”

And the screaming heads on radio and television invite us to the worst interpretation of those we disagree with—and I can think of few things more harmful to the long-term health of our democracy or our individual souls than the routine demonization of those who think differently. We wind up with an almost Newtonian response—the more fear I feel the more likely I am to move further away from the center. Moderates become un-electable and so we push our national discussion from conversation to chaos—locked in a perpetual war of polar opposites led by idealogues.
Numerous books and studies have pointed out the increasing isolation so many of us feel. Isolation and loneliness we live with despite being connected every hour of the day by satellite TV, cellphones, and wireless internet. I think we, as a culture, are living out this addictions theory axiom—we have plenty of intensity and increasingly little intimacy.

When we are encouraged to feel afraid—afraid of our government, afraid of other countries, afraid of those who look, love, believe, think differently then we push ourselves into a constant feeling of danger, a perpetual fight or flight state which leaves us compromised intellectually, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Instead of ready and engaged, informed and hopeful, we find ourselves panting on the floor, door barred, wide-eyed and ready to repel the next assault. This is no way to live.

Where do we go to find silence and solace, rationality and reprieve, perhaps even recovery from the crystal meth-level high of irresistible media and unstoppable corporations? Well, right here, of course. We are the antidote to fear, this is the place to recalibrate your senses and your soul.

I don't think UU congregations always get why we come together on Sundays. We don't as Unitarian Universalists take the concept of sabbath seriously enough. If you cannot find a couple of hours each week where you will not answer your phone, will not check the latest headlines or stock prices, will simply let a little time pass in worship than we, actually you, have a problem. Be here, breathe, settle into a quiet sense of worship.

Whenever I use the word worship I can feel a little shudder go through a number of congregants—worship, such a word to be afraid of. Worship—as if we came together to engage in anything like what most other churches do. When we speak of worship, when we worship together, we are tapping into the word's deepest roots. We bring together “worth”—that which we find valuable—with the suffix “-ship” meaning to shape or create. We all come together to engage in a profound act of creation—we, together, minister and layperson, women and men, rich and poor, republican and democrat, gay and straight, theist and atheist—we come together to shape, to create and share what is of worth to us. Nothing less brings us together every weekend—nothing less should. I want, today, for all of us to let go of our nervousness about calling what we do worship. And yes, I am certainly using the word differently than most Baptists, Methodists, or Evangelicals would—but we can take their sense of it back as well. We do worship—we worship what is Holy and Divine like they do, but we locate it differently. We find God in the free mind and soul, we find it in the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi and the dreams of Dr. King. We find it in small acts of personal courage and grand gestures toward justice. We find it in our history of tolerance and rationality in the face of superstition and fossilized tradition. We find it in the open hand and the open heart. We find it in every spiritual path an honest, loving person ever walked. We find it in the words of Jesus and Buddha, the music of Bach and the Beatles.

We Unitarian Universalists are different from those faith traditions that lace their message of love with fear and offer salvation with one hand while holding a stick in the other. Brave men and women over centuries have purged our tradition of fear and superstition. And, to be frank, it is surely one of the main reasons our religion has such low growth and loses so many of our youth. You will never hear in a church like ours—believe as we do or you are damned for eternity. You will never hear, love who we say is acceptable or you will be punished with a horrible disease. You will never hear, everyone who is not Unitarian Universalist is wrong and influenced by the devil. Coming to our church is like going to a Nascar race and never, ever seeing a crash. In fact going to a race and not only not seeing a crash, but being asked genuinely to hope one never happens anywhere.

This is not just modern UU, this is us going back. Does anyone know who John Murray is? He preached his first Universalist sermon in the states in 1770. He famously said, “You may possess only a small light, but uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men and women. Give them not Hell, but hope and courage. Do not push them deeper into their theological despair, but preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.”
A deep, pervasive, bitter fear is not part of our history and has no place in our future. We offer hope and community. And we steadfastly refuse any claims to truth that hold distrust, fear, prejudice, or discrimination at their core.

This afternoon you will ordain me. You should not do this just because I'm a good guy or because I can preach, but because you recognize in me a life's calling as a minister of the Unitarian Universalist tradition. And I am that, I stand here at this pulpit with 500 years of our history at my back, holding me up, informing and teaching me, leading and inspiring me. I am a Unitarian—I believe that this holy, sacred, intoxicating, frustrating, comedic divine reality is ultimately non-dualistic, One with a capital “O” and that is what, if anything, I call God. I am a Universalist, I believe that salvation—a profoundly deep health and healing is available to all who seek it, not just those who hold to one set of beliefs, but all those that seek the truth in love shall find it and that truth creates freedom. I've heard dozens of UU ministers preach—here and New Jersey and San Francisco and Boston and Maine and Seattle and other places—Buddhists and Pagans, Christians and agnostics, Humanists and Jews. We use different language, different images but we speak with a surprisingly steady unified voice. We call you to freedom, peace, justice, balance, self-awareness and love---in short we try to call you to what is best in the human spirit, what is truly sacred in religion. You call us and then we call you.

Fear is easy; our way is hard. Fear removes the ability to think and traps us in a state of raw instinct, closes our eyes and hearts, and seduces us with false promises of safety and crystal clear identity. Overcoming this addiction will be, as with most addictions, very hard—made even harder because there's a peddler of fear and intensity on every street corner and the seductive call echoes from every radio, television, rooftop and, unfortunately, too many pulpits.

But that is, I think, increasingly the purpose of this free religion of ours, to be a strong gentle counterpoint to the rest of it all. I challenge you, today and in the days to come, to practice rejecting fear. Hear excess in the media and laugh softly to yourself. Read alarm in the paper, smile, and put the paper down. Consciously remember this community when you need to be re-grounded in what is of value. This is your genuine heritage; Unitarian Universalists have been doing this for 500 years. If your spiritual identity is primarily that of what you left behind, what you don't want, you are cheating yourself and this tradition. Reject intensity, refute fear, welcome intimacy, and practice--as John Murray advised—uncovering your light, give yourself and those around you hope and courage, not hell. Live our values, speak our gospel of justice, love, and unity in diversity. It is the task of this generation of Unitarian Universalists to reclaim the spirituality of our faith—steadfastly holding to the motive force of humanism, the methodical fearlessness of science, while not being afraid of the profound mystery of life. We have chosen a path that allows us tremendous freedom but requires of us a deep, steady strength. Ours is a path that has for many generations rejected the seductions of fear, let us strive to be worthy.

Amen, blessed be, namaste.

Cake or Death: Laughter and Spirituality

Cake or Death.

How many people have heard of Eddie Izzard? I'm a pretty big fan of the British stand-up comic and actor. I want to play a brief bit of one of his skits. (click here for a youtube clip that isn't identical to the one in church, but has the main point.)

Cake or Death. It seems a pretty easy choice.

I must admit I've felt a bit daunted by my topic this morning. Y'know, it seemed like great idea at the time—offer a sermon for the auction. I like preaching, you all seem to like listening—a match made in heaven, a veritable piece of cake. Ahhh, sweet naiveté of youth—or at least middle age. The auction bit went well—folks bid on the sermon, and Sheila won. I felt good, I was able to contribute to the church by doing something I already enjoy.

But then, people started coming up to me. Not before, when I could have changed my mind or placed some limits, not before did they come to me, but after, then they started.

"Y'know, one year, someone handed Matthew an 873 page book, written in Swedish mind you, on the ontological implications of interfaith epistemology in instances of sacred sexuality in persons of Buddhist inclination—and it was the best sermon ever given in the state of Colorado. Seven people in the congregation actually reached Nirvana by the end, seven. Two more the next day once they really digested it all"

The full extent of my plight kept being expanded for me. I kept smiling as best I could, but I'm sure my eyes started getting wider. I didn't have time to being reading long books, let alone ones written in Northern European languages. I mean, Norwegian I could handle, maybe Finnish, but Swedish, never. I don't even like Ikea much.

Then Sheila sent me the email with her chosen topic—and I breathed deeply.
Sheila asked me to preach on light in the midst of the dark, to preach about the role of laughter and joy in religion and spirituality. What a wonderful topic Sheila, thank you for creating this opportunity and for your generous support of this community.

And what a perfect time for the topic. Am I the only one who feels a need to take another look at the Book of Revelation? The economy , health care, global warming—and now pandemic. Swine Flu, are you kidding me? Who the hell is kissing the pigs? Swine Flu...Yes, Rabbi, yes...I know, I know, I should have kept kosher.

Of course, all of these catastrophes are starting to take on a new meaning for me as I rapidly approach fatherhood. Most every day, some helpful person reminds me how overwhelming parenting can be. To which I want to say, thank you. Thank you very much. I had already been worried, now I can really settle into some prime, irrational anxiety. Thanks.

It is in these moments, that I need to do three things. First, remember to breathe—greatest advice I've ever received or given—just breathe. Second, remember that I am blessed with community—not just this one, but others as well. We are only truly human and grounded in community. As most of you know I am a hospital chaplain and the one thing I see over and over again---the grease that eases life's sticky passages is connection—the more you have consciously sought connection, the easier life will generally be even in the face of tragedy. Third, I need to remember the healing power, the profound sacredness, of laughter.

For this morning let us think together on three elements of holy laughter—choice, community, and consciousness. All three are profoundly spiritual and important in our identity as Unitarian Universalists. And I do feel a need to connect this with spirituality and Unitarian Universalism. Making folks laugh is a noble enough goal, but I'm not sure its enough for worship. These sacred hours we spend together, when we share together our wisdom, our faith, our fears and our love. For them to mean something we have to, more often than not, touch on that which is beyond the mundane, to make a conscious choice to aim toward the sacred.

But we can still, indeed must still, laugh as we do this. Losing our ability to laugh at ourselves, is the first step toward forgetting that all religions are merely windows through which the light of the Divine pours through. Too much seriousness is like an accumulating layer of dirt on these windows—before you know it, the light gets blocked and you spend your days trying to decipher mystic patterns and perceive apocalyptic visions in the patterns in the grime. Laughter cleanses our eyes, our souls, our faith---laughter, it turns out, does windows.

I didn't write all my own material this morning—I've tried to draw from several traditions. I'll share with you traditional wisdom stories from Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism---as well as a smattering of UU jokes that have been around the proverbial block a time or two. Regardless of the source, I've tried to tie everything together to offer some ideas about why a sense of humor is a critical part of spirituality.

Let's begin with a story from the Islamic tradition.
One day the news went out that Mullah Nasrudin, the great Islamic Sufi mystic, had suffered a significant loss. His one and only, much loved donkey had gone missing What a loss, how terrible everyone said. When his neighbours heard the news they felt so bad for him they decided to go to Nasrudin's house and help him to find his donkey. So they came to the wise man's home and found him smiling and praising God in gratitude They couldn't understand it and asked the Mullah: " Mullah aren't you sad about loss of your donkey?" The Mullah laughed and said, "I am happy because God has been so good to me.” His friends were still confused. Nasrudin shook his head and smiled, “Don’t you get it? If I had been riding that donkey, I'd be lost right now too!”

For me the first message of sacred laughter is that of choice. We don't have a choice about much that happens to us. Life unfolds as it will, but we always have a choice about how we respond. Within the Buddhist tradition they sum this idea up by saying that “pain is mandatory, suffering is optional.” “Pain is mandatory, suffering is optional.” I see this over and over again, in the midst of tragedy so intense it sometimes literally takes my breath away. With precious few exceptions, events come to us all that cause pain, events that shatter our hopes, events that we wouldn't wish on anyone. These things simply happen, indeed it is one of the great tasks of religion to answer the question---why do bad things happen to good people? For the most part, the Unitarian Universalist answer is—I don't know. We don't spend much time trying to tease out the cause, we mostly focus on response. God's plan, karma, fate, or simple random chance—we don't, as a community share a single answer, nor does our history offer a clear systematic theology of evil. What we have now, and what is completely consistent with centuries of Unitarian and Universalist faith is that regardless of why it happened, we can use our freedom, innate wisdom, and goodness, and our community to get through.

Choice is not just individual though, it belongs to us as a community and as part of our spiritual inheritance. Because our religious forebears lived and died for tolerance and the use of reason in religion and the right of the individual to follow their own innate wisdom—because of these precious beliefs we are for the most part freed from the idolatries of the mind and spirit that afflict so many other faiths. We don't suppress questions, indeed we encourage them.

Not long ago, Julia and I were at Betty Davis' home for a Stewardship dinner. Conversation eventually turned to a Academy Cadet who happened to visit on a morning I was preaching. After the service he was, apparently, rather upset with some of the heresies I proclaimed. I can easily imagine an exchange he might have had with one of our members, the young man sputtering “I couldn't believe the sermon this morning, I didn't agree with practically anything that was said.” To which any of our members might have happily replied, “Oh well then you'll fit right in.” We all know the joke about a busload of UU's who die in a crash. They find themselves at a fork in a road with a sign saying “Heaven to the left” “Discussion about heaven to the right” and the whole troupe, of course, heads right.

When you join this community, when you begin to identify yourselves as Unitarian Universalist, you affirm more than perhaps anything else the value of freedom. You leave behind what seems to be the increasingly narrow dogmatism of many faiths. There are tremendous rewards for this choice but also a cost. The cost, as many of us have found and occasionally lament is the sense of surety and security that comes from letting clerics and texts dictate your reality in this world and the one to come. The reward, the reward is a sense of humor. Laughter only comes out of freedom for to laugh is to see difference, to recognize contradictions and paradoxes, to be aware of irony. To see the profound gap between what we hope for and what is reality is to be aware of the tension inherent in existence—and in that space between what we dearly hoped for and what we feared might happen, in that space we have a choice of how we respond. I see this in my work as a chaplain and in my own life. Do we choose cake or do we choose “death”?

Now, obviously I’m not suggesting anyone should laugh when given a diagnosis of Leukemia or smile when someone you love dies. Nor should we laugh off every insult and injury. We have to cry sometimes, to struggle sometimes, to scream and rage against reality sometimes—else how do we know when life is sweet? I doubt there’s a person in this room who has not at some time enjoyed an unexpected reprieve—the truck just misses hitting you, the diagnosis is benign, the lost child found playing at a friend’s house, the slide on the ice that comes to a gentle stop. Sometimes the laughter bursts forth at these times in sheer giddiness as the tension leaves so suddenly it does feel like a weight lifted from our shoulders.

The fact is religion is often absurd. For a long time I expressed that sentiment out of a highly critical analysis of religion in general. Church father Tertulian famously once said, "I believe because it is absurd." That kind of attitude drove me nuts, still does a lot of the time, but more and more I feel that the absurdity of religion is only exceeded by the absurdity of real life. Cake or Death, laugh or die—the choice is ours.

Humor and laughter are not just individual responses, but are an integral part of what binds us together as humans—they are part of what creates community. To laugh together is to create bonds and community is the second aspect of laughter I want to talk about.

Laughter, scientists and sociologists tell us, predates speech by tens of thousands of years, maybe even millions of years. Infants laugh way before they talk. Those born blind and deaf laugh. The ability and instinct to laugh is not learned, it is part of what it means to be human at the deepest level. We are wired for laughter. Groups laugh far more than individuals. Laughter is profoundly social—and that perhaps is the key. Laughter reminds us that we are social beings, that we are connected. When we laugh together, I feel happy, I feel love. Nothing else feels that way. I think of some of the most exciting things I've ever done. Racing against a thunderstorm while climbing a mountain in the Cascades. Driving a motorcycle at 130 mph. That's all adrenaline. That all makes me aware that I am alive. But to be surrounded by my community sharing laughter tells me why it's good to be alive. For inspiration, Sheila sent me several quotations. One was G.K. Chesterton, the English journalist who said, “It is the test of a good religion if you can joke about it.” We are bound together as a community not because of shared dogma, but because of shared ideals. Of course, sometimes it's hard to know just what those ideals are—a trait we make fun of ourselves about:

“How many Unitarian Universalists does it take to change a light bulb?” “We choose not to make a statement either in favor of or against the need for a light bulb. However, if in your own journey you have found that a light bulb works for you, that is fine. You are invited to write a poem or compose a modern dance about your personal relationship to your light bulb and present it next month at our annual light bulb Sunday service. We will explore a number of light bulb traditions including incandescent, fluorescent, three-way, long-life and tinted; all of which are equally valid paths to spiritual luminescence.”

The third aspect of laughter I want to speak about this morning is consciousness. Now the truth is that what I'm actually talking about here is awareness of ego as a component of spirituality, but I was trying to find something that worked with choice and community and consciousness has more alliterative value than ego. There are two modes of awareness or consciousness that are important here. First is how a sense of humor is a natural outgrowth of spiritual development. May I be saved from those who are excessively earnest—I don't trust people who are too sober. I like people who can laugh at themselves, their beliefs, and me for that matter. I'd rather hang out with Trickster Coyote from the Native American tradition than with Yahweh any day. Yahweh seems entirely too serious to me. There are some signs of he has a sense of humor—the giraffe, the platypus, my baldness--but overall a pretty sober fellow.

I've had the pleasure of meeting a number of people I'd consider holy or advanced souls or on their way to enlightenment. I've also met a number of people who thought they were in this category. Perhaps the most significant difference is how easily the truly wise laugh—at themselves, at their foibles and failings and even at their faith.

A story from the Jewish tradition: One day a rabbi is overwhelmed with the spiritual realization of how small he is in the grand scheme. He falls to his knees in the synagogue and shouts out over and over again, “I am nothing, I am nothing.” The president of the congregation sees this act of piety and falls to his knees, beating his chest, also exclaiming, “I am nothing, I am nothing.” The janitor for the shul sees the two men and rushes to their side, “ I am nothing, I am nothing.” The second man nudges the first and says, “Heh, look who thinks he's nothing.”

The second aspect of consciousness is how it can be happily derailed by humor. Humor can often lance through the tangles of intellectualism to show us wisdom that isn't linear and remind us of truths that aren't logical.

Mara, sort of the Buddhist equivalent of Satan--though not as pervasively evil, more of a tempter figure, is walking the earth one day with one of his demons. The demon observes a man stopping suddenly to pick up a shining item. The demon looks to Mara and says, “Did you see that? That human just found a piece of the Truth.” Mara nods and walks on. The demon sputters and exclaims, “Aren't you worried that he discovered a Truth?” Mara smiles and says, “Don't worry, he'll just make a belief out of it.”

Cake or death. It seems like such an easy choice. What are you going to choose today, tomorrow, and the day after? And yet, how often do we choose “or death”? How often do we avoid the risks inherent in genuine community for the safety of solitude, the safety of the expected. Perhaps the most basic platitude about life is that each of us ends in death. We all go there eventually---but we don't have to go there in tiny increments every day. If we are wise enough to bring holy laughter instead of mundane practicality or fateful resignation, if we bring a sacred smile or subversive giggle to more of our situations, we can develop the skill of choosing “cake.” Laughter is often our response to the unexpected. It can be so hard to look for the “cake” choice in the midst of the difficulty, but there almost always is one—people with cancer can laugh, those locked in concentration camps found things to smile about, indeed I'm sure they have to---for the alternative to “cake” is “death.” We find ways to cope, adapt, and eventually laugh or we most assuredly perish. We can learn, as a spiritual practice, to be aware of the choices in front of us and to consciously reach out for the laughter, for the healing it brings, for the community it builds, and for the awareness we all come here to find.

I want to close with one more story from the Islamic tradition starring the wise fool Mullah Nasrudin who, in this final tableau, is sitting with some friends drinking coffee:

They are discussing death, "When you are in your casket and friends and family are mourning, what would you like to hear them say about you?"
The first man says, "I would like to hear them say that I was a great doctor of my time, and a great family man."
The second says, " I would like to hear that I was a wonderful school teacher who made a huge difference in our children of tomorrow."
Nasrudin says, " I would like to hear them say... LOOK!! HE'S MOVING!!!"

Cake or death. Blessed be, amen, and namaste.

Days of Shock and Awe

When I was a boy growing up in New Jersey, my parents and I attended Congregation Sons of Israel, an orthodox Jewish synagogue in Asbury Park, New Jersey. We would go most every Saturday. I never liked it much—all the good cartoons were on Saturday morning and I couldn't stand wearing a tie. Although we went to an orthodox, very traditional synagogue, my parents varied widely over the years as to how much we adhered to the rules at home. We didn't fulfill al 613 mitzvot or commandments, or pray all the complex daily prayers at home, my father never put on Tefillin, the little boxes that contained written prayers that are bound to the forehead and arm for particular prayers in accordance with an injunction in the Book of Exodus. At home, being Jewish mostly meant bagels and lox and laughing at Jackie Mason. But at Hebrew school I learned all the things we were supposed to do. Learned the blessings to say before eating or drinking anything, learned the rituals for the holidays, learned to read (but not understand) Hebrew. The rabbi who taught our classes was very, very orthodox—adhered to it all—and made it clear he didn't think much of my family for being, well, let's just say, less observant.

The result of these mixed messages was that I never really understood everything going on around me or what was actually expected of me during what the complex service. If you've never been to an orthodox Jewish temple, the morning service is mostly in Hebrew, with many songs and chants and very specific prayers—far closer to a Catholic or Muslim service that most Protestant ones. The service is highly ritualistic and fairly opaque to an outsider, or even someone like me who was, at least theoretically, an insider.
If the average Saturday was a strange combination of bewildering yet familiar, the high holidays were even more so. Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish new year and, for me, mostly associated with the sound of the shofar, the horn made from a ram's actual horn. The blowing of the shofar is not just a interesting musical choice during the Rosh Hashanah service, it is a commandment from God that all Jews older than 13 hear the sound. It serves to remind us of many things—not the least of which is God's judgment. You see on Rosh Hashanah God opens the Sefer HaChaim, the Book of Life, and inscribes a fate for each of us for the coming year—most important is whether we are inscribed at all in the Book of Life or if our name will be blotted out because we are to die.

On Yom Kippur, ten days later, the Book is closed and our fates sealed for the year to come. The days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur when the book is open and our fates might be revised are known as the Days of Awe. This period is when Jews consider the year that has just passed and the one to come. During this time, we ask forgiveness of each other and God. I remember going every year to temple and saying the prayers, part of which includes pounding one's heart as you list the sins for which you ask forgiveness. The prayer says:

We have transgressed, we have acted perfidiously, we have robbed, we have slandered. We have given evil counsel, we have lied, we have scoffed, we have rebelled, we have provoked, we have been disobedient, we have committed iniquity, we have wantonly transgressed, we have oppressed, we have been obstinate.

You get the picture and it goes on for while in this vein. This was a time of genuine fear for me as a child. I worried if my parents, my brother and I would all have met the bar—we weren't very good Jews, we ate pizza that had meat on it and, living on the Jersey coast, we even had lobster as a rare treat—both decidedly not kosher, as the Rabbi informed me with a scowl when once I asked what the proper blessing for pepperoni was. If I had really thought about or comprehended the full extent to which we failed to meet the exacting standards of orthodox Judaism, I would have been an absolute wreck. It's completely conceivable that the Pope was a better Jew than anyone in my family was. Still I felt deep inside a sense of what was right and wrong. I knew I was a Jew and that certain things were expected of me, even if neither I nor my family completely complied. I remember the deep sense of wrong I felt the first time I had a cheeseburger (mixing meat and milk is a kosher no-no). By the time I was 13 and done with my Bar Mitzvah, this was all starting to unravel as my somewhat high level of teenage rebelliousness took aim at any institution my parents valued. It would be many years before Judaism came to mean anything to me again.

I need to strike a balance here between the sadness I feel when looking back to that little boy who was so scared for his family's safety, so lost in a world that was both familiar and foreign, and the intensity of religious feeling that moved that little boy so. It is both deeply reassuring and yet sometimes concerning that the youth in our own church will likely never feel anything as intense here in this space. I imagine more than a few people might now be thinking, “Good, I would never want one of our kids to feel that kind of fear of God.” Of course, I agree, but there is something important about a sense of deep awe and even a little fear in religion. Those evenings at the temple as a child, with the light of the candles, the musty smell of the prayer books, the men somberly dressed with their white prayer shawls and yarmulkes, the chanting of Hebrew the meaning of which I only vaguely knew was nothing short of magical....and frightening.

But it got me, at the time, to take forgiveness seriously. To have a real sense of deep wrong. I'm not sure if we can muster that intensity for the errors in our own lives. I offer that question very honestly, not as a rhetorical device, do we have any way of connecting with a deep sense of wrong, one that moves us from the internalization of the cultural sense of right that is shame, to the deep grace of forgiving and most importantly to the saving power of profound change. I sometimes see it in the people I minister to. Mostly, a concern for forgiveness comes in the hours before death—but not too much before that, and I don't think I see it much at all in our public figures, in politicians, let alone celebrities who all too often are a substitute for heroes in our culture. When it is just human to human with no active divinity involved how do we find deep forgiveness for others and, just as importantly, how do we find absolution for ourselves? If there is no cosmic keeper of the score, no powerful agent who can really wipe the slate clean, how do we move past the hurts and harms that are done to our souls. How do we relinquish the easy apathy that comes from knowing that quick words and a band-aid is just as good, certainly easier, and more expedient than the painful work of deep reconciliation, forgiveness, and, most importantly, change.

I've been involved with Buddhism for the past eighteen years, and for many years I thought of Enlightenment as the process of getting rid of faults, of the perfection of the individual. Now I see it as the quest to accept and even embrace the faults and flaws—which, not surprisingly also reduces the influence they have. Not that we don't work on getting better and certainly reducing the damage those flaws can inflict, but the more I accept my inherent quirks and flaws, the easier it is to accept them in other people—to extend a bit more grace to my fellow keystone cops as we bumble along doing the best we can in a wacky world.

I've spent a lot of time in recent years wrestling with God, enough so that I think I should change my name to Jacob—and if that reference doesn't mean anything then we need a class on mythic themes in the Bible. Jacob's story is a bizarre one—as many of the Old Testament ones are, but I'm coming to a new appreciation for the old stories as I study and dig deeper into Jungian psychotherapy, theory, and perhaps one could even say Jungian theology.

Anyway, Jacob isn't a real upstanding guy in some ways—not what my parents would have called a “mensch.” And yet this fellow is a great patriarch of the Bible, the father of the 12 tribes of Israel. Some, including myself not so long ago, would point to the immorality and inconsistency of Biblical figures as evidence of their poverty as worthy heroes—Jacob cheated his brother out of his inheritance, Noah was a drunk, even Jesus curses and kills a fig tree cause it didn't have any fruit. I read the stories and wonder why anyone would include them in a book that's supposed to guide and inspire.

The answer, of course, is that they are meant to be deeply flawed individuals because we are deeply flawed individuals. I am coming to prefer my heroes more broken and in need than perfect and powerful because they more closely echo my own struggles. We make mistakes that are profound. And for many of us, there is no absolution to be found out there. And so we must learn the painful imperfect path of forgiving ourselves and others without the benefit of divine justice or intervention. In a paradoxical way, the absence of a judgmental, punishing God makes the work even harder—there is no one else to turn to, to do this work. We have to do the heavy lifting. You've heard me preach enough by now to know that this theme that runs through most of my thought—regardless of what god or gods, forces or powers may or may not exist, we are the ones who need to act for good in this world. No one, no divine power will aid us more than we aid ourselves and this applies to forgiveness just as much as anything else.

I mentioned earlier the people I minister to. While that sometimes includes the members of this congregation, it is mostly with the patients in the Intensive Care Unit at the hospital. Maybe three or four times a year, I meet with someone who expresses profound fear at dying because they don't believe God can forgive them for what they've done. I remember the first man who expressed this level of anxiety over his sins to me. He confessed to me a host of sins, some fairly grievous and even frightening, some so common as to be almost humerous if not for the intensity with which he spoke them. I remember being at a bit of loss as to how to console him and assure him that Love and Mercy are more powerful than Judgment and Punishment. As he talked and I listened, I started to have an intuition about his spiritual distress. When he paused in his litany of sins, I said to him, “I hear that you're worried if God can forgive you for all you've done, but I wonder if you've ever forgiven yourself.” He burst out crying uncontrollably. All the pent up pain and regret that was eating him up as surely as the cancer was came flowing out. We spoke several more times and while I don't want it to sound like a single sentence on my part “cured” him, it helped move him in a different and I hope more helpful direction.

I've spent a lot of time thinking and working on forgiveness in the past few years. My training as a chaplain consists largely of enough self-examination to allow me enough freedom from my own neuroses and anxieties to be reasonably present to people in crisis. I've also coupled that with a lot of work with Jungian psychotherapy. One thing I've learned, although it continues to be a challenge truly putting it into practice, is that forgiveness isn't something you give just to someone else, it is something you give to yourself as well. I don't mean just forgiving oneself for the errors we all make although that is essential to a healthy whole life. What I mean is that when we forgive someone else we drain poison from our own veins. Perhaps this is the deep wisdom of Judaism. Forgiveness can't be too simple. Forgiveness can't be too simple—and maybe that is more the sin of our culture, thinking it's just a matter of saying, “oops, sorry.” If the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur involved a ritual that consisted just of some simple gesture, it wouldn't be enough to shake our own thoughts and feelings loose. Chrisitianity believes that it is so difficult to be forgiven that God has to torture and kill his only son. Forgiveness is and may need to be hard. It is through pounding our hearts, going to a body of water and casting our sins into it, praying that we can be forgiven enough and forgive enough to be worthy of the gift of life—it is through these profound, dramatic gestures that we pause enough to consider the depth of what it takes to forgive and be forgiven. A simple sorry doesn't always do it any more than a walk to the mailbox counts as an aerobic workout. We need to get our emotional heart rate up if we're going to connect with inner peace.

We probably can't summon the intensity and sense of terror and awe that I felt as a child or that some of you may have felt in the church or temples or other places where you grew up. I am, overall, glad of it, but there's a bittersweetness to it as well—one that I think many of us feel at times as we've made the transition to being Unitarian Universalists. We make the choice, not always consciously at first, but almost always increasingly so, to trade certainty for freedom, religious clarity for spiritual integrity. And with any trade, we gain something and we give something up. If I am honest, I have to say that there are things I miss of those years being a religious Jew. I've heard other UU's express similar sentiments about what they've left behind to be a part of this free faith—they miss the beauty and mystery of mass, the power of communion, a sense of security that comes with dogmatic belief and I don't use the word negatively here. We are a congregation of what, 150 adults. There is much we agree on, but much that we differ on as well. Most churches don't have to have much discussion on whether there is even a God—let alone what he, she, or it wants us to do. So we take our license to believe as we will, to pursue our individual path, and we leave behind most of the structures that provided clear boundaries and foundational beliefs to our lives. I am not saying we believe nothing or that Unitarian Universalism is not a strong, beautiful tradition upon which to build a life. I am saying that, for the most part, we have dedicated ourselves to a complex journey, an adventure of spirit that comes with a price. Part of that price is having to find the strength within to acknowledge our weakness and to find it within ourselves to forgive and the sometimes far more difficult process of allowing ourselves to be forgiven.

I quoted one prayer of Judaism when I began this morning and I close with a different, very different voice of Judaism, song-writer Leonard Cohen. Cohen, who spent years at a Zen monastery, wrote the amazing lyrics that I should read aloud every morning and which I know were sung quite recently here, and bear repeating.

You can add up the parts
but you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.

Finishing the Quilt

Finishing the Quilt

I don't know about you but sometimes it feels to me like the world is incredibly screwed up.
I am aware that may not be the most inspiring first line ever offered in a sermon, but it's where I need to start this morning. I'm not feeling depressed or particularly morose, but when I read the news, listen, against my better judgment to talk radio, read bumper stickers saying “illegal alien hunting permit” or “either stand behind our troops or stand in front of them,” see more reports of humanity's inhumanity---when I see all this I start to feel more than a bit of despair and a fair amount of paralysis. I begin to feel overwhelmed by all the challenges and problems and hatred and ignorance and shortsightedness and deception and greed and destruction and and and I'm back to not being inspiring. I just wonder how one leaves this life feeling like they've accomplished anything given how short our time is and how limited our strength and influence is. It feels like so much gets left undone. I met a patient at the hospital recently, let's call her Sarah, who was reaching end-of-life. We spoke a number of times, at some length. Sarah said at various points how much she regretted that she would never get a chance to finish the quilt she was working on. She brought this up several times across our conversations and at first I just didn't get it, but now I think I might. Anyway, you get the picture. The problems of our lives, let alone the world can seem so overwhelming, so difficult to make any real impact on. I don't think I'm alone here, right. When you read the news, look around the world, it seems dramatically, perhaps irretrievably screwed up, right? Can I get a solid Universalist amen or even a nice quiet Unitarian show of hands?
Several weeks ago we had a really wonderful Sunday service led by Bob Nemanich. The entire service focused on the impact music has upon our lives and the morning was embroidered with wonderful songs. As I sat where you sit now, I listened and sang along to a couple of my favorite songs. The first was Dust in the Wind by Kansas which, as the title implies, speaks to the incredible transience of our lives. “Dust in the wind, all we are is dust in the wind”--so goes the famous rock anthem. I've always loved the song and the quiet, melancholy simplicity of it still appeals to me. It echoes the sentiments of so many of the world's sacred scriptures. Whether it be the Book of Ecclesiastes or the Buddhist idea of Anicca or impermanence, spiritual paths throughout human history have reminded us about our limited nature—limited by strength, resources, distance, and, of course, most powerfully, we are all, paupers and princes alike, limited by time. The author of Ecclesiastes writes “vanity of vanities, all is vanity. The Hebrew word central here is hebel which means transient, insubstantial. That is to say, “all we are is dust in the wind.”
It doesn't take much to remind us how small we are. Carl Sagan's wonderful passage reminds me how very small I am and short my life is. Each of us is the barest piece of dust in the universe. Our lives, indeed dozens upon dozens of generations, flit by in less than a blink of the galaxy's eye. Not that this awareness is without its own gifts. There is a certain peace in remembering that so many of things we worry about, the day to day conflicts and chaos, the spikes and troughs of daily life, mostly smooth out from the perspective of a 100 years out. Sometimes it can help to take a deep breath, relax, and ask what will this really mean a year or 10 or 50 or a 100 years out. But still, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the weight of history and culture. So few make an actual difference, so many live “lives of quiet desperation.”
But I, we, are not alone in our fears and doubts. Indeed we are in good company, others have gone before us and felt daunted by the enormity of their problems. The feeling of being too small is part of the hero's journey, part of our journey.
Arjuna, the hero of the Hindu epic poem, the Bhagavad-Gita found himself in a such a situation. Just before a huge battle between two sides of his family, Arjuna directs his charioteer, the god Krishna, to drive his chariot onto the battle field between the gathering armies. He looks out and his courage fails, he loses sight of his reason for acting. The rest of the poem is Krishna's instruction, assurance and encouragement to Arjuna to act in the world despite his doubts. Krishna comes to see all his action as an offering to God thus letting go of ego and attachment to outcomes.
Moses also faced such difficulties. Minding his own business, tending his sheep, he sees a burning bush. God speaks to him and calls him to be his emissary in freeing the Jews from bondage in Egypt. Moses takes a lot of convincing—who am I to do this, what if they don't believe me, what if they don't listen to me, I'm a lousy public speaker, what did you say your name was again? God convinces him to speak to pharoah and overall, apart from the plagues and Red Sea business, everything turned out OK.
Although the details of the two stories differ, both point to an individual struggling to act in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. These stories are too significant to take literally, but once we see them metaphorically, as archetypes for our own lives, then we can truly appreciate their importance. Every heroine or hero in the great myths represents us, each of us in our struggles. There is story after story of prophets and seers, heroes and heroines, all facing the fear that they are not enough, that they do not have the strength, resources, or abilities to carry the message or accomplish the task.
“Dust in the Wind” was only the first of the songs that really sang to me that morning. The other was Melissa Etheridge's “I need to wake up” written for Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. The song speaks to the individual awakening to the problems that need work, now. I find the song a powerful and inspiring call to action against an enormous challenge---one that will require us to remake our culture in an effort to avoid remaking the global climate. And even though the song was written specifically for the movie and the threat posed by greenhouse gases, it also simply speaks to an awakening of one's consciousness to the need for action on any front—hunger, justice, equal rights.
The two songs feel so at odds with each other. One reminds me how small I am, a mere mote of dust on a tiny ball floating through an enormous galaxy in an even-larger universe. My years are limited and even I, at 39, may well not have as many years ahead as are behind. While the other seems to cast that off or at least reframe it, to remind us that we not only should act, but must act when we see problems that need our help no matter how small that aid may be.
Some religious traditions might actual confirm me in my fears---I am too small to help, I am too warped by original sin to even know what The Good is, I am powerless in the face of evil. I reject that absolutely.
I have wandered through several spiritual paths as have many of us here. But whether I identified as a Jew, a Christian, or a Unitarian Universalist Buddhist as I am now, there is one belief that has always been a part of my spirituality: what good happens on this earth happens by the hands such as these. Whatever role God or Spirit may play, we can never wait for a transcendental rescue. God may inspire, Spirit may guide, but we must act.
I don't care what you do. I don't care if you are republican or democrat or neither, liberal or conservative or beyond labels. I don't care what you get fired up about: climate change, poverty, illiteracy, gay rights, animal rights, abortion, choice, xeriscaping, supporting the troops, protesting the war, any war, all war, freedom of religion or freedom from religion. All I care is that you care enough to move, to get up, to stand up, to speak out, to find an injustice that causes you pain enough to change your own life. Unitarian Universalists have been called free-thinking mystics with hands—the first part is wonderful, it's great to be free-thinking, great to be mystically inclined, but its all crap without being a presence in the world. Most of our beloved forebears, those we claim with such pride were not thinkers or not merely thinkers. They acted in the world. Even Thoreau, a fairly thoughtful fellow, went to the woods—he just didn't sit in his living room in Concord. Some may say that he didn't go far. Walden Pond is indeed a short distance from town, but that's the point not the problem. You don't have to go far to change yourself or the world around you. It is by small, almost unnoticeable movements that some of the most worthwhile changes happen. Inflate your tires, use fluorescents, plant a garden, email a city council person, skip coffee for one week and give that money to the food bank. One doesn't, as the old saying goes, eat an elephant all at once. You do it one bite at a time.
I doubt anyone came here this morning to secure a place in heaven. I don't think most of you come back to this church week after week, year after year, because you are afraid of hell. I don't believe that you are worried about salvation. But you should be. You should worry about how you will be saved. Not by anything you were told in any church, temple, mosque you've been in before. Not by God, Jesus, Krishna, Shiva, or any of a thousand other divinities. Other faiths will condemn you for your thoughts and feelings, but I say to you it is not in our thoughts and feelings that we are damned no matter if they are the thoughts of a Gandhi or a Hitler, what matters is action. Has anyone in this room never wished harm upon someone else?—I certainly have—everything from a speeding ticket to death. It is not good to hate, but action is what turns emotion into evil. I feel sorry for you if your heart and mind burn with hatred of Jews, Gays, Blacks, Whites, Women, Children, Christians, Muslims, Unitarians, anyone. If that malice is what fills you, I feel sorry for you, but I fear you if you act. That man in Tennessee could have hated liberals like me from today to eternity, but had he not acted, he could have lived his life that way—only wasting his own life and not that of our fellow believers. I know this simplifies the relationship between action and thought. How we think colors all of our actions and who we are at a deep level, our inmost thoughts and feelings, speak in every choice and movement we make. My point however is that no matter our worst or, perhaps more importantly, despite our best intentions, what actually matters is acting on those convictions. It is horrible to see someone starving, but until you transform the inward to the outward, all you offer is pity not help.
But we were talking about salvation. I don't believe that salvation is a simple matter of belief, not that belief is all that simple. I've certainly never mastered it. I think salvation is a matter of action. I say again, you should be worried about the state of your soul, you should be worried about your salvation, but I can offer you no salvation... apart from this—that as you act in the outer world so will you change your inner world. I do not believe that you can give and not receive, offer love and not be loved, change and not be changed, save a life and not be saved. I do not know for sure what kind of eternal reward there may be, if any, but some part of me says that if t here is someone or something that sits in judgment I feel certain that I better have more than a lifetime of good intentions. But again we come back to good humanism and, indeed, good traditional Unitarianism. One of the tensions between the Unitarians and the Universalists was the concern that the Universalist focus on transcendental salvation might take the focus off the Unitarian goal of transforming and perfecting this world, right here right now. But both traditions I believe could share in a sense of the word salvation that has roots that go back to sense of health, and that's what I'm talking about here. Salvation not as a theological proposition but as a measure of the health of our spirits. Action aimed at improving the world is aerobic exercise for the part of us that isn't physical.
It is because we are small that we must act simply because no one is any bigger. Never let the size of our contribution keep us from making it. And isn't that what faith is. The belief that the acorn can grow into the oak, that the trickle of water will cut the grand canyon, that small acts of conscious compassion can feed the hungry, mend the broken, and heal our planet.
Of course action can be subtle. We often act without knowing the effect. Anyone who has ever taught anything has likely had an impact that will never fully be known. Here again we see the deeper more complex relationship between thought, attitude and action. Embrace your highest ideals deeply and fully, wonderful ideals like our principles, and you will touch lives in ways you will never know.
I want to return to the dying patient I mentioned at the beginning. She was so concerned about not finishing the quilt she'd been working on for years. I wasn't quite sure what to say to that and so I did what any good chaplain would do, I kept my mouth shut and just held her hand. Eventually broke the silence and said she never felt she had known what her purpose here on earth was and wasn't sure she had ever made a difference. But then a young student nurse came in. Her shift was over and she would be moving on to a different unit the next day and so would not see the patient again. Sarah took the young nurse's hand and thanked her for the wonderful care and for sitting with her when she had been scared. The nurse and the patient teared up and just held hands for a while, looking into each other's eyes. It was clear that these two human beings had formed a profound bond. I watched the student nurse's face as she said good-bye clearly knowing that she was saying goodbye forever.
When Sarah and I were alone, I suggested that maybe she had just accomplished a part of her purpose. I told her that I could see how profoundly touched that young nurse was and I could tell she would remember Sarah for the rest of her career. Through who she was, even through her disease and death, she had touched this young woman's life forever and inspired her to a life of service and helping others. Then we spoke about how maybe none of us ever “finishes our quilt.” Maybe the quilts of our lives are only finished by those we love and touch and help and heal. Maybe this is the balance and the mystery. We must act despite or even because of how small our lives are, we must know that we will never know all the ways we touch others, we must trust that those connected to us by invisible threads of love are the ones who in turn help us complete our lives, placing them in a deeper wider context that the threescore and twenty years we have, and we must have faith that although little makes sense or perhaps even seems to change from the limited perspective we have, that we are all a part of a greater movement, that we all all contribute to the on-going story of humanity, the each of us is an essential thread in finishing the quilt.
This is one of the great aims of religion. Religion helps us embed ourselves in a quilt of meaning that has threads that runs from the far past, bold threads of figures that are models, archetypes for our own journeys. The old traditional stories often don't work for us, it's one of the reasons many of us found our way to Unitarian Universalism. And yet, when we turn back to those myths, those of Arjuna and Krishna, Moses and Jesus, Coyote and Crow, when we turn back and take them seriously enough not to take them literally they can unlock worlds of meaning, reveal the finely interwoven threads of our lives, and help us to wrap ourselves in a quilt lovingly constructed—not a quilt that hides us from reality, but one that helps us stride forward in brave ways knowing we are connected and have a role to play no matter how brief the scene.
Amen, Namaste, and Blessed be.

This Wednesday, April 16th, is National Healthcare Decisions day. I'll be leading a workshop at my church to discuss Advance Directives and having conversations with family and friends about our wishes in the event of life-limiting illness or injury. It is also a time to open up conversation with loved ones who may be facing these issues. Almost all of us will, at some point, need to make or help make these decisions for someone we care about.

Here are ten points about end-of-life decision making. At the bottom of this post are some links to other resources. Email me if you have any questions.

blessings,

Nathan

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Ten Points about End-of-Life and Advance Directives

1.Think about what quality of life means to you.
Is it enough to be biologically alive even if machines are needed? If you needed machines to exist, would you want that long-term?
Do you have to be awake for life to be worth living? How awake?
How aware do you need to be to consider it worth continuing? Does your mind need to be fully intact?
Are there certain activities that define an acceptable quality of life for you? For example, “If I can't talk [or eat, or play golf, or listen to music, or go the bathroom by myself] then I may not want to prolong life any further.” Think about whether there's something without which life would not be worth living.
Everyone's answers are different—there is no right or wrong here. For some, not being able to interact with family might be a threshold. For others not being able to perform basic activities of daily living might cause them to make particular choices regarding health care. These are hard questions to answer because as illness or age take things away from us, we often find life still holds enough to keep us wanting to be here. It's important to understand that, in general, we're talking more about acute and clearly life-limiting illness or injury, not chronic, slow progressive processes—though age also is a factor. Decisions you would make at 62 are different than ones you might make at 92. Finances can also play a role here. Many people express concern about being a financial burden to family. Setting can be a part of the decision-making mix. Some do not want, under any circumstances, to live in a nursing home. There is no way to answer all the questions ahead of time, but we can give some thought to the broad categories of possibility in an effort to be more prepared.

2.Have The Conversation with family and friends. Talk about what you think and want in the event of catastrophic illness or injury. Few statements are more powerful than a family member or friend saying to hospital staff, “We spoke about this last Thanksgiving. Jane said she would never want to be kept alive like Terri Schiavo.” Be assured that any discomfort felt now will be more than offset by the peace of mind you've helped provide to family and friends when the time comes for these incredibly hard decisions.

3.Have Advance Directives in place. Encourage other family members—adults of any age—to have these documents in order. Ask older relatives what they want. Give copies of your Directives to family, close friends, and your physician. Revisit your Advance Directives and Financial Will once every decade of life.

4.Have realistic expectations for medical treatment.
CPR survival rates on TV can be as high as 85%, while real life is less than 15% overall and less than 2% for the elderly and/or those with more than one significant medical problem. Those who survive are often worse than they were before and may have brain damage.
Medical technology is such that we can keep bodies alive even when the disease process cannot be stopped and death is inevitable. We often need to make choices about how prolonged the dying process is. Again there are no clear answers. One might, for example, choose to keep someone on life-support until a family member can arrive to say good-bye.

5.Understand that doctors are, for the most part, trained to save lives at any cost. The family often needs to look to themselves for guidance at end-of-life. Doctors will often present all that can be done, but they are not always good at clarifying what should be done. It is reasonable to ask direct questions like, “How likely is this treatment to prolong life with good quality?” Medicine during critical illness is increasingly the role of specialists who sometimes focus on one body system. Ask for the big picture: How is the patient as a whole doing?


6.Artificial ventilation and artificial hydration and nutrition is transitional help for ill people, but often is not appropriate at end-of-life. The natural cycle of death usually includes a decreased need and desire for hydration and nutrition. Providing these items via IV or other non-natural routes at end-of-life can often increase discomfort. If someone wants to eat or drink, they should, if at all possible, be given food and drink. However, for the unconscious person who is in the process of dying, giving these substances by artificial means often creates more suffering. As the body shuts down, it has little need for this material and forcing it in may short-circuit the body's natural way of making us comfortable as we die.

7.All medical treatment has a goal. If the goal isn't being achieved, the treatment can be stopped. The quality-of-life questions discussed in #1 above can help you identify what your goal is, for yourself or for a family member.

8.You, not the doctors, are in control of your health care.

9.In general, there is no reason for a patient to be in pain, anxious, or uncomfortable at end-of-life. As our goal moves from cure to comfort, more options may open up in terms of palliative (symptom management) medicine.

10.Live your life.

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Here are some links to resources:

http://www.pikespeakforum.org/resources.htm

http://www.caringinfo.org/

http://www.nationalhealthcaredecisionsday.org/

http://www.caregiver.org/caregiver/jsp/content_node.jsp?nodeid=401