Fearing the Future
Fearing the Future
A sermon for Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Rev. Dr. Clare Butterfield
Opening words: From Hildegard of Bingen
I am the one whose praise echoes on high.
I adorn all the earth.
I am the breeze that nurtures all things green.
I encourage blossoms to flourish with ripening fruits.
I am led by the spirit to feed the purest streams.
I am the rain coming from the dew
That causes the grasses to laugh with the joy of life.
I am the yearning for the good.
Reading from Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm [pg. 35]:
If the process of the development of mankind had been harmonious, if it had followed a certain plan, then both sides of the development – the growing strength and the growing individuation – would have been exactly balanced. As it is, the history of mankind is one of conflict and strife. Each step in the direction of growing individuation threatened people with new insecurities. Primary bonds once severed cannot be mended; once paradise is lost, man cannot return to it. There is only one possible, productive solution for the relationship of individualized man with the world: his active solidarity with all men and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual.
However, if the economic, social and political conditions on which the whole process of human individuation depends, do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality in the sense just mentioned, while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. It then becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to man and the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of his freedom.
The Last Supper
By Rainer Maria Rilke
They are assembled, astounded, bewildered,
round him who, like a sage centered at last,
withdraws from those to whom he once belonged
and flows beyond them as some foreigner.
The former solitude comes over him
which raised him to perform his profound acts;
again he’ll wander in the olive grove,
and those who love him will now run from him.
He summons them to the final meal
and (as a shot shoos birds from sheaves)
he shoos their hands from bread
with his word; they flutter up to him;
they flap about the table anxiously
searching for some way out. But he,
like an evening hour, is everywhere.
Sermon:
Out of the depths I cry to you O Lord.
I wait for the Lord my soul waits, and in his word I hope:
My soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning.
Psalm 130 is in the lectionary readings for this morning. We don’t use those, but I like to see what’s in them sometimes, because I find wisdom there. Good and thoughtful people put these together, out of the historical wisdom of Biblical text, and particularly in the Lenten season I like to draw from those.
Lent is a time of waiting. It is a canonical calendar for the not yet – that which has not yet come into being but which might be. And in times of waiting we are uncertain and when we are uncertain we are anxious. Out of the depths I cry to you O Lord. My soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning.
Some years Lent is particularly well-timed. Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox (because we are modern, logical people), so depending on when that full moon happens, Easter can fall between March and April. When it’s late, as it is this year, it truly coincides with the weather changes that usher in a more grateful season here in the Midwest. And I particularly love it when that happens. Because we all know, in Chicago, that it’s best not to get too excited too soon about spring, or it will break your heart a few times before it really arrives. And Lent is all about that time of silent anticipation. The quiet discipline of non-anxious waiting, in uncertainty. Lent is all about not fearing the future. And you may have noticed that there’s a lot of fear around these days. It’s making us act unworthily toward one another. Lent invites contemplation on this, and it invites us to take the time to lose anxiety, and therefore to meet anger with something other than anger.
One of the other lectionary readings for this morning is the Lazarus story from the Gospel of John. If you haven’t read that story lately, I’d recommend it. You’ll be surprised at how vivid it is. Lazarus was really dead. You could smell it. It says so in the text. The story really wants you to have no doubt about that. And it speaks of a people who were intimately acquainted with death, unlike our own time, when we are cut off from it.
These are readings which, in the wisdom of the season, suggest a time of great gravity – of tragedy. They suggest a time of anxiety and hope that is unfulfilled, and unlikely to be fulfilled. The Lazarus story, of course, also foretells the story of the resurrection, which is coming. But in its way it tells of Jesus entering the last act of his play, and it leaves us with a sense that death is in the air.
I think this speaks to the time we’re in generally. Certainly the anxiety of the last major natural disaster, this time in Japan, contribute to a feeling of general anxiety and decline. We fear the future. We fear it generally, and in all times because in spite of our death-denying culture, we know that at some point it no longer includes us. That gives us anxiety.
There are more immediate and specific causes for anxiety these days also. The earthquake in Japan was bigger than anything seismologists had predicted for that region, and the consequences of it and the tsunami that followed have been sobering, sad beyond words. And this earthquake also reminds us that historic time floats along on the crust of geologic time the way as Verlyn Klinkenborg put it in a recent article: “a whale louse overlaps with the blue whale it infests, though the scale of that comparison is too small by several orders of magnitude.”
Some are even starting to suspect that the warmer crust our activities are creating on the earth, and the altered pressure of higher ocean levels, might start to affect the very geology of the earth, making seismic events of this order more likely. That they are always likely at the intersection of historic and geologic time is a given. As Klinkenborg points out, we exist in the moment on earth that permits our existence and survival, but our last 10,000 historic years have been relatively quiet in geologic terms. There is no reason that this should continue to be so. What is likely at any moment is likely, but what is possible at any moment is always possible.
The convergence of the possible and the likely, even for an instant, can have catastrophic results, as we should now be aware. And that awareness could provoke anxiety.
Tea Party enthusiasts and Climate skeptics may prefer to deny that there is any anthropogenic link to this kind of activity. That may in part be a psychological defense to the idea that catastrophes are becoming more probable. We are still more likely to die in a car wreck, or cancer, or simply old age. The only certainty in that is that at some point we will die. But somehow our culture is not good at helping us to meet that reality in an unanxious way, any more than it is good at helping us to accept the increased likelihood of large-scale disaster in an unanxious way.
In searching for a vehicle to talk about this, I finally got around to reading something I should have read a long time ago. Erich Fromm’s book Escape from Freedom. I’ve been thinking about the book and wanting to read it because I think it’s a helpful thing to read in the time of the Tea Party and other modern anxieties. I am trying to find a way for myself to think about all this without creating something out of the other that I can no longer recognize. It isn’t helpful to do that. The people who disagree with me are people. And I do not intend to belittle their thinking when I suggest that it seems to me to have a strong element of fear in it. Certainly my own priorities are in part driven by my fears – my fear of a dead planet, for example, or my fear of leaving a world to my children which is appreciably worse than the one into which I was born. But I am finding the kind of fear that leads one to doubt the citizenship of our President, for example, to be a kind with which I cannot directly empathize, and so I need a better and more constructive way of thinking about it.
I read you a passage from Escape from Freedom which summarizes its central idea. That as we lose our security – our understanding of our place in society, even if it comes from greater personal freedom, we become anxious. The solution to this anxiety truly is a sense of solidarity with the rest of humankind, but because we are ill-educated and ill-prepared for that we turn instead to methods – to an escape from freedom.
Fromm writes particularly of the attraction of Nazi-ism in Germany (the book was written in 1941), but he also speaks, profoundly and frighteningly, of the potential for the rise of facism in the United States.
I note that this week the 2010 census data, slowly coming out, indicates that white children will become a minority among the young in this country by some time in 2019. White people overall will become a minority in this country a couple of decades after that. Given the racial history of our country, the loss of a white minority must be profoundly anxiety-provoking for some. There is a privilege associated with whiteness that will, if there is any justice, be lost, and if one’s life has granted few other privileges, the loss of that one must be deeply frightening. I lay that out only as one possibility of where some of the more racially-charged fear that is taking over our public conversation might be coming from. It is the fear of a future which will be controlled by people who are not familiar and who may not share our priorities. Now in my mind the best way to get past that fear is to get to know the people who will be in control, but that takes a certain mindset, and there is no denying that it’s difficult and scary at times.
This idea of the fear of the future connects in my mind with the season of Lent because Lent is the time in which we sit with our humanness and the certainty of failure and death and loss – but failure and death and loss that have not happened yet. It is the worst possible season – a time of anxiety.
Fromm talks about the anxiety of modern society (I find it fascinating that he was writing 60 years ago), and says [243-244]:
In our society emotions in general are discouraged. While there can be no doubt that any creative thinking—as well as any other creative activity—is inseparably linked with emotion, it has become an ideal to think and to live without emotions. To be “emotional” has become synonymous with being unsound or unbalanced. By the acceptance of this standard the individual has become greatly weakened; his thinking is impoverished and flattened. On the other hand, since emotions cannot be completely killed, they must have their existence totally apart from the intellectual side of the personality; the result is the cheap and insincere sentimentality with which movies and popular songs feed millions of emotion-starved customers.
But, from says, one emotion is not permitted in our culture and that is the sense of tragedy.
“Our own era,” he says, “simply denies death, and with it one fundamental aspect of life. Instead of allowing the awareness of death and suffering to become one of the strongest incentives for life, the basis for human solidarity, and an experience without which joy and enthusiasm lack intensity and depth, the individual is forced to repress it….Thus the fear of death lives an illegitimate existence among us. It remains alive in spite of the attempt to deny it, but being repressed it remains sterile. It is one source of the flatness of other experiences, of the restlessness pervading life, and it explains, I would venture to say, the exorbitant amount of money this nation pays for its funerals.” [pg. 245].
He goes on to describe our vulnerability to the wrong sorts of influences, because our society encourages the repression of real emotions, and because it also encourages a strange kind of authoritative figure [pg 250].
“Radio, moving pictures, and newspapers,” he so quaintly says, “have a devastating effect on this score. The announcement of the bombing of a city and the death of hundreds of people is shamelessly followed or interrupted by an advertisement for soap or wine….Because of all this we cease to be genuinely related to what we hear. We cease to be excited, our emotions and our critical judgment become hampered, and eventually our attitude to what is going on in the world assumes a quality of flatness and indifference.”
What do you think he would make of the 24-hour news cycle, smart phones and twitter, in their atomizing influence? What do you make of them, in light of this thought?
To draw from a different resource, The Onion, on-line, there is their headline following the earthquake and tsunami in Japan:
Deaths Of 20,000 Japanese Afford Planet Solid 15 Minutes In Which Everyone Acts Like A Human Being
I’ll quote from the article because while horrible, it’s funny:
"Though its duration was incredibly brief, in this span of time the entire human race was able to temporarily forget all its petty political interests, narcissism, greed, and ironic detachment for a few moments and behave like real people with compassion and respect," social scientist Dr. Robert Westbrook said of the short-lived burst of basic decency. "There is no evidence of any significant bickering, lying, preening, or self-involvement during this period. In fact, it appears that all 6.7 billion human beings simply stopped for one quarter of an hour, became filled with genuine emotion, and said, 'Oh, no, those poor people,' while keeping their baser instincts in check."
"That they instantly went back to being needy, solipsistic whiners does not change the fact that, for a fleeting moment, the world was a wholly humane and gentle place," Westbrook added.
It’s the same general idea. What does it take, in a world of nano-second attention spans and instant access to everything that happens, including the every unedited thought of thousands of people, to get us to feel a true sense of awfulness, compassion, and solidarity.
A thirty-foot wave, apparently, can still do it.
For fifteen minutes.
But then we go back to being anxious and overfed by the information stream, with its strange capacity to equalize and therefore trivialize everything, and to turn everything into a bit of data, whether true or untrue.
That is a very anxious-making condition in which to live. And if one lives in that condition with the distinct sense that one’s own group is becoming more vulnerable by the hour, some anger is likely to be added to the anxiety.
This is my interpretation of what we’re seeing in our public conversation right now (which is more like a shouting match than a conversation, really). And it is far from clear to me that it can end well. I believe that the potential for demagogues and fascists is quite real, more real now than it has been at any previous point in my life.
If we are both constantly stimulated and afraid and anxious, and we never take that moment to sit with our anxiety and to ask ourselves who we are as human beings, and how we are in fellowship with other human beings, whether or not their political ideologies are the same as ours, only worse things can happen.
This is what Lent is for. To dwell in the time of anxiety, with some assurance of the capacity for goodness to re-emerge, but no assurance that it will do so at the moment of our choosing. It is as likely when we think to look out the window next that it will be snowing as that the flowers will suddenly have broken open.
The wisdom of the lectionary is that it gives us both the Psalm – Out of the depths I cry to you O Lord – and the Lazarus story – “Lazarus, come out!” It gives us both a reflection of our own anxiety and a sense that there is potential in any moment for something radically new to emerge.
There are no certainties in life except that at some point it will be taken from us. We do different things in response to that. Some are hoarders, and some are afraid to experience life at all because they can’t control it utterly. Some religions offer certainty, but they do so, in my opinion, in exchange for credibility. What Lent can be is a time to learn to live with uncertainty without anxiety. Our response to the fragility of life should be to live it gently and fully.
To sit in the openness of this time and simply draw breath. To know that there are trends afoot in our country and our planet that do not auger well, and to know that we do not know where they will take us – what additional grief we will witness for ourselves and our brothers and sisters. But to know also that the possibility of something truly new and beautiful exists with us in all times, and that the greater love we show and the less we are divided from one another the more likely it is that the beautiful possibility will emerge.
We are the anxious disciples in the Rilke poem:
they flap about the table anxiously
searching for some way out. But he,
like an evening hour, is everywhere.
It is painful to wait and not know. Like those who waited by the cave of Lazarus for Jesus, the stench of death is all around us. Spring breaks slowly forth, but we hold back from embracing it for fear of the late frost. If the blossoms did the same there would be no spring. Do not fear the future, even the future that does not include you. Love the present. Love one another. Do not squander this moment, whatever it brings us, in fearful anticipation of the next one. Breathe. Be patient. Trust in the beautiful possibility. Be like Lazarus, like spring. Come out.
Closing Words:
Peace I leave with you;
My peace I give to you.
I do not give to you as the world gives.
Do not let your hearts be troubled
And do not let them be afraid.
Go in peace.