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September 2004 Sermons
September 5, 2004 SermonRev. Nancy D. DeanSeptember 5, 2004Our Desire to BelongIf I were to ask you, I expect that each of you could tell me some different groups to which you belong. Some of the groups are formal, some are defined by your gender, class, profession, and so forth. Since we are in the last of our informal summer services, I think I would like to raise your hands as I name some groups you might belong to: Children, fathers, mothers, gardeners, Rotary, Theater or Opera Guild, professional organization; a committee, several committees, aunt or uncle, musicians, school, online service, this congregation. The fact is, it is highly unusual not to belong. Now certainly there are some people who do not actively seek out organizational or institutional ways to belong, some are less social, but even hermits belong to a group- they just don’t choose to affiliate. One evening, as they watched a TV news-program, a woman said to her husband, "It seems to me that the majority of people in this country belong to some minority group." Well, it is true, isn’t it? While we do not all belong to a racial minority group, we are likely to belong to some smaller groups. When we think about what conforming or conformity means, we are usually talking about whether we belong to the majority group of something or another. One the great ironies of teen rebellion is that in their need throw off the conformities they perceive in their parents, in their need to “do their own thing”, even though it seems drastic to the older generation, most are participating in the oldest form of conforming. Whether it is wearing raccoon coats in the wild behavior of the 1920s collegian, or more modern examples of dying their hair purple, body piercings, or tattoos, they are seeking more to fit in with their own age group in classic conformity patterns. Unitarians do not tend to be conformists, at least not with regard to religious belief and practice. And, I would say that of all the things people who are new to our faith deal with, the biggest has to do with how to talk about belonging to what used to be called “non-conformist religion.” When we belong to the “main” groups, we have less to explain. We have less to divulge of ourselves. Or so it seems. There is one way in which this really bothers me, and that has to do with filling out forms or applications where they ask you to identify your race or ethnic origins. They used to give you two options, black or white, now you might also find Hispanic, Native American, and so on. I always have the desire to check Other, if that is available. After all, our origin is not that straight-forward. Tiger Woods, the golf phenom, sometimes refers to himself as "Cablinasian," a word he derived from his Caucasian, Black, Indian and Asian heritage. The fact is probably most of us do not really know with any certainty what our ancestors of a three or four generations back may have been. In this melting pot, where people of every race and nationality, have been in contact for two or three-hundred years, we are often only basing our statements on what is obvious. We are derivatives at best. Still, it is a strong need to belong, to know to what and to whom we belong; and further, to know to what and to whom others belong: hence Tiger Woods press release after being plagued about whether he was Black or not. Of course there is more to the story, but that’s another sermon. My focus today is on the reason so many of us will step outside the circle of family, friends, even culture, out of our desire to belong to a group that defines most truly who we are or who we want to be. Fundamentally, that is why I became a Unitarian, and why I think people become members of our UU congregations worldwide. Not surprisingly, the American Psychological Association published an article dealing with this issuing of belonging. [A]ccording to an article in the . . . Psychological Bulletin, a journal of the American Psychological Association (APA), there is now a large body of empirical evidence to support the idea that belonging is not just a desire, but a fundamental human need. Psychologists Roy F. Baumeister, Ph.D., and Mark B. Leary, Ph.D., decided that in order for 'belongingness' to be considered a fundamental human motivation (as opposed to a want), it would have to meet several criteria, including being universal in the sense of applying to all people, affect a broad range of behaviors, lead to ill effects when thwarted and elicit goal-oriented behavior designed to satisfy it (the same sort of criteria that might be applied to defining the need for food as a fundamental motivator). [and] They found, for example, that 'friendships and group allegiance seem to arise spontaneously and readily, without needing evidence of material advantage or inferred similarity.' People also invest a great deal of time and effort in fostering supportive relationships with others and, the authors note, external threat seems to increase the tendency to form strong bonds. The article goes on at length to point out that we are social creatures who begin early in our lives identifying our belonging: first to family, to religious and academic groups in American culture, and these are further delineated by recognizing we belong to sub-groups, for instance, our family is vegetarian, or Unitarian, a given race or multi-racial-in other words, what makes our families special groups within the larger groups we belong. Think just a moment about your understanding of belonging when you were in third or fourth grade, when you were around 8 to 10-years of age. How would you have described your belonging? For some of you, that may not have changed very much, but for some of us, myself included, that understanding of belonging is quite different now. One way our understanding of belonging changes has to do both with the groups to which we belong, but also how we see ourselves in relation to other groups to which we do not belong--and this is very important to how we Unitarian Universalists see ourselves. For most of human history, it was important to define your belonging in order to survive. We would like to believe that as we have become more civilized, that we have less of the “us versus them” thinking. But, as the various wars we continue to engage in testify all too clearly, human beings very quickly align themselves according the perceived “right” groups. As the men and women who are fighting in Iraq, and those who preceded them in other wars, the biggest problem is in identifying who is on our side. And, even here at home, we readily see the tendency to identify with groups based on “our side or their side.” I hear this language around politics all the time, especially now we are in the run-down to the national election. Sometimes, we forget that we are all Americans in favor of the sub-group identification of Republican, Democrat, Independent, or Green. Of course, as UUs, we want to remember that our UU Principles are intended to help guide us in the remembering the greater good, and that it is perfectly acceptable to believe differently about these issues while respecting what used to be called the “loyal opposition.” You and I are constantly engaged in relationship building or relationship maintaining. As the Baumeister-Leary study showed, we spend most of our real and emotional energy in this activity of heart and mind. Looking at the effects of the need to belong on emotions, the authors conclude that 'many of the strongest emotions people experience, both positive and negative, are linked to belongingness.' The formation of new social bonds -- from falling in love (that is also requited), to getting a new job, to pledging a fraternity or sorority -- is generally associated with positive emotions, even celebration, the authors write. 'Childbirth is especially significant in this regard because the data show that parenthood reduces happiness and increases stress, strain and marital dissatisfaction, yet people nonetheless retain a positive image of it, celebrate it, and feel positive about it, both in advance and in retrospect. It is plausible that the formation of the new social bond is directly responsible for the joy and positive feelings.' On the other hand, the authors note, threats to social attachments, especially the dissolution of social bonds, are a primary source of negative emotions. 'People feel anxious at the prospect of losing important relationships, feel depressed or grief stricken when their connections with certain other people are severed, and feel lonely when they lack important relationships.' In fact, the authors conclude, 'there is no firm evidence in [the literature] that significant social bonds can ever be broken without suffering or distress.'
If you and I think about our greatest joys and greatest pain, the odds are very good that they all relate to acceptance, belonging, or the dissolution of relationships. We have a few psychologists in this congregation, and I have no doubt that the majority of the people the counsel are dealing with these issues; it certainly is true of my pastoral counseling. Our desire to belong is the most deeply spiritual aspect of our being. We will sacrifice our basic beliefs to belong, but some of us will also severe our deepest connections in order to belong to a group that does not require us to sacrifice our basic beliefs or truths. It is powerful stuff, this desire to belong. We all want and need love, we need the society of other people, we need affirmation of our very being. These three things have everything to do with whether we find life ultimately good, and contentment in our own life journeys. The article on belonging goes on to say that we do not need a lot of people to nourish our need to belong, but we all need some people. I do not believe any of us need a congregational relationship to be spiritual or even religious, you could do both even if you stranded on a desert island. If any of you remember the movie with Tom Hanks, Castaway, where for seven years his character is in just such a place, the most touching part of the film is that he creates Wilson, which is in reality a soccer ball with a face painted on it. He talks to Wilson, in fact keeps his sanity because of Wilson, and when near the end he is separated from Wilson, he is so attached to this human surrogate that he nearly risks his own life to save it/him, and weeps for his loss. You and I need each other, there are things we can do together that we cannot do alone, like build this church; but if we did not build relationships first, we would never have bothered with the building. That is first, foremost, and always the reason for a community of faith. We want to belong. And if we can have our druthers, we want to belong to a group of people with whom we share basic values and goals. And that is why you and I are here this morning. Because we need to love and be loved, because we need to belong. This is the heart of every message of God’s love, the message of all the greatest spiritual teachers, that we all belong to that greatest good that is beyond ourselves, but which is also meaningless without ourselves. Belonging is the message of every one of our seven UU Principles; it is the message of this minister. We need each other so that the bad times are less difficult, and the good times are more joyful. May it be ever thus. So be it. September 12, 2004 SermonRev. Nancy D. DeanSeptember 12, 2004Mingling the WatersThis is always a special service when we gather once more to formally start up the new congregational year. This ritual we do on Ingathering Sunday of bringing water, stones, or shells has special significance because our offerings have some special significance to those who bring them. These offerings represent where our hearts and minds, indeed our very spirits, have been over the last several weeks. When we pour out our offerings into the bowl we are participating in one the most ancient of human rites, a communion, a sharing, which has come to have a deep meaning for this congregation. This is how all rites and rituals come to into being. For those who are visiting and have not observed this ritual before, this is our Unitarian way to witness to both the elemental things and the spiritual quality of life. Our dependence, our absolutely inviolable reliance upon water for our very existence; this is elemental. While no one can argue that we must have water to survive, it is also true that the human spirit requires emotional quenching. We need to be cared for, and we need to care for others, this is also elemental to our humanness. When we mingle these waters together that arrive here from our separate lives, our separate experiences, we bring a new consciousness to our being. What, after all, is important? What of all the many disparate things we do, what is most important? Work? Well, yes work is one of the most important things we do. We work to provide the basic necessities of life, but we also work to provide for some joys and pleasures as well. Striving? We strive to achieve purpose and meaning in life, but we strive also make our mark on the world, however great or small. Religion? We gather in communities of faith for what our spirits need, but we also gather for community of like-minded friends, who add meaning to our lives. Love? Most important of all, is love. For none of the other things has so much meaning, or so much purpose, or so much intensity without love. Love is the ultimate meaning, purpose, work, and religion. And in all this, we see the patterns that represent all that we call the good life, even the very life of the universe. We are told by geophysicists, those scientists who study such things, that the earth is a closed system, all the water that ever was is still here. Yet, of all the water on the earth (and about 2/3 of the earth is covered in water), only about 3% is fresh water, and a bit less than 1% is available to humans (the rest is locked in glaciers, polar ice caps, or deep in the ground). So, while the amount of water in the atmosphere and on the Earth remains basically the same, that water can take many forms, and most of it is not available to us. We know that water is precious, and we know also that to waste what is precious is wrong, and it jeopardizes the potential available water for our children and coming generations. There is an old Chinese adage that says all the water you waste, you will have drink in the after life. My children always had to hear this repeated whenever I heard them leaving the water running when they were brushing their teeth, or when they would leave water running for any reason. My son, who very early on decided he did not believe in an after life, always responded, “And I have to hear about all this life, so in effect, Mother, that’s being punished twice.” I suppose we all remember from elementary school days learning the interdependency of our closed system, how water evaporates, condenses into clouds, moves over the Earth, and falls again as rain, where it collects in lakes, streams which flow to rivers, and on to the oceans. And, so the cycle repeats. One of the reasons for such grave concerns about the present rapid destruction of the Amazon rain forest, the primary reason, is how important that equatorial band of condensation truly is to the world weather system. We know, also, that we can create circumstances where the rain will not fall in some places, or cannot be collected where it falls, so it quickly runs off, as happens in deserts. Due to human causes, deserts are increasing around the world, including here in this country. West Texas, for instance, is undergoing rapid increase in land falling to desert--desertification. We know how very crucial water is to life. Water, the cycle of rainfall and evaporation, all this reminds us of the cycle in human life of birth, life, death. So with this water ritual, our water communion, we here are honoring this interdependence between our lives and the Earth’s cycles. For we are of this Earth, not separate from it, what affects the planet affects us, and what we do to the planet affects the Earth and then our lives once again. The great circle of being. How powerful it is to be reminded of our dependence, and the interdependent web of all existence. It is a sacred connection that we ignore at our own peril. Further, all the great religious teachers have taught us that this is equally our connection with God, with that Ultimate Reality that is greater than ourselves. Professor Tom Driver, emeritus profession of religion at Union Theological Seminary, wrote of ritual’s significance, that all rituals are about lifting up something as important, for its importance. To quote Drive, ritual is a “showing of a doing”. This is why we have special rituals for all the things that are important in our lives: weddings, child dedication, funerals or memorials, award ceremonies, and so on. We could just treat them like most people have their breakfast-without ceremony. (Of course, some religions make every meal a ritual.) Our ritual of return is to bring a small offering from the waters that were in the places we spent special time, and gather them together into this bowl. Further, we extend the ritual to our other rites, for it has always been my practice (and anyone who’s been here for more than a year or two knows this mantra): to take this water, filter it, sterilize it, and put it in a Hellman’s mayonnaise jar in my freezer. Then, throughout the year, as we celebrate child dedications, blessings of all sorts, memorials, we use this Mill Creek Water of the World for our ceremonies. Just as the waters mingle around the world in the closed system of the Earth through the cycles of rain, collection, and evaporation; so, too, the water moves through us, coming into us in what we eat and drink, flowing through all our tissues (we are some 75% water), carrying nourishment to and cleansing our physical being. Water is life, for its absence is death. This is the meaning of baptism down through the ages, predating Christianity. The importance of our annual water communion is not about who went farther away from home, or to the most unusual or inaccessible place (though that can be very special for the individuals); it is, rather, about the path the water itself represents. As you and I mingle in this religious experience of being members of the Mill Creek congregation, we are bringing what is to this community, in effect, the life blood, the water that quenches, cleanses, and purifies. You are that which is elemental to this faith home. What you bring will not lie here and stagnate before drying up; rather, who you are, what you value, what you have to give to this generation and those to come, moves through your actions and mingles in our joint actions, providing that soul sustenance we all need. That we bother to bring a small vial of water or a pebble or shell, from wherever we have been, this is about the importance of communicating a small part of our individual stories to the gathered congregation. In this, we are mingling our experiences. In this ritual we repeat year-to-year, we are telling our story, enacting part of the story, and re-telling older parts of our story. This is how religion is made, and in large part how history is made, too. That cycle which carries us back to the mingling of the waters of the world, that today we mingle here, and will during the year be touched on the foreheads of babies, sprinkled on the ground of a grave, poured around the memorial trees, even added to the paint that coats the walls--the cycle continues. Even to the extent that some water from the past is mingled with the present. We tend to take this dependency for granted, but life itself depends upon it. We are born, we live, we die. One day the water that flows through our cells will be given up to the Mother Earth once more, to live again in life that comes after us. Let us be reminded: Reader One: From the oceans we bring these waters; Reader Two: From the rivers of the world where they flowed; Reader Three:From the lakes shaped by glaciers, rivers and springs; Reader Four:From the rains and snow these waters come; Reader Five: From the tears of joys and sorrow we add our human offering; Reader Six: From the watery home of a mothers’ womb . . . In the compassion with which we live our lives, that love that passes understanding, in this is all we can know of God. All we need to know of existence. All these offerings are now one in this bowl. In the words of an anonymous Unitarian youth: Come let us mingle the waters of a thousand rivers So be it.
September 19, 2004 SermonRev. Nancy D. DeanSeptember 19, 2004Road Leads Ever On and OnSince I was a small child I have always loved fairytales. I like the challenge or problem, the crisis, the clearly defined good versus evil, and I especially like the happy ending. Have you heard the story about the little girl who asked her father, who had been reading to her at bedtime? "Daddy, do all fairy tales begin with 'Once upon a time'?" He shook his head and replied, "No, there is a whole series of fairy tales that begin with 'I promise if elected . . . '" Now fairytales have changed a great deal, so that the challenge and the crisis, even the evil that good must overcome, have been softened up quite a lot. If we look back to the original tales the Brothers Grimm collected in their 1812 landmark collection of eighty-six tales (mostly German), they were often very scary. These were stories that arose, as do all folk tales, among people who were trying to teach important lessons to the young. Of course, many such stories were told one or two times and fell by the wayside, but the best ones, the ones where the moral, the thing to be taught, was best encapsulated in the tale, these enjoyed many repetitions. They were told and retold, with bits and pieces added by the later storytellers. Storytelling, in fact, was the first entertainment of children and adults. Yet, like the stories of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, there were kernels of truth underlying the tales. So, too, with fairytales. Human experience was writ large in the fairytale and the fantasy. Life was scary in medieval Europe. Wolves, for instance, were a very real danger. Small children who wandered away from their mothers or minders had been known to be snatched away by a hungry wolf pack. Adults out in lonely places also had been attacked. So we get the story of Little Red Riding Hood. The oldest version looks quite a bit different from what many of us now recognize of the story. In that early version, the little girl is sent by her mother to take a bottle of wine and some cake (that’s changed to just food), to grandmother, and told not to wander from the path. The wolf comes along and asks her where she is going, and she tells him everything he needs to know, including where Granny lives. Off sprints the wolf to Granny’s house. Little Red Cap, as she is called then (because she wore a red-velvet cap/hat made by Granny), sees flowers off the road that she thinks her granny would enjoy; so, with all good intentions, she leaves the path to gather them, which gives the wolf time to get to Granny’s house, devour granny, and put on her gown and nightcap, so that when the child gets to Granny’s, she is surprised by the changes, and ponders all the “what big ears/eyes/hands/mouth you have grandmother,” but in that story the wolf gobbles her up, too. The day is saved by the quick wits of a neighbor, a hunter, who decides to check up on the old woman, and finds the wolf snoring in her bed, clearly glutted on his terrible meal. The huntsman cuts open the sleeping wolf’s stomach (logic does not play a strong part in these stories), out pops Granny and Little Red Cap, he then fills the stomach with stones and when the wolf wakes up, it falls down dead. The huntsman, Granny, and Red celebrate by eating the cake and drinking the wine and, as it is written: “Red-Cape thought to herself, ‘As long as I live, I will never by myself leave the path, to run into the wood, when my mother has forbidden me to do so.’” Of course children then and we here now recognize some bigger issues like talking to strangers, telling more than you should, not recognizing the wolf, etc. Still, there is a happy ending, and the children of three or four hundred years ago were reminded in the telling that danger and evil lurk at every turn, and even the best intentions can lead to bad outcomes, and that listening to your mother (or elders in general) is what will keep you safe. By the time J.R. Tolkien was writing in early to middle 20th Century, he, as a linguist and scholar at Oxford University in England, was well-acquainted with not only Grimm, but the many folk legends, and mythical stories of Europe, especially Norse myths (he did a renowned translation of Beowulf), as well as the mythology of many religions, Christianity included; so, he was well-equipped to recreate the great myth, which includes all the elements of fairy tales. He creates the great trilogy known as Lord of the Rings, which feature the most unlikely of heroes who arise from the peaceful, pastoral folk called Hobbits, and it is with the hobbits Bilbo and his nephew Frodo Baggins that the tale begins and ends. I fell in love with these stories in my late teens in college, and became part of the group of American young people who turned these stories into the cult classics they became (which, Tolkien really did not like; he felt they were not appreciated as much as they should be for what is truly their real genius in the languages he created). Of course, what we loved was the fairytale, but it was, as myths are, a fairytale for adults. The plot is complex, the creatures, good, bad, confused and indifferent, are many. The languages, which are an element many do enjoy, further complicate the stories that are part of the layering of the main story. Still, as the movie trilogy also pointed to, what is the best about Lord of the Rings, is the magical moral elements. We like to see humans, or extensions of our humanness in the creatures, either survive the big challenges, or fail through their evil machinations. In the end, good does triumph over evil, and though it is not a fairytale ending in the way of Little Red Riding Hood, it is the best ending. In fact, it is the human ending. For, like us, the Hobbits go off to die, and though they are successful in overcoming the evil, it ultimately results in their death because the struggle of good-to be good and do good--takes all their strength and there is nothing left. They sacrifice themselves so that Middle Earth survives, and humanity can go on. When the first story was released as a movie, I was excited to see these tales brought to the big screen; I knew they would be great movies, just like Star Wars movies are great for all the same reasons. It occurred to me that we are in a time when the movies on offer have been moving from the highly realistic offerings of the 70s and 80s where evil often triumphs, back to the moral tale, the good versus evil tale where good triumphs. What is that telling us about people in our time? I had a professor in graduate school from the department of radio and film, who said that movies do a number of things, but mostly they point to what the wider society is concerned or worried about--our fears. Which is why in the 40s and 50s we had a great era of sci-fi movies showing all that evil scientists got up to that went wrong. In the era before that, the movies showed how science as medicine might go wrong (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). Of course, all of this follows on the earlier work of literature that pointed to these concerns. Beginning in the late 60s into the 80s, we got a string of realistic movies that showed us that good does not always, or even often, triumph over the evil as portrayed in child molesters, corrupt politicians, drug dealers, mafia overlords, all kinds of corruption from wars fought for the wrong reason and fought badly (think Apocalypse Now), lies told to perpetuate all kinds of evil, and on and on. All this pointed to our cultural anxiety about increased population, increased crime, more and more revealed by the media that showed us the ugly side of life, especially political and business life. Then we started getting Star Wars, Star Trek, and a number of sci-fi movies more like Tolkien’s myth that showed once more the great mythological hero or group of heroic people. Of course, amidst this more recent emergence of the Tolkien stories, rise up, not coincidentally, the Harry Potter series of books and movies. So, it would seem that we nowadays feel the world is too much with us, and want stories, epic stories, with all the unchanging human themes of good versus evil, and hope that good can and will overcome the evil. Many scholars of religion point to the mythological hero, for instance Joseph
Campbell with his great work looking at the religions and religious myths around
the world, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell said: Myth is the
secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into
human manifestation.... We try to envision the creator, and that comes to us as both good and evil, for we see both good and evil. So, in most cultures, there is a manifestation of good and evil in the supernatural beings. We do not just have God in western culture, we have his very powerful counterpart, Satan (the Devil); and God has his armies of angels, and Satan has his armies of demons. In fact, there is little difference from one religion to the next worldwide in terms of this pattern. Though the kinds of heroes, the journeys they must go on to overcome evil, those naturally all have their own particular themes and casts of characters depending on the culture. What is consistent is that there are both cosmically powerful forces of good and evil, and we humans have to choose which we will follow: the side of light and goodness, or the side of darkness and evil. These sides also have other reliable physical characteristics, aside from sunlight versus darkness of night, there is up versus down, mountain top versus the pit or cavernous depths. There is green growth, flowering, fruitfulness versus, desiccated vegetation, decay, stagnation, death. Flowing, clean (often white or pastel) garments versus dirty, rigid/restrictive, armor. Quiet versus noisy. And so on, you could add more of those defined differences that are all codes for our eyes and ears, indeed all our senses, that one thing is good and another is evil. Would that it were so! Wouldn’t it be nice if we could see so easily what is good and what is evil, or if those were the only choices. Perhaps what this trend in film is really telling us is that it is awfully hard to know these days what is good and what is potentially negative or evil. How do we know if we are making the right choices? Life is complicated. Our choices are not so clear-cut. And we all feel challenged as we try to do what we think is right. Which has a lot to do with the division we see today in our country religiously and politically. The best and the worst of our leaders keep trying to treat the world in these either/or terms. As if we are all still children who cannot handle complication, despite the fact we live complicated lives. Perhaps it is also our fault for wanting all these hard things like terrorism, environmental degradation, and rising fuel costs to be simplistic-even to want it to be easy to see the right and wrong. When we all know, in our heart of hearts, that there are no easy answers, nor simple solutions, and that no one person, political party, or religion has all the answers. But, that does not keep us from looking for the simple solutions. We human beings do have a long tradition of answering life’s biggest, most frightening questions with fairytales. God, when God is most loving and most powerful in our religious stories, that God tells us that we have to make choices, but also that what is right for one situation is not always right for another. In our Christian tradition, a simple man, a carpenter, a Hobbit if you will, brings a message that teaches his followers that just following a lot of rules and regulations, even if they are in the Bible, is not as important as loving one another. And, he said, all those people out there that you’ve been taught to despise, the tax collector, the Samaritans, the lepers, the weak people, children, well, they all deserve to be loved, too. So it is not enough to just follow the stories of the past, especially if those stories do not teach us to love others. Jesus called the others “your neighbor.” Further, no religious leaders can either excuse you or make some other people responsible for your behavior. Each one of you, said Jesus, every person can know this message, just like I do. Which, by the way, is one the great mistranslations of the New Testament, for when Jesus said no one comes to the father except by me, he meant by my example. By living simple lives of sharing and teaching, which is the agape', in the Greek, way of loving your neighbor. Sadly, so many of the religions founded in Jesus’ name have more often than not done exactly what he was upset with the Jewish leadership of his religion and time for doing. Saying that you have to do this, that, the other, and love is primarily given only lip-service. Oh well, you know the saying: the more things change, the more they stay the same. All the great religious prophets and teachers have taught as did Jesus. If your main motivation in life is not love for others, you run the risk of falling into the errors of the dark side. Don’t we see it clearly all around us today? So we turn to the fairytales of our age, some resurrected from the past, some new for this amazing age of technology. Whether you are the boy who became King David, or Jesus, Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, Jr, Luke Skywalker, or Frodo Baggins, someone who initially may appear to have no apparent power, perhaps no apparent significance, these stories tell us we have something important to learn which is this: Even the least of us must do our part for goodness and light to be brought forward into the “age of men” (as the Tolkein story terms human existence). This is where our real power lies. Ultimately, war is not how the world’s problems are solved, even if all that destruction sometimes appears to be what brings us to solutions. Evil, in all its complexity is uncovered, and goodness in all its guises comes by way of human beings; by human decency, by the human desire to communicate and cooperate, by human agency in healing the sick and broken world. This is God/Goodness in the world; this is the example of Jesus, the message of Gandhi, and on and on. Even to the fairytale of Little Red Riding Hood, for without the loving concern and kindness of the hunter, Granny and Red would have been lost to the wolf. This is the road that is sung about repeatedly in the Lord of the Rings: The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say. A road of trying to discern what is the best we can do and the worst that is possible. A road that goes on and on, that we each must walk, and we know not where it leads, but what all our tales are trying to teach us, is that we each can make a difference. A far bigger difference than we can ever appreciate from our limited, human points of view. So be it. |
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