The Unitarian Fellowship of Peterborough

The Lion King is a story of life...of loss and hope and community. The lyrics to the song that was played before the service remind us:

The Circle of Life...it moves us all

Through despair and hope

Through faith and love

Till... On the path unwinding

we find our place

In the Circle

Welcome to this ever-widening and open circle. May our time together this morning help you to find your place, wherever that may be. Come, let us worship together. 

Our story is from India, from the Upanishads, sacred books from the Hindu religion. The story is about a boy named Svetakatu, and this version is taken from a book of stories collected by the famous Unitarian religious educator Sophia Lyon Fahs. The story is called The Lump of Salt.

 

It is an interesting exercise to try to capture the essence of one’s life in an analogy or metaphor. Listen to how Billy Collins tries to do so:

 

”What is a life? What is this life? What is my life? I don’t suppose that many of us obsess daily about these questions, but perhaps they occasionally nag at you. And then the time comes when someone we have loved and known well dies, and in the days of grieving and remembering, we try to somehow sum up that life. We want to put some kind of frame around it, a way to hold onto it. Like this...

 

The daytime book club is currently reading a book by Julian Barnes called “Nothing to Be Frightened Of”, and Barnes says that life is a matter of cosmic hazard...that one day the human species will completely disappear and not be missed...that each of us will follow the ‘rule’ of the universe...which is to come into specific being and then to return to the larger being. 

And yet, faced with death, we try to make something of a particular life, be it our own or that of another. Common behaviours, values, how time was spent, useful analogies ... we try to capture that life, hold it for eternity. And yet, once it is gone, once the breath of life has left...any description is hollow. It is a life that is no longer alive.   

 

Most of the time we are able to distinguish between that which is alive and that which is not. We associate breath and warmth and growth with life, though modern microscope capability has taught us that stones and mountains and even icicles are very much alive. So if, everything in the universe is alive, if the universe itself is alive, what is a life...one particular life? My life. Your life. 

I love that Billy Collins poem, where he tries to name what his life might be...a finger piercing a smoke ring, a string of small farming towns connected by a winding road, a nest with one egg, a field that he has been hoeing every day...

How might you capture your life in words? Like Collins, would you find a description to be elusive and changeable? Do you lose interest in the exercise when the phone rings or the sun comes out? 

 

Try as we might, a human life is something that simply cannot be written down or captured for eternity. Eventually, every human life, even that of the most famous and productive, will be lost to memory.   Interestingly enough, one of the possibilities that Collins mentions in his poem is that his life might be a large ball of air and memory. Barnes also speaks of life as a collection of memories...that we are what we have done, and what we have done is contained in our memory.   He also posits that it doesn’t matter what has actually happened, but rather that it is how we remember our lives that makes us who we are....a theory that seems to disrespect the lives of those with memory loss or dementia...as if they have less of a life.

 

A life, a particular human life, is often thought of simultaneously with a self. And like life, the concept of self has been debated and pondered since humans were capable of such thought. There seem to be two main theories of the self, and they centre on continuity.  One asserts that continuity is provided by the physical form...that a self is born and dies along with the physical body. The other, based in Hume’s bundle theory, claims that the idea of an enduring self is an illusion, and that any continuity is provided by psychological phenomena and memory...we are merely a collection of properties and experiences.[1] As I understand it, Hume saw no evidence that there was a separate ‘self’ that unifies this collection of memories or bundle of properties.   

 

And, many believe that life itself is simply a physical response or energy created by nerves and electrical impulses...which would mean that a life happens in a purely physical body that has somehow learned how to come alive.

 

Some of us, to be sure, struggle with the idea of something more...an individual soul...with the notion that somehow a self or essence is breathed into an otherwise empty biological form...a soul that then leaves the body upon death. For those of us who believe that we do have souls, and even if we need no explanation for how or why that soul comes and goes and where it comes from, we might be hard pressed to argue that a life is purely soul. So to me it seems that a life is, at the very least, a collection, a merging, of a physical body and a life force some might call spirit or soul.  We do not fully understand what it means to have a life...to be this combination of matter and spirit. Like Svetakatu...we do not know what cannot be known, we do not hear what cannot be heard, we don’t understand the nature of the mystery, a mystery that some call God.

 

Mary Oliver, in one of her numerous wonderful poems, says that the spirit likes to dress up like this...ten fingers, ten toes, shoulders and all the rest...and that...it could float of course but would rather plumb rough matter....that it needs the metaphor of the body...it needs the body’s world...to be understood. 

 

Oh, get a life, you might be saying. Isn’t this all just a bunch of navel gazing and ontological meanderings?  Okay.  Maybe I would get a life, if I understood what one was and where to get one!

 

Remember that Barnes thinks it doesn’t matter what really happens in our lives...it only matters how we remember it? Similarly, I think it doesn’t matter if we understand what a life is, as long as we use it well...as long as we construct it in a way that creates the people we want to be. 

 

A colleague, Rev. James Kubal-Komoto from Des Moines, Washington, recently shared something he has read and preached about...a book by Daniel P. McAdams entitled The Redemptive Self.   I haven’t read it, but apparently this book analyzes the stories we tell about our lives and how those stories serve to form who we are.   McAdams contends that most people tell stories about their lives that fall into one of two categories...stories of redemption or stories of contamination (just from those two words you can imagine which might be preferable!) Stories of redemption are those stories where we take what has happened and make the best of it, creating memories of meaning. Stories of contamination are those stories which use what has happened to blame or to create further negative outcomes. The point that McAdams makes is that people who choose to live out of stories of redemption are more generative than those who live stories of contamination. And, generative people are those who are highly engaged with the world, not only for their own sake, but the sake of others.   In my mind, that means they are more alive! Again, it doesn’t matter what has actually happened in our lives, it only matters how we remember it and what we make of it. 

 

But let’s be careful here...I want to be clear that this is easier for some than others. Some people have more opportunities than others. Some lives seem more blessed, or more cursed, than others. This is the way of the universe...more of that cosmic haphazardness, I suspect. Even so, I believe that it is never true that suffering and bad things happen in order that we will learn and grow and become stronger. It is always true that we can learn and grow from any experience, good or bad, even though it always would have been better if that suffering or tragedy had not occurred. 

 

While there are many things we don’t understand about life, most of us, in this room, choose to focus on what we do know...what we do have...rather than on the ‘unknowns’.  Perhaps the most central of those ‘knowns’ is that each individual life will end. We do know that we are born, and in that moment, begins an indeterminate succession of days and years which make up a life. We do know that we come in a variety of shapes and colours and sizes with a variety of talents and challenges. We do know that there is no equity in the distribution of advantages and opportunities. We do know that we will have a life built of experiences... good and bad, helpful and harmful, growthful and detrimental. We do know that all of this will compose what we call a life, and from this collection of memories we will create a story. I daresay that it is impossible to give too much import to the kind of stories that we create from what has been, because these stories, these interpreted memories, are the narratives that we live by. They control who we are and who we will be in the future, and they influence how we will be remembered, for as long as we are remembered. This is how a life has an impact. This is how our lives have meaning. 

 

And this is the intention for our service theme for the year.  

“How Shall We Live” will be a series of explorations that intends to help each of us to make stories of redemption from our lives...stories of emancipation and recovery, stories of atonement and forward movement, stories of enlightenment and self-actualization. I, we, want this to be a place that encourages all of us to be more generative, more concerned with the welfare of all.   I want the Unitarian Fellowship of Peterborough to be a place where we can each ‘get a life’ that matters.

 

And one more thing...or maybe two...

First, back to the Lump of Salt. That story is told, within the Hindu tradition, to point out the mystery that is Brahman and Atman, or, god inside each person and god beyond everything. Here I am, in the shadow of that story, talking about our individual lives, and I don’t want you thinking that it was a story of contamination in which an individual life dissolves into meaninglessness. The salt in that story does not represent an individual. Rather, that beautiful story is in fact a story of redemption...of how the divine, the salt, the spice, while not always apparent, cannot be separated out from all that is, but rather colours all that is.  Each life is a part of the divine. Your life is a part of the mystery and the mystery is in you. 

 

And second, all of this talk about what has been, memory, and what will be, our future, implies that a life is merely a collection of, as Hume postulates, properties and experiences. But in truth, life is also, and most vividly, lived in the present moment. In order to bring our experiences into the story of our lives, we have to be present to them...appreciating them with full awareness. Admittedly, this is something that few of us do well, (at least not I) and it takes continual practice and the full faculty of our beings to live in the moment. With that in mind, I close with a poem by Unitarian Universalist minister Burton D. Carley, a poem aptly titled, September Meditation. 

I do not know if the seasons remember their history or if the days and

nights by which we count time remember their own passing.

I do not know if the oak tree remembers its planting or if the pine

remembers its slow climb toward sun and stars.

I do not know if the squirrel remembers last fall's gathering or if the

bluejay remembers the meaning of snow.

I do not know if the air remembers September or if the night remembers the moon.

I do not know if the earth remembers the flowers from last spring or if

the evergreen remembers that it shall stay so.

Perhaps that is the reason for our births -- to be the memory for creation.

Perhaps salvation is something very different than anyone ever expected.

Perhaps this will be the only question we will have to answer:

"What can you tell me about September?"

 

What can you tell me of your life? Does it blow through the whole scene, stirring everything that it touches? Of course it does. Perhaps that is the reason for your birth. 
May it ever be so.
Amen. 

 

May your life be one of peace and love. 

Amen

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