WORDS TO LIVE BY
by Forrest Church
October 28, 2007
Shortly before he was murdered outside the Dakota apartment building, John Lennon recorded what would be his last song. He wrote it for his son, offering fatherly advice. That was more than two decades ago now—it seems like yesterday. He called it, "Beautiful Boy." "Beautiful Boy" packed a message that fate swiftly stained in the sidewalk with blood: "Life is what happens when we are busy making other plans."
I was in San Diego two weeks ago. It was a beautiful day, warm not hot, the sky robin's egg blue. I had gone to Southern California, my new book in hand, sharing its message at churches and in talk shows, practicing my new role as your minister of public theology. I remember how beautiful that day in San Diego was, because the top of the news, elbowing every other story to the periphery of people's consciousness, belied it. Out of the blue had come a terrible mudslide, destroying six houses in the San Diego foothills.
When I'm on the road, I watch more television than I do at home. I've discovered that it's possible to watch the very same news report over and over again, waiting for a tiny bit of new information, as if anything were going to change. The night I arrived in San Diego, flipping through the news channels, it was "all mudslide all the time." I became quite familiar with the head of the geology department at San Diego State University, a dapper, articulate fellow with a handlebar moustache who know the natural history of the entire San Diego basin by heart.
The next morning, as I arrived at a local TV station to do my four-minute cameo, right there in the green room was San Diego's man of the hour. Since I was well versed in mudslides by this point, while we waited to be called into the studio I engaged him on the subject of natural catastrophes. "Here in Southern California," he said, "we pay for paradise by teetering precariously on the fault line for every natural disaster known to man. Earthquakes, mudslides, draught, wildfires. Even a live volcano is waiting to blow. It keeps you humble," he said. "At least it should."
The word, "humble," contributes to my favorite etymology: "human, humane, humanitarian, humility, humus: dust to dust, ashes to ashes." As the ash came raining down over Southern California these past dramatic days, leaving its patina on more than a million disrupted lives, two thousand homes incinerated by indiscriminate, wanton flames, I thought back on my encounter with the wise old geologist. "It keeps you humble. At least it should."
One year ago this month, hit with a diagnosis of esophageal cancer, I was told I had six months to live. Even if the tumor were operable, which my general practitioner initially doubted, the cancer, he told me, had almost surely spread. I stood, as it were, directly in the fire's path. Now, a year later, from my perch in the grandstand witnessing other people's tragedies as a concerned yet unimplicated spectator, I had to pinch myself. "It keeps you humble. At least it should."
When the roof caves in or a trap door swings, people who are allergic to all-purpose bromides, especially theological ones—"It was God's will, a part of God's plan, and everything turns out for the best"—operate at something of a disadvantage. As one who does not believe that God gave me cancer before shifting his attention to Southern California where he exercised His omnipotence by torching thousands of family homes, I receive little comfort from the assurance that God knows what he's doing when he plays with matches.
This week, I carried my message to Dallas and St. Paul. Watching the fires rage with infernal beauty across my hotel TV screen, I found myself reckoning the calculus of natural disaster. In Minneapolis they are still talking about the terrible bridge collapse that took dozens of lives last summer. But all eyes were now on California. In Los Angeles and San Diego, this week's wildfires were hundreds of times as devastating as the mud slides in San Diego that had ruled the air waves just two weeks before. For another exponential contrast, scroll back to Katrina, which destroyed 100 times as many homes. Even my airplane book gave me no respite. Between Minneapolis and New York, half of its protagonists died of the Black Plague.
So where is God in all of this? Commingled, I believe, with the victims' tears. God doesn't torch houses, will entire cities to disappear under the floodwaters, or sentence toddlers who wander too close to the family pool to drown. I could not worship such a God, even if I believed in him. But I don't believe in him. With the star to person ration at 1.6 billion to one, my God is not a puppet master pulling every string above this tiny globe as if the universe turned on how we behave here. Greater than all and yet present in each, no less mysterious than the creation itself, God is not the cause of our undoing but the cosmic ground of our being. The God I believe in saves not by destroying but through healing. When we recognize our tears in others' eyes, God is with us; God's rod and staff they comfort us; God brings us peace.
We Unitarians don't have a heavenly insurance policy. I myself am agnostic about the afterlife. Whatever happens after we die, it surely can't be any more amazing or unlikely than this—than life before death! I've never needed Biblical miracles to confirm my faith. It's not the supernatural, but the super in the natural that I celebrate. I draw strength and insight from the Bible and embrace Jesus' two great commandments (love to God and love to neighbor) as my own, but following the spirit, not the letter, of the scriptures, my abiding touchstones are awe and humility. Death, I have said time and again from this pulpit, is not life's enemy. With birth, it is the hinge on which life as we know it—each individual unique, ephemeral, and therefore precious—turns.
Every minister worth his or her salt spends a lifetime preparing for death's exam. A year ago this month, just how strong the theological foundation I had built for myself met thetest. With compelling reason to believe that my number had been called, I finally had a chance to see if the balm I had brought over the years to the bedsides of your loved ones would salve my own fresh wound.
During the days after my diagnosis, through my brain, as if on a Moibus loop, cycled my theological mantras.
• Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.
• We are the religious animal; knowing that we must die, we cannot help but question what life means.
• We are more alike in our ignorance, than we differ in our knowledge.
• God is not God's name. God is our name for that which is greater than all and yet present in each.
• Whether or not there is life after death, surely there is love after death.
• The one thing can never be taken from us, even by death, is the love we give away before we die.
• The purpose of life is to live in such a way, that our lives will prove worth dying for.
One year later, each of these propositions stands unchallenged at the heart of my faith. Yet they are not what got me through my time of trial. The consolation they offered was intellectual, not emotional. My soul needed something more bracing than my own soaring rhetoric. So I returned to the mantra by which I have attempted to guide my life since shortly after 9/11: Want what you have; do what you can; be who you are.
Let me unpack these words to live by in reverse order. First, be who you are. Easier said than done, I admit, but essential to peace of mind and true success in life.
Being who we are means embracing our God-given nature and talents. I, for instance, loved my father. I still love my father. I honor and admire him. Once, however, I wanted, more than anything, to borrow his ladder to the stars. I had more confidence in him than I did in myself. I wanted to be like him, not like me. Then the moment of reckoning arrived. Half way through my doctoral work, I was handed a political career on a platter. In 1976, at the age of 27, I had run my father's presidential campaign in Nebraska, a primary he won against Jimmy Carter. After the primary season ended, the Carter people invited me to head up their Nebraska effort that fall, sweetened by an offer from Nebraska's lieutenant governor to remain in the state as vice-chair of the Democratic party, with the promise of standing for Congress two years later if everything worked out. I might very well have done this, but my father interceded. He called me a quitter. Finish your doctorate, he said. Then go ahead and do whatever you wish with your life. So I persevered. And, in persevering, I found my calling. Two years later, I was installed as the ninth minister of All Souls. For thirty years I have been privileged to serve this congregation, fulfilling not my destiny—I don't believe in destinies—but answering a call that was mine, not someone else's. To envy another's skills, looks, or gifts rather that embracing your own nature and call is to fail in two respects. In failing to be who we aren't, we fail to become who we are.
No less important than being who you are is doing what you can. This too is more difficult than it sounds. How much wasted energy we spend trying to do what we can't. And how often we fail to optimize our efforts and thereby achieve the significant goals that do lie within our power. When we quit trying because we fail to achieve our pipe dreams, we overlook all we actually could accomplish by putting our shoulder squarely to the right wheel. To do what you can is to do all you can, not less, not more.
Finally, and most pointedly for me last year when I was diagnosed with cancer, want what you have. Did I want cancer? Of course not, but to obsess on the bad things that befall us squeezes out a just appreciation for the good. The time we waste on wishful thinking or regret detracts from the time we might devote to being grateful for all that is ours, here and now, to savor and embrace. For instance, if you are healthy today, don't take your health for granted. Want what you have. By the same token, when I was sick I remembered to want nothing more than the caring affection of those who loved me. Wanting what I had, my prayers were answered.
In each of our lives not only will some rain fall, but fires will burn, the ground will shake, and one day, life itself will be exacted in payment for the gift of life bestowed. By wanting what we have, doing what we can, and being who we are, our cup will forever be half full, not half empty. Do these same things with reverence, humbled by awe, and our cup runneth over.
The alternative, to long for what we lack—for things we have lost or shall likely never find—offers little save the sour pleasures of victimhood and regret. Fantasy is no better. Wishful thinking is both sloppy and sentimental. We should think to wish instead for things a little closer at hand.
• The courage to bear up under pain
• The grace to take our successes lightly
• The liberation that comes with forgiveness
• The energy to address tasks that await our doing
• The meaning to be found in giving ourselves to others
• The patience to surmount things that are dragging us down
• The joy to be gained in even the smallest endeavor
• The wonder that lies between the sacred moments of our birth and death.
I call this thoughtful wishing—wishing for what is ours, here and now, to have, do and be. Those are my words to live by. It's like dreaming the possible dream. All we have to do is put our heart in it. And there's one more bonus. Unlike wishful thinking, thoughtful wishes always come true.
Amen. I love you. And may God bless us all.