Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
“Getting and Spending, We Lay Waste Our Powers”
Rev. Rod Debs
November 7, 2010
This morning I would like to propose to you something that I learned just this last week from Chaplain Darrell Bruning who, along with Josh Ashley, leads our Second Hour group Extra! Extra! Although “spirituality” is commonly thought of as one’s private inner state—calm, centered, reflective, powerful, wise, transcendent—and you can add other qualities of the individual rising above the frey, I have come to reflect that spirituality has more to do with engaged moral and ethical values than is popularly held. Spirituality has more to do with the service that we perform than with a private state of mind. Citizenship, political engagement, service is an essential expression of spirituality without which our inner lives are little more than smoke and mirrors.
There are many ways to serve: manufacturing, construction and repair; agriculture, nutrition and food service; medical services; parenting, education; social services; public service. This coming Thursday is Veterans Day, formerly Armistice or Remembrance Day, the eleventh day of the eleventh month, celebrating the cessation of hostilities of WW I. Recognizing that veterans of United States uniformed services provide many services from air transport, to medical care, to food service, to chaplaincy, education and social services, construction and public services, as well as military missions, I would like to ask the veterans who are here today, if you would, veterans of United States uniformed services to stand and be recognized. Thank you.
There is no ambivalence among us regarding war. Of this I feel certain. Whether serving in civilian or uniformed services, we all despise war and deeply, emotionally grieve the war’s lasting spiritual mutilation as well as its physical injuries, death and destruction. At the end of WW II, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States, declared: “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity. War settles nothing.”
President Eisenhower described militarization as “humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children….”
Whether serving in civilian or uniformed services, we are all interconnected and complicit in society’s injustices and its violence. Last month, Membership Committee Chair Ashleigh Rhodes, a military spouse, gathered a small group of us, ten or so, who are especially concerned with the military services, to listen to one another’s deep commitments. We are just beginning to reflect on how this congregation can serve those at our doorstep in the uniformed services. For the next six months, we propose to listen, to listen to how we can serve those who serve. With so many veterans, contractors and active military and military families among us, this seems like something we are called to do.
The title this morning, “Getting and Spending and Laying Waste Our Powers” is from a poem by William Wordsworth. Wordsworth’s sonnets blasted Western materialism as decadent, selfish greed at the cost of our society’s alienation from Nature.
“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.”
Indeed, Americans have reclaimed our pagan roots. We have built a National Park system with camp sites and national highways to get us there. Although I have not left the city for farming as did the big city lawyer and his socialite spouse played by Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor in TV’s Green Acres, Jeannette and I keep trying to grow greens, potatoes and tomatoes as well as raising rabbits. We are somewhat rejuvenated by such earthy activities as gardening, outdoor recreation and occasional vacations. But it seems that we continue to lay waste our powers, getting and spending in the consumer rat race.
Our spirituality resembles a split personality disorder, torn between competitive dog-eat-dog productivity, vulnerable to job loss on the one hand, and on the other hand, expanding consumerism to include recreation, nature experiences and outdoor vacations. Gurus offer Nature retreats and churches offer Sunday-morning spirituality, with a wink and a nod, sending us back to the real world of getting and spending, accumulating and consuming, laying waste our powers. We are both slave and master, slaves to competitive demands of productivity and master of consumption ever more dependent on others’ productivity.
Our privatized Western spirituality consists of: private accumulation, recreation and consumption; competitive alienation from one another; proudly repudiating the general welfare as theft from private rewards; celebrating greed as good; lost, our sense of interconnected wholeness, mutual trust, compassion and joy.
We have become numb. We dare not look straight on at suffering because we fear that if we give recognition, there will be no end to the giving. The needs are so grievous.
This week I drove a young man to pick up a check in Fort Walton, his toddler son and car-seat in the back. The check wasn’t there. He has been working a new job paying $10.50/hour. He had borrowed $30 to pay his baby-sitter, shorting her $10. His friend needed his loan back in order to pay his own rent. The baby-sitter was cheap—$5/hour, but since he had fallen behind in paying her, she requires payment at the beginning of each day. His paycheck is coming next Thursday. He needed $40 to pay the baby-sitter, or he wouldn’t be able to go to work the next day. Food? Diapers? The child isn’t fully potty-trained yet. I weasled information out of him on our drive to Fort Walton and back.
Would you have given him some cash? Perhaps, if you were there, seeing him face to face. How many more people are in such straits? What if it’s a con job? I’ve got $80. But I don’t have money to give to many others. What if my name gets out on the street? What if he calls again? But what if he can’t go to work and loses his job? How can a business pay only $10.50/hour when half goes to child-care? It’s immoral.
It’s easier to avert my eyes. It’s easier to stay in my cocoon of private spirituality, walking in nature, meditating. Seeing the homeless and the working poor, I would rather look away; I would rather avoid depressed areas. Albert Einstein wrote: “A human being is a part of the whole that we call the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest–a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature.”
Korean poet Kim Chi Ha wrote this prison prayer:
“I cannot cut off the tie that draws me into the flowery tomb
of happy pleasurable home, the nest of amnesia. . . .
Send me off to the wilderness, dawning under the cold wintry stars,
where I can gain the maddeningly bitter awakening!”
Since 2003, when Katrina and I traveled to the West Bank and Gaza, I have followed the plight of Palestinians and Israelis. I usually don’t say anything to you. But I’ll share a little now: In the three-week Israeli incursion into Gaza, across New Years, 2008-9, operation Cast Lead, 1,397 Palestinians were killed by Israelis, nine Israelis were killed by Palestinians, and four more Israelis killed by “friendly fire.” The Israeli operation was in response to 4,048 rockets fired from Gaza into Israel over eight years, un-directed rockets, killing 15 Israelis, two Palestinians and one Chinese worker, many more injured, traumatized. The rockets were fired because of sixty years of Israeli occupation, home demolition and constantly expanding Israeli settlements in the Palestinian West Bank, over 500,000Israeli settlers. The Israeli occupation, home demolitions and settlements are deemed necessary for Israel’s security. United States tax dollars fund Israel’s occupation and expanding settlements, or if you prefer, Israel’s security. Such realities seem to me a “maddeningly bitter awakening.”
Leading up to the 2010 elections, Tea Party conservatives have been outraged by the direction of U.S. legislation. Glenn Beck, Hannity and Karl Rove speak from the TVs in kitchens, bedrooms, living rooms and waiting rooms all across the nation, and they are concerned. Liberals, too, are concerned. Does a “maddeningly bitter awakening” do anyone any good? On the other hand, can we remain blindered in cocoons of private spirituality and avoid the maddeningly bitter responsibilities of citizenship, of compassion? It seems to me that our moral and ethical values, any real spirituality, spiritual wholeness calls us to engage the world in compassionate service.
Humanitarian Albert Schweitzer wrote: “All are capable of compassion, able to develop a humanitarian spirit. It abides within us like tinder ready to be lit, waiting only for a spark.” The Nobel Peace Prize winner (1952) also wrote: “I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote of spiritual wholeness in this way: “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.” King wrote: “Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.” How simple love is. He wrote: “I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered (people) have torn down, other-centered (people) can build up.”
H.H. the Dalai Lama also called for service as opposed to private self-centered spirituality: “I believe that to meet the challenges of our times, human beings will have to develop a greater sense of universal responsibility. Each of us must learn to work not just for oneself, one’s own family or nation, but for the benefit of all humankind. Universal responsibility is the key to human survival. It is the best foundation for world peace.”
At home I am hosting a small Friendship Circle currently reading a book called Blessing the World: What Can Save Us Now by Rebecca Parker, President of our Unitarian Universalist seminary, Starr King School for the Ministry. Dr. Parker writes: “The times we live in demand something of us…. I believe that we are living in a time when the best is asked of us, and this best is far beyond what we thought we were capable of or what we thought we would ever be asked to do. I believe that in rising to the occasion of what is asked of us now, we will discover a depth of strength and a richness of love and courage that we did not know we could claim or achieve. I believe that in rising to the challenge of our times we will wade into the mystery of life to a depth we did not know was available to us.”
The mystery of spiritual wholeness discovered in service, is not private outer activism any more than it is private inner calm. Unitarian Universalist theologian James Luther Adams writes: “Basic changes take place slowly and primarily through group action, through organizations and movements within and outside the (religious community) supported by skill, courage, and persistence.”
Dr. King called for collective action: “Let us rise up (today) with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation.” “We have it in our power” according to Thomas Paine, “to begin the world again.”
Let me close with the words of Albert Camus speaking of a wholeness in spirituality:
“There is beauty and there are the humiliated.
Whatever difficulties the enterprise may present,
I would like never to be unfaithful to the one or the other.”