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Don Smith
July 18, 2004
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
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PRAYER
Let our prayer be a prayer for remembrance.
Let us remember that today, like every day, is a holy day. It is a gift of time, freely given to all that lives. May we honor this day by using it well.
Let us remember that today, like every day, is a judgment day. It is a day with infinite opportunities to do either good or evil. May we choose to do the good and to fight the evil, so that, at the end the day, we may judge ourselves gently.
Let us remember that there are those among us today who hurt and whose pain takes away the gifts that others enjoy. May we do what we can to ease their pain.
Let us remember that there are those among us today who struggle with problems that may seem too big to manage. May we do what we can to lighten their load and help them on their way.
Let us remember that there are those among us who are lonely, even in the midst of the crowd. May we offer a kind word, a friendly smile, and the hope of new friendship.
Let us remember, again, that each day brings with it new opportunities. May we strive not so much to do more, but to do better.
SERMON
What does it mean to be a morning person? What I want to do this morning is try to describe a way of viewing the world that, to my mind, constitutes being a morning person. Bear with me if I seem to wander about; I think the picture will come into focus before I’m done, and I trust you to tell me if it doesn’t.
In his book with the audacious title How the Mind Works, Stephen Pinker posits that it is primarily through metaphors that we understand our world and I agree with him. I think this is especially true in areas outside the hard sciences, when it comes to contemplating our lives, what we’re doing with them, and the meaning we assign to things, independent of their concrete facts. Most all religious texts, poetry, great literature, and songs are filled with metaphors.
Since being a morning person is a metaphor of my own creation (although I’m sure I’m not the first to use it) we’ll consider some other, perhaps more familiar metaphors–along with some lesser-known personal favorites–to try to narrow in on my conception of what it means to be a morning person.
Let’s start with a metaphor from the New Testament; a metaphor used in two ways. The first is found in the Gospels. We’re told by these writers that Jesus once said to his disciples “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: For of such is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.”
The second comes from St. Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians. He wrote “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
The same metaphor “that of being childlike” is used to express seemingly opposite ideas, as something to embrace and something to shun. But is that really the case?
Our responsive reading this morning was, to my mind, at least, an explication of Jesus’ words. If all people had the spirit of a child–if all people trusted, imagined, sang, received the beauty of the world without reservation, were filled with wonder and delight and a faith that could cure them of their cynicism and make them unafraid to need and to love’then I believe we truly would be living in the kingdom of God.
Looking at the larger context of the letter to the Corinthians, it becomes apparent that when Paul told the Corinthians that they must put away childish things he was speaking of childish, that is to say, overly simplistic views of the meaning of spiritual teachings. Spiritual teachings taken as literal truths lose their power to inspire us and lift us up. Instead, they become dead and suffocating things. They block our ability to see the world as Jesus would have us see it, with the wonder, honesty, and simplicity of a child. It’s like reading those words by Jesus and taking them to mean that heaven is a physical place peopled only by children. That really doesn’t provide a lot of hope or inspiration for those of us who have made it into adulthood, does it?
Having been raised in a fundamentalist Christian church–where the Bible is taken as literal truth, even in matters historical and scientific– I was taught, for example, that creation was a one-time event. God created the universe and everything in it over a period of six days. It’s been running its course according to God’s plan ever since, and it will be destroyed at some unknown point in the future. Our main concern in life should be making sure that when the world ends we’re part of the “elect”, meaning those who are destined for heaven. Heaven, in this worldview, is some distant place where all is perfect. And we can get there, but not in this life.
Now, contrast that view of things with the view expressed by Thoreau when he wrote in Walden that “The morning wind forever blows. The poem of creation is uninterrupted, but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the world everywhere.” This is a radically different view than the one I was taught, is it not? Creation, rather than being an historical fact, is an ongoing process. Olympus’ home of the gods, or heaven is all around us. We need only wake up to that realization and live our lives accordingly in order to experience it. Heaven is, or can be, here, now.
The first attribute of a morning person is this: A morning person sees creation as an ongoing process in which he or she has a part to play. And the second attribute of a morning person is this: A morning person believes that his or her part is important and can have an impact on the world. These two attributes go hand in hand.
In her song “The Dream Before”, Laurie Anderson writes these words (and for what it’s worth, the scene is a conversation between Hansel and Gretel, who, we are told, are alive and well and living in Berlin):
She said, “What is history?”
And he said, “History is an angel being blown backwards into the future.”
He said, “History is a pile of debris, and the angel wants to go back and fix things, to repair the things that have been broken. But there is a storm blowing from Paradise. And the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards, into the future. And this storm, this storm, is called Progress.”
I think about those words quite a bit. It’s a wonderful image. It’s the way I see much of our human endeavors. While I agree that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, I sometimes think that we spend too much time analyzing and agonizing over the mistakes of the past, and not enough time dreaming about the future. I’m reminded of Bobby Kennedy when he said “There are those who look at things the way they are and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask ‘Why not?'” Those are the words of a morning person.
Many among us believe that all we need to do in order to make the world better is to go back to some earlier time, before we made some huge mistake or went off in some wrong direction. I suppose we all wish from time to time that we could go back and get a second chance at things.
And I think we’re all angels trying to fix things, but I believe we need to turn around and face the future. Rather than fighting progress, let progress be the wind at our back–the morning wind that forever blows, carrying us in the direction that we need to go. To quote Thoreau again, “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you’ve imagined.”
The third attribute of a morning person, then, is that he or she embraces the idea of progress. Even though we may question what true progress is–and that’s too broad a question to address in the time we have this morning–we must believe in our ability to move beyond where we are today, both individually and as a species. We must believe that a better future is possible, and that our dreams can be realized.
In every age there have been prophets of doom, people who see no hope for the future. Looking only at what’s wrong with the world, they give in to a cynicism that eats at the core of their faith, regardless of what it is that they have faith in. They overlook all the good that is done, daily, by the majority of people. They forget how many trials and tribulations humanity has endured, and how great some of those have been. It’s easy to do; too easy, I’m afraid.
Emerson, in an address to the Phi Beta Kappa society at Harvard and published under the title The American Scholar, said that we must have “the courage to call a popgun a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom.” How many events have been declared the beginning of the end, if not the end itself, only to pass into history as nothing but another obstacle over which humanity has stepped in our long and steady progression through time. Marcus Aurelius, using another wonderful metaphor, said “History is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is it’s current; no sooner has a thing been brought into sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.”
A morning person embraces a spirit of optimism and fights against the cynicism that comes to us all too frequently, and all too easily.
This may sound like an overly simplistic, even naive view of things; a view that could only be embraced by Professor Pangloss. You remember Professor Pangloss? In Voltaire’s story Candide, Professor Pangloss is the teacher who asserts that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” But as Candide learns, through many trials and tribulations, his beloved Professor Pangloss is not correct. Everything is not for the best. In the final lines of the work, using yet another wonderful metaphor, Candide sums up what he has learned by saying that “we must cultivate our gardens.” And that brings us to a discussion of how a morning person conducts his or her life.
I’m a gardener, and I can tell you that any gardener knows, as they pull the weeds from their garden, that the weeds will return. It’s the way of the world, and not to be changed. But we pull the weeds anyway. Because to not pull the weeds is to abandon the garden, and this we cannot do.
A morning person continues to work for the good, not with the naive hope of eradicating evil, not because they believe they can solve all the problems of the world, but because it’s the thing to do. Bodil Jonsson, the Swedish physicist, writes in her book Unwinding the Clock “it doesn’t befit a human being to give up. The future is not some mountainside we’re all going to smash into. Nor is it some kind of precipice and we’re all going to fall off the edge. We’ll do what people have always done. We’ll try.” A morning person tries.
Winston Churchill was a morning person when he said to a group of elementary school students “Never, never, never give up.” Martin Luther King, Jr. was a morning person when he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.
A morning person holds fast to his or her belief that a better world is not only possible, but assured. The future is not something to fear, but to work for.
What kind of future do I want for myself and my children? What kind of world do I want to live in? What can I do to move in that direction? These are the questions that a morning person asks.
I have to confess that, although I am by nature a morning person in the literal sense, I sometimes have to work at being a morning person in the figurative sense. It’s not always easy, when I look around me and see some of the things going on in the world, to be a morning person. But that’s what I want to be, and it’s why I come here. I rely on you’on this community’to help me continue in the way of a morning person. And for that reason I also ask “What kind of future do I want for this church?” “What kind of church do I want to be a part of?” “What can I do to move us in that direction?”
What about you? What do you need in your life? In times of despair, where or from whom have you found strength?
I want to close with some words from the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer:
Optimism is by its nature not a goal for the present situation but a life-force,
A force for hope when others give up,
A force for withstanding setbacks, a force that never surrenders the future to pessimism but rather requisitions it for hope.
He wrote those words while he sat in a German concentration camp, awaiting execution. He’d been sentenced to be hanged for his part in a plot to remove Hitler from power. Listen again to the words of a morning person.
Optimism is by its nature not a goal for the present situation but a life-force,
A force for hope when others give up,
A force for withstanding setbacks, a force that never surrenders the future to pessimism but rather requisitions it for hope.
I don’t know what else I could say.
