How The Story Ends
A Sermon to the Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
During the Centennial Celebration of its National Landmark Building
January 17, 2010
the Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles
Introduction
The Hymn, Mother Spirit. Father Spirit, is something of a personal indulgence. It was written by the Rev. Norbert Capek.
Capek did a lot to keep Unitarian Universalism alive in Eastern Europe. He founded the Unitarian Church in Prague, which soon became the largest Unitarian church in the world. and died in 1942 in a Nazi prison camp. We still remember Capek as the creator of the Ceremony of Flower Communion, which is popular among many contemporary congregations.
Less well known, is that in addition to being a Unitarian minister, Norbert Capek was also a hypnotist, as am I. It’s said that his theology was “sun drenched” and optimistic. I believe that.
Most hypnotists are optimistic people. That happens because what hypnotism does is to teach you how to control what you say to yourself in the privacy of your mind. That has an enormous influence over how you think, what you feel, how you behave, and therefore how others respond to you. Hypnotism is one way to control what the story you tell yourself is like.
Most people think of stories as tales told for entertainment. But they are more. A story is a narrative--a narration or the plot you keep in your mind that explains why things happen as they do. We all have such an inner narrative.
Stories Are Important
In 1967, psychologist Martin Seligman did an important experiment at the University of Pennsylvania in the School of Professional Psychology.
Now, as an animal lover, I dislike this experiment. But as it was done, I’ll tell you about it. Seligman took a group of puppies and put them in a kennel where the floor was a black, electrified grid. Periodically a shock was delivered over that grid. The puppies howled, but there was nothing they could do to deliver themselves from the pain.
After some time of this, Seligman put the dogs in another kennel where there was food and water at both ends. Part of the kennel floor was the electric grid, but the other part was an ordinarily kennel surface. The pups were placed on the grid and the shocks resumed.
Not one of the dogs moved from the electric grid to the non-grid surface where they would be safe. The dogs had learned helplessness. In the narrative they told themselves in their dog minds, the universe was a place of unrelenting suffering and one is powerless to deliver oneself from it.
When they were placed in a circumstance where there was actually something they could do to help themselves, their inner narrative kept them from seeing the possibility.
Stories are important. The narrative you keep in your mind has the greatest power to determine what you do, the opportunities you see, and the meaning you make in your life.
Once, while I was Parish Minister here I was getting on the Eisenhower Expressway at Harlem Avenue--that’s a left entrance to the expressway. A guy cut me off as I tried to merge.
Well, I “showe’d ‘em.” I turned in to Road Warrior--Mel Gibson would have been proud--for I chased that so-and-so all the way down to the Dan Ryan (which wasn’t even where I was going) and I cut him off. Yeah! In my inner story a guy had to prove himself.
Ten years later the exact same thing happened to me in the exact same place. But this time I took my foot off the accelerator and said to myself, “Isn’t it a shame there’s so much mental illness in the world?”
The exact same stimulus, in the exact same place. Totally different outcomes, because my inner story had changed. I no longer made the same meaning of events as I’d used to.
Religion as Story
I think there is a sense in which we find the meaning of our lives in the narratives that we tell. Maybe that’s why stories are so important in religious studies.
If you want to learn about Confucianism, you learn the story of Confucius. Islam is based on the story of the Prophet Mohammed and you will need to learn all about his battles, dates, struggles and campaigns.
If you ask to learn about Buddhism, someone is going to tell you the story of his conception, his leave-taking from the female cousin he’d married, Yasodhara, his journey atop his horse Kanthaka, and his enlightenment under the Bo Tree. You can’t understand Buddhism without understanding that story.
What do you think the Bible is? Mostly it is a collection of stories interspersed with poetry and predictions. Stories about a God who would walk in His garden in the cool of the evening, or of a Tower of Babel, or a King named Solomon.
Some of the stories are based on history.
There had to be something like the Exodus of the Israelies from Egypt. “Moses” is an Egyptian name, not a Hebrew one, and the Israelites had to come from somewhere. But the stories are not history.
According to the story Pharaoh was persuaded to release 600,000 male Hebrews from slavery. That’s almost two million people if you count the women and children. It’s a mighty story; but almost certainly an exaggerated.
Egypt was a slave economy. The departure of two million slaves would have had an economic impact that would have been recorded in many places in the civilization for it would have brought Egyptian society to its knees. Yet no such record exists; and the ancient Egyptians were very good about recording their catastrophes.
Likely a lessor number of slaves were released or escaped. Then, over time their numbers grew as other nomadic peoples joined to form the Twelve Tribes. We even think we know the ritual newcomers used to join the Hebrew people:
When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the Lord your God, you shall make this response.....”A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation....When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us,....we cried to the Lord,...the Lord heard our voice...The Lord brought us out of Egypt with an mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying desiply of power, and with signs and wonders (Deut. 26:4-8, passim)
By means of this ritual new people joined by agreeing to tell the story of the Exodus as their own story. By adopting the story and how it ended, they became one. And so it has always been.
Christianity did this too. Even more than the Old Testament, the New Testament is a collection of stories. That’s all the Gospels are and scholars long ago noted that the stories in each of the Gospels differ from the others.
But it didn’t start out that way. Originally, the early followers of Jesus tried to make do with just a list of the things Jesus had said; basically a statement of his philosophy. This was called the Sayings of Jesus Tradition. Echos of it still exist in the finished work. In the Book of Acts, Paul says “remembering the words of the Lord Jesus, for he himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’” (Acts 20:35)
Most of you have probably heard that quotation, “It is more blessed to give than to receive” haven’t you? Clearly, to Paul and his hearers the passage was understood as something Jesus said. Yet that quotation is not found anywhere in any of the four Gospels. So obviously there was a body of teaching that was accepted as authoritative, but which never actually made it into the Gospels.
Scholars think, we may have a glimmer of what those Sayings looked like. When the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in December 1945, there was one document called the Gospel of Thomas. It’s not an Gnostic (or heretical) text. Most scholars believe that it was the Sayings of Jesus of the early Egyptian Church; a church that was destroyed early by the Roman persecutions. The Gospel of Thomas is not a gospel at all. It’s just a list of sayings, “And Jesus said....,” etc.
But the ancient church found it could not survive without stories to tell. Philosophy alone was insufficient. At some point in the first century each of the four surviving urban churches (Rome, Antioch, Jerusalem and Corinth) took their collection of what Jesus has said, and put them together into narrative stores; literary creations that told a tale and had a beginning, middle, end, a plot, a theme and a poetic structure. These become the Gospels. They found they needed stories to tell. A list of philosophical statements wasn’t going to do it. People need stories.
In fact, that’s one of the great teachings of religion the world over. If you want to live forever, tell your stories. Through them you can achieve an immortality in the minds of others as they incorporate your story into their own.
Stories are Serious
Human beings have an inner need to seek meaning. In philosophical terms, we are “time-binding” creatures. We want to know what our lives are all about. We ask ourselves ultimate questions. When we die we often leave a gravestone to say “I was here!” We want to have mattered.
As we try to explain life to ourselves, we create a narrative, a story we tell ourselves about what everything means. We want there to be a theme to our lives. The story we tell about ourselves forms the lens that we will use to look out at our world.
Like any lens, the story we tell ourselves about what “life is all about” will make some things seem larger and more important, and other things smaller and less important. Our inner story tells us what to pay attention to.
I noticed a long time ago that most people tell themselves a Victim’s Story. We remember hurts, failures, a long list of the wrongs that were done to us.
Yet, there are others who make a different choice and tell themselves a Victor’s Story. They frame the bad things as hurtles they have overcome. The interpret failures as important learnings. They consider the wrongs done by others to be attempts to hold them back, that they have triumphed over. “All those people tried to bring me down. But look! I have survived. I have done okay despite them. I’ve lived well.” Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay teaches us that “living well, is the best revenge.”
I tell you truly, there is an enormous difference in the quality of life of someone who tells themselves a Victor’s Story, rather than a Victim’s Story.
There is a sense in which our ability to be happy depends on our point of view. In fact, psychologist Fred Luskin, director of the Stamford Forgiveness Project and the author of the best selling book Forgive for Good argues that no one who has not shift his or her inner story from a Victim’s Story to a Victor’s Story, can ever really forgive another person for wrongs done and move beyond the pain.
Stories can we weapons too. Every political party has a story to tell. The story they tell is their particular spin on world events. They’ve got an explanation of where the problems come from, and a proposal on how to conduct repair. They want you to start telling yourself that story. They know that if you do you will start to see the world the same way they do.
One of the problems we as a nation have with modern terrorists is that there no longer has to be a world-wide 5th Column of spies and infiltrators. All people have to do is export their stories of exploitation and rage. Others, learning the stories, adopt them as their own, and strike out without having to be told.
This isn’t true of all terrorists, but it’s true of some. The Department of Homeland Security calls such people “self-radicalizing.” No one has to indoctrinate them, they do it themselves. No one has to point them to a target, the plot-line of the story they tell suggest the targets.
Stories can be weapons. Never underestimate the power of a story.
A Confession
My wife Lindsay and I love books. With two ministers in the family we have a lot of books. Four times in the past twenty years we have had to cull our library to get rid of enough books so that we would have space to shelve new books. The last time we did this we gave about more than a thousand volumes to our Theological School.
I don’t know about you, but I find giving away books to be really, really hard (they seem to make these little whimpering sounds when you take them off your shelf for the last time).
Fortunately, Amazon.com came to our rescue a couple of years ago by inventing the Kindle, a reliable electronic book reader. You’ve got all the pleasure and utility of a book in one easy to carry device, and electronic books take up no room. We both have Kindles and love them. If Apple comes out with it’s own eBook reader this month, you can be sure Lindsay and I will be early adopters.
But there is one thing wrong with a Kindle (or any other eBook reader). It’s almost impossible to flip to the end of the book to see how the story is going to turn out.
And I do that! I realize it’s a moral failing. But when I’m really enjoying a story I can’t resist the temptation to look ahead and find out how the story ends before I’ve gotten there. I find a measure of comfort, and a resolution of existential anxiety, to be able to peer ahead and find out how the book ends, ahead of time.
Why Consider the End?
I’ve often wondered why I always flip to the end of a novel. Well, part of the reason is that I want to discover if there was a happy ending or not.
I mean, I’ve got enough problems! If the book I’m reading is going to “bring me down” I want some advance warning. On the other hand, if I know that it’s going to end well, I can let myself relax into the story more, confident that good feelings are ahead. It’s easy to relax and feel confident when we know how the story ends.
But in real life that doesn’t happen, does it?
I’d like to know what my future is like, and no doubt I’d have fewer worries if I knew everything was going to be fine in the end. I suspect you feel the same. We do what we can to plan, but that’s not the same as knowing for sure.
How about this place? How is the story of Unity Temple going to end? Will the congregation find a way to restore Frank Lloyd Wright’s Beautiful Room?
What about contemporary government? How is that story going to end? Wouldn’t it be nice to know how the wars will wind down, how the economy will heal, what sort of stability will come back into our lives?
Regrettably, in real life we can’t flip ahead to see how things are going to work out. We’d like to. Fortune-Tellers have been cashing in on that desire for centuries.
Figuring Out the Ending
Now that I do my reading using eBooks I can’t easily skim to the end of the book to see how the story ends. So, I’ve had to develop other ways of figuring out what direction the plot is going in when I read for enjoyment.
Sometimes the author will give you a hint or two. My English teachers used to call the “foreshadowing” and they all took it seriously. I’ve become sensitive to it and have realized that often the author of a story does in fact let you know what going to happen if you pay attention.
There are some Spiritual Directors and Theologians who think that there is foreshadowing in real life too; a bit like the old notion of “omens.”
They tend to be modern thinkers who don’t subscribe to the traditional model of a male God in the sky who, as comedian George Carlin used to say, “who loves us, and thinks maybe we should all go to Hell. Who is all knowing, all powerful, and who really needs money.”
No, the Theologians who believe that there is a theme to each of our lives tend to be people who are more mystical. They’re not sure what is ultimate in this universe, but they do believe that there is a vast and wonderful transcendence on the other side of the reality that we see. Religious language is merely a poetic metaphor that points to this transcendence.
They think that if you look at events as they unfold; even with all the darkness and pain, you can still see that there are trends. These trends amount to foreshadowing from a Higher Power about how the story will end.
When President Obama said “The Arc of the Universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” that was what he implied. Actually, the President was quoting Dr. Martin Luther King, who himself was quoting the great Unitarian minister, Theodore Parker, who wrote in 1853:
"I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice." (“Of Justice and Conscience,” Ten Sermons of Religion)
There may be some hints about how the greater story will end. I think so and am both optimistic and comforted. Sometimes I’m bold enough to think I’ve seen such signs in my own life; maybe you have found them in your life too. I believe it’s real.
Your Greatest Power
In any case, every person in this room does have one power you can use to direct how your personal story will come out.
In1953 Martin Kohe wrote a book that became an instant classic, called Your Greatest Power. It’s a book about choice.
To a greater or lessor degree we can each may some choices about the story we tell ourselves in the privacy of our mind.
We can make it a Victor’s Story if we choose to. I come from a family I compassionately describe as a “train wreck.” The script put upon me when I was a boy was that I was to grow up and be a janitor.
Well, that’s not quite what happened. I made different choices and look upon my boyhood as something I was able to overcome rather than something I was injured by. We have the power of choice. It’s not an absolute power. But it’s a power.
You as a congregation have that power too. You will use your power of choice to decide what happens to this Beautiful Room, and I’ve confidence you will choose well.
I know some of you, and if the people who have joined since my years here are like the people I know, I am certain this story will end well too.
Beyond even this, all of us have some control over how the story ends. Stories are powerful things. What is your story going to be like?
And that’s my sermon.
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Call to Worship
The spirit of the Holy calls us from many places;
some of us come from busy homes with many people
some of us live alone.
Yet we are a part of one family.
This week has been different for each of us;
some of us have had happy news we want to celebrate
some of us have faced grief and need to cry.
We are members of one human family.
We all come to this same place;
all of us seeking a special presence in our lives
all of us seeking presence with each other.
Together we become one human family.
--Katherine Hawker (adapted)
Pastoral Prayer
Hildegard of Bingen wrote, "Every creature is a glistening, glittering mirror of divinity." May we reach out in our hearts today to the divinity that is in the hearts of the people of Haiti.
God of our inmost self,
A cruel tragedy has come to our brothers and sisters.
Lives have been lost.
Many are hurt.
We ask that all nations come together to work in one accord.
May those in peril find relief, food, medicine and supplies
May those who are injured heal quickly.
May they stay strong to help others.
We pray for those who are lost.
We pray for the reunification of families.
In the midst of such destruction,
we are grateful for the outpouring of kindness we have seen.
Give to all patience, peace and hope. Amen.
Reading: Ecclesiastes 2:9-14 NRSV
Scholars agree that the writer of the Book of Ecclesiastes was not, as the text claimed, King Solomon. Yet whoever the writer was, he or she wrote in that persona. It is the persona of a person who looked over his life’s story and decided how that story should end. He used his power of choice to favor wisdom over possessions and used that decision to structure the final chapters in the Book of his Life.
So I became great and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem; also my wisdom remained with me. Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them; I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and this was my reward for all my toil. Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had spent in doing it, and again, all was vanity and a chasing after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.
So I turned to consider wisdom and madness and folly; for what can the one do who comes after the king? Only what has already been done. then I saw that wisdom excels folly as light excels darkness.
The wise have eyes in their head, but fools walk in darkness.
Responsive Benediction
And now may the Truth that makes us free,
And the hope that never dies,
And the love that casts our fear,
Lead us forward together,
Until the dayspring breaks,
And the shadows flee away
!
Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 04:31PM 