Things Are Getting Worse: A Guide

Sermon: Things Are Getting Worse: A Guide
The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles
Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist, September 5, 2010

 
Opening
 
I’m an optimistic person. But not long ago a client told me a joke that gave me pause.
 
“I felt bad,” she said. “And everyone told me, ‘Cheer up! Things could be worse.’”
 
“So I cheered up,” she said. “And they were right. Things got worse.”
 
My sermon today is a reflection on the human tendency to imagine bad things, expect bad things and assume that bad things will happen, even if they never do... It’s sort of a counterpoint to 1 Corinthians 13. Love may predispose to optimism, but there is disturbing trend of negativism out there.
 
I see it in my clients. I see it in my friends. This sermon is sort of a guide to it. It’s my own reflection on why it’s hasn’t gotten to me and why I think things are soon to be better.

The Biochemical Argument
 
Why do most of us find it easier to expect bad things to happen? One explanation n has beeadvanced by Dr. Herbert Benson, founder of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
 
Fear makes a creature cautious. Cautious creatures tend to survive while incautious creatures tend to become meals for larger creatures. Therefore, because the ready ability to experience fear gives a creature a survival advantage, the “fearful gene” has tended to be passed on. At this point in evolution, fear is the easiest emotion to experience.
 
Evidence for this proposition also comes from research into brain chemistry. The brain is biochemically active. If there is the wrong amount of dopamine, we lose touch with reality. If the amount of GABA is wrong, there will be problems with anxiety, memory and addiction. If serotonin is too low there can be depression, worry, irratability and insomnia.
 
All of these chemicals do more than one thing, and their presence in different amounts in different parts of the brain can radically alter how reality is experienced.
 
Functional Imaging, a kind of brain scan, shows that if anything slides out of whack in almost any area of the brain, the brain as a whole begins to react with patterns of chemical uptake that are very similar to the patterns associated with fear.
 
To put that into simpler terms, your brain has a strong biochemical predisposition to experience fear, worry, sadness, and the other dark emotional states.
 
If anything goes wrong with the precarious biochemical balance in the brain, the resulting emotion for the brain as a whole will be one or more of the negative emotions. The dark feelings are the easiest feelings to have. They are almost the “default setting” of the brain and all of us look out at the world through mental glasses blacked with the smoke of negative expectation.
 
Unless we regularly practice some discipline to correct for this biochemical predisposition, or unless we are just unusually fortunate in our genetic heritage, all of us will routinely assume that “Things Are Getting Worse, “and that “Everything Is About To Fall Into Place On Top Of Me.”
 
The consequence of this for civilization is a long history of religious literature that is really, really unsettling.
 

Apocalyptic
 
In religious literature there is long history of predicting The End of Things. The Christian Bible ends with the Revelation of John of Patmos.
 
Scholars are divided as to whether or not the author was actually John the Apostle of Jesus who also wrote the Gospel of John or some other writer. The current thinking is that the writer was not the Apostle, and that the book was actually created near the end of the first century, about 65 years after the death of Jesus of Nazareth.
 
Scholars are less divided in the belief that whoever he was, he was as crazy as a loon.
 
The Book of Revelation is an incredible collection of visions, prophecies, complex symbolism and the obscure use of words. One of my New Testament professors confidently asserted that the writer must surly have labored with the disability of schizophrenia.
 
While the sheer majesty of the vivid images have captured the imagination of generations of biblical scholars, it remains the only book in the New Testament about where there is absolutely no scholarly consensus about what it means, why it was written or how seriously it should be taken.
 
Many of the early church scholars, such as St. Jerome regarded the book as a second class piece of work, and the Bibles of the Orthodox Churches usually omit it, even today.
 
However, at least the general plot of the book is clear, even if no one can be sure of what is meant by the characters of the “Lamb of God,” the “Dragon,” the “Beast” or the “False Prophet,” let alone the “Whore of Babylon” or the “Four Horsemen.”
 
The plot of Revelation is that Things Are Getting Worse, and will continue to do so, until finally there is a great conflagration after which Bad Things stop happening and Good Things become common. In all serious Structuralist analysis of the text, that is the structure.
 
This kind of religious writing is called “Apocalyptic” and most religions in the world contain some of it. Some even organize the progression of Bad Things into a procession of epochal ages. In Hinduism there are four such, a structure mirrored in Northern and Greek Mythology.
 
Hesiod, the Greek poet active about 700 BCE, organized time in his great poem The Theogony, into a Golden Age, a Silver Age, a Bronze Age and an Iron Age. Each age was characterized by a decline in high culture, civility, altruism and good. He believed that things were winding down and that the Iron Age would be the last and worst age.
 
It would also be---ah, now.
 
The only remedy he could recommend was “not forgetting” the glory of the past as a comfort through the dark times. Apparently, he was not the most cheerful of men.
 
In Northern Mythology we find a similar structure, although the Northern peoples held out the hope that Ragnarok, or the final conflagration occurring after the Twilight of the Gods, would somehow open to a better world. A belief, not too different than that held by John of Patmos.
 
Even in Buddhism we see this literary structure emerging.
 
Buddhism is a practical religion--so practical in fact that some think it is more a system of psychology than a religion as such; as it lacks any idea of a God, doesn’t have a theology, and possesses only the vaguest notion of an afterlife. What it does have is a series of practices which, it is said, will allow one over time to find a place of inner peace, and eventually may allow oneself to experience a unique state of consciousness, called Nirvana.
 
However in modern times the number of practitioners demonstrably able to achieve Nirvana seems to have been decreasing alarmingly. This has given rise to the development of the “Pure Land” school of Buddhist philosophy which is now one of the most popular schools of Buddhism in the world.
 
Pure Land Buddhism believes that the world has become so corrupt that Nirvana is not almost impossible for anyone to achieve, and will eventually become impossible to achieve. In short, they believe that Things Are Getting Worse. The only hope, according to this version of Buddhism is by appealing to enlightened beings on other worlds or dimensions, who live in a less corrupt and polluted place.
 
These other worlds and dimensions are called, as a group, the Pure Lands of the Buddha, and it is from them that the movement takes its name.
 
There are many forms of Apocalyptic, and they are ubiquitous.
 

Popular Thinking
 
I’m sure many of you are aware of the belief in some parts of our society that Really Bad Things are going to happen to us in the year 2012. I believe there was recently a popular movie made about just that. No doubt we will see more as the year approaches.
 
The origin of this conviction appears to come from writer Patrick Geryl, and is set forth in his book the Orion Prophecy: Will the World be Destroyed in 2012. It costs $11.53 on Amazon.com which is pricey for a paperback.
 
Geryl believes that the earth’s magnetic field will abruptly reverse on December 21, 2012, causing environmental catastrophe that will essentially wipe out our civilzation. This prediction is based on his study of the Dresden Codex of the Maya a version of the Mayan Calendar that has reached the end of a cycle; which is believed to be important for some reason.
 
I was actually startled to learn this. Not so much because of the prophecy. I’ve been collecting End of the World Sayings for most of my career.

No I was actually surprised because I’d thought the Mayan Calendar had already run out of days.
 
When I was a Parish Minister in Oak Park, Illinois the whole congregation was all aflutter about something called the Harmonic Convergence, which took place on August 16, 1987.
 
We had a special sunrise service on that day (I attended but did not officiate) and there were many people in the congregation who expected something wonderful to happen on that day; selected by an alignment of the planets and because the Mayan Calender had reached the end of it epochal cycle.
 
Regretfully, nothing wonderful did happen, but to this day I remain unclear on how the Mayan Calendar managed to recruit more days so that it could hold out for another 25 years to 2012. Or maybe I just misunderstood something.
 
In any case, 2012 looks to me to be just another piece of Apocalyptic in a world full of this sort of fearful and fear-filled literature.
 

So What?
 
So, is this all true? Are Things Going To Get Worse?
 
Well looking at the newspapers these days, it might seem so. I really want to believe that this is a false impression caused by the 24-hour news cycle and the global information net. I want to believe that it’s always been this way but we just hear about it more.
 
But, to be honest, I’m not sure. We Unitarian Universalists are children of the Enlightenment. That was a 19th Century movement that was committed to the values of reason, science and clear thinking. Our historians, such as Earl Morse Wilbur, whose magisterial two volume, The History of Unitarianism was required reading for all Unitarian Universalist clergy in my days at Theological School, said that the three values of Unitarianism were Freedom, Reason and Tolerance. These are classic Enlightenment values.
 
I became a Unitarian Universalist when I was 16 years old. I never doubted through my years of education and the early years of my ministry that the Enlightenment values would somehow prevail in the world.
 
Not that it would be easy. Not that there wouldn’t be setbacks. But, ultimately, rational institutions, democratic process and the values of independent thought and debate would close on the best ideas.
 
I don’t believe that for a minute anymore. I wish I did. Yet everywhere I look I see the rise of partisanship and anti-intellectual fundamentalism of every sort: Christian, Political, Islamic, Jewish, and even in a somewhat mindless liberal Political Correctness.
 
We have a situation where our own political leaders are willing to publicly embrace lies, such as the claim that President Obama is somehow a Muslim, and do it without blinking an eye, knowing full well that it is not true. And more frightening yet; There are people who believe.
 
Maybe, I wondered, Things Are Getting Worse.
 
Maybe we live in the Iron Age.
 
Maybe it will all come tumbling down around us.
 
Maybe.
 
Nah..... Let me tell you why. This may seem a bit odd at first. But then, I’m a bit odd.
 

The Green Man
 
I’ve got a throne in my office. Now, by throne I do not mean the device developed by Thomas Crapper from Yorkshire who founded a plumbing company in London in the 19th Century. I mean an actual Throne of carved mahogany.
 
Some years ago my office was redone by a professional designer. She did a wonderful job for me creating an environmentally-friendly room of sustainable-growth rock maple wood, organic fabrics and recycled metal. I love it. If I die and am reincarnated as a room, my office would be that room.
 
However, she felt that the room needed a touch of whimsy, and she wanted to incorporate my love of the Renaissance Faire and such matters. So she hung a large canvas painting of a man receiving the Accolade, the ceremony of Knighthood, and she installed the throne. I’ve had tons of fun with it and have a whole list of completely improbable stories about it that I use to tease and amuse those clients who I think will enjoy them.
 
The throne is carved with mostly Christian symbolism, but there is a Green Man on it too.
 
The Green Man, the image of a man’s face that is either made of leaves, surrounded by leaves, or spewing leaves from his mouth, is one of the oldest human symbols.
 
Christianity never really absorbed the symbol, but you can find Green Men carved into the Cathedrals of Europe, mentioned in the Mideval poem Gwain and the Green Knight, mixed into the mythology of Osris, Pan, John Barlycorn, Puck, Jack in the Green and in the margins of The Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels. Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, long associated with stories of the Holy Grail contains 103 carved images of Green Men, and only 1 image of Jesus. It is a symbol that has emerged from our collective unconscious mind.
 
Over the world the image of the Green Man can be found. While is carved into the door of Chartres Cathedrial, he can also be found on the Pillars of the Jain Temple in Rajasthan. He watches above a statue of the Buddha in the Temple of Gompha in Nepal, and you can find him carved nearly everywhere in the Kayan area of Borneo.
 
He is a symbol of a person who lives in harmony with nature. He is also why I do not think that Things Are Getting Worse; or at least if they are, it will be possible to fix that.
 

Karl Marx
 
I am trained as a Philosopher. One of the very few things Karl Marx said that I agree with is that sometimes Quantity becomes Quality. That is, if you have a lot of something, and if the pile gets too big, your pile undergoes a change and actually becomes something else.
 
For example, if your pile of money gets big enough, it ceases to be money. It becomes “Capital.”
 
You can use your Capital to make more money without even having to make your pile small at the start. You can finance, you can invest, you can own, you can speculate, people will just give you things; you can do a lot more with Capital than you can with just some money. Your Quantity of money, if there is enough of it, undergoes a Qualitative change and becomes something else. Capital.
 
If you have a business and it gets big enough it becomes a Corporation it takes on a legal life of its own. People can now sue it, but they can’t sue you; even if you are still the one making all the decisions.
 
If your Corporation gets big enough it ceases to be just a Big Corporation and becomes a Mini-Government. It may even have its own Security Forces.
 
If you have a bank or a finance company, and it gets big enough, it becomes a World Economic Power that can tell even large Governments what to do, and can virtually ignore laws that even Governments must obey.
 
The economist I read from earlier, E. F. Schumacher wrote his book, Small is Beautiful, because he wanted to make the claim that Big is Bad. Once something, harmless or even beneficial, becomes too big, it takes on a life of its own and starts to play by different rules.
 
Big insurance companies calculate that they can refuse to cover life-saving treatments because the will have a larger profit if they do that and pay settlements the few grief-striken framilies who sue.
 
Big Oil companies calculate they can take insane risks because even if the worst happens the governments can’t afford to shut them down.
 
Factory Farms churn out contaminated eggs because they do not maintain good food handling practices. Yet they know they can’t really be shut down, because they control enough of the market that if they were it would cause national chaos.
 
I could go on, but I probably don’t have to. Big can be very bad.
 

Small is Beautiful
 
The remedy for this, I think, is the path suggested by the Green Man. Live in harmony with nature. One does that, I believe, as Schumacher argued, by keeping structures as small as practical. We live in a world where there are more than 5000 species of beetle. Nature does not favor uniformity. Nature does a lot by using many little things, mostly different, working in harmony.
 
We are in a time of great unemployment. It’s got everyone scared. Employers know that workers are terrified of losing their jobs and so they are squeezing every bit of productivity from them that they can. Companies are awash in profit and cash, but there are no new hires, few raises, and only a demand to do more. They can get away with this because since World War II our society has embraced the model of Bigger is Better. Big Business. Big Pharma. Big Oil, and yes Big Religion; who have flexed their lobbying muscles and practically run things. They squeeze us because they can.
 
Yet, economists tell us that most of the new jobs are coming from small businesses. Most of the new discoveries are made by small technology companies. They are the hope for the future. I’m a small business man. Never been happier.
 
Are Things Getting Worse? Maybe, but I don’t think they will continue.
 
What we are going through now is the therapy for the wrong-headed way we used to do things. While the correction is painful, I believe we may be on the edge of a better way of doing things. I believe the lesson of our time is that we have hit the Limits of Largeness.
 
It is not necessarily better to have a huge home than a modest one. It makes no sense to enslave oneself to a lifestyle that requires one be up the one’s eyeballs in debt.
 
It makes more sense to shop locally. It’s better to buy a product made by an artisan than by a factory in China. Farmer’s Market’s rule!
 
If I have a choice, I always do business with someone in a small business, even if I have to pay a bit more. If enough of us do that, over time, the stuctures that have caused our problems will weaken.
 
I’d love to see a world of smaller farms, small business, small technology firms where people matter and things are calculated according to values other than the bottom line. And I do expect to live to see that. I think that is what is going to happen and perhaps even inevitably.
 
It’s not going to happen overnight, but Big Companys are hiring fewer people. The other people will have to go somewhere; and if not to Big Companies, they will go to small ones, or start them. People will reinvent themselves. Big Farms are widely seen as dangerous, while small organic farmes now regularly return a profit, and so on.

 
I think change is coming and we will not go backwards into the future. We will do things differnetly because we will have to, and we do better in groups that are not huge. Smaller works.
 

Maimonides
 
In the 12th centry a great Rabbi named Maimonides wrote a three-volue work called The Guide for the Perplexed. Interestingly, economicst E. F. Schumacher wrote a final book himself called the same thing, although I will not deal with it here.
 
In the 12th century work, Maimonides attempted to explicate some of the most complex passes of  Jewish scripture. He did it using wording that would allow the most educated to understand him while “shielding” the less educated from ideas that might upset them. He believed that if only a few could understand at first, gradually that knowledge would filter out because others, the Perplexed, would see that there were some who were not Perplexed about what to do. That would be attractive, and a following would grow. He was right. That is what happened to those who read his books.
 
It’s not necessary for everyone to change how they live and favor small merchants, small businesses and sustainable practices. It’s not necessary that even most do. The few who do will attract a following and their numbers will grow. As the number grow, politicians will adjust because they will always go where the votes are.
 
As Jesus taught, like the bit of yeast that levens the whole loaf, or the pinch of salt the seasons the whole dish, if only a few people change the values by which they live, that will be enough to change the outcome for the whole eventually.  That is what I expect, and I think it will be a Good Thing.
 
And that’s my sermon.

Service Materials

Chalice Lighting [Wilhemina Stitch]
 
We kindle this light, a reflection of Thy light
which from the first of days
shines through all worlds that are,
And burns undimmed, undimmable in minds and hearts
of all who dare to think, to care, to serve.
 
For all wounded, and those radiant with joy,
For those caught in tears, laughter and rejoicing.
We would stand together in the light of candles,
hearths, suns and stars
Awash in the bright, brave, astonishing light.
 
Light a candle in your heart
and watch the golden flame upstart
No one could act a greater part
--to bear a candle.
Than bear a candle here and there
to light the road of deep dispair,
to let a puzzled soul share
--in your flame.

Call to Worship [Elspeth R. Vallance]
 
Those present may call upon the spirit within them or the spiritual powers beyond them to increase their awareness. May each of us be “in tune with the universe” in our own way.
 
There is so much in this life that we take for granted.
 
Let us today become more aware of those things for which we should never cease to be thankful.

Readings

1 Cor 13

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.

If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

Small is Beautiful, E. F. Schmucher (yes, it’s sexist)

Is it not evident that our current methods of production are already eating into the very substance of industrial man? To many people this is not at all evident. Now that we have solved the problem of production, they say, have we ever had it so good? Are we not better fed, better clothed, and better housed than ever before - and better educated!

Of course we are: most, but by no means all of us: in the rich countries. But this is not what I mean by 'substance'. The substance of man cannot be measured by Gross National Product. Perhaps it cannot be measured at all. except for certain symptoms of loss. However, this is not the place to go into the statistics of these symptoms, such as crime. drug addiction, vandalism, mental breakdown, rebellion, and so forth. Statistics never prove anything.

I started by saying that one of the most fateful errors of our age is the belief that the problem of production has been solved. This illusion, I suggested, is mainly due to our inability to recognise that the modern industrial system, with all its intellectual sophistication, consumes the very basis on which it has been erected. To use the language of the economist, it lives on irreplaceable capital which it cheerfully treats as income.

I specified three categories of such capital: fossil fuels, the tolerance margins of nature, and the human substance. Even if some readers should refuse to accept all three parts of my argument, I suggest that any one of them suffices to make my case.

Prayer [Norbert Capek]

In the name of Providence, which implants in the seed the future of the flower, and in our hearts the longing for people to live in harmony.

In the name of the highest, in whom we move and who makes the mother and father, the brother and sister, lover and loner what they are;

In the name of sages and great religious leaders, who sacrificed their lives to hasten the coming of the age of mutual respect;

Let us renew our resolution--sincerely to be real brothers and sisters regardless of any kind of bar which estranges us from each other.

In this holy resolve may we be strengthened, knowing that we are God’s family; that one spirit, the spirit of love, unites us;

And endeavor for a more perfect and more joyful life.