TURN, TURN, TURN
Noreen Kimball
26 December 2004

Reading:
Life matters;
People are precious;
Deed is more important than creed;
Love is the spirit of our church;
Existence is our gift;
Meaning is our quest;
Service is our prayer;
Freedom in community is our way;
Responsibility for others is our obligation;
Reverence for life is our practice.
In the love of beauty and the spirit of truth,
We unite for the celebration of life and the
service of humanity.
All the rest is commentary. Now go and learn it.
This reading is from the Rev. Richard Gilbert
(who had a little help from Rabbi Hillel)


Well, here we are, nearly at the end of the year. It’s the day after Christmas, we just celebrated the solstice and, though it’s hardly possible to believe it yet, the days have officially begun to get longer. Chances are good, given that it’s already December 26, that this year will end as usual and a new year will begin in a week’s time.

I don’t know how you approach a new year, whether you think in terms of getting your taxes done, or in terms of starting a new semester, or that you’re getting that much closer to your winter vacation in February. Or whether you think about a new year at all once you’ve figured out how you’ll celebrate New Year’s Eve. Or whether this will be the year you finally do what you always threaten to do which is to just stay at home and rent a good movie and get to bedearly.

Me, I’ve always felt just the same way every year at this time. I think, “Hmmm. It’s New Year’s. I’ve got another shot.” Maybe this fixation I have with the notion that you get to try it again and maybe even get it right this time, grows out of my experience with Roman Catholicism. Catholics are really big on second, and third, and even fourth, chances. They’re really big on forgiveness. Now, we’ve seen that in excess, this isn’t always a good thing. But, taken as an approach to everyday life, the notion that we can have another chance at things can lead to a fair amount of hopefulness.

So, here I am, looking at a new year and another chance at living the life I think I really should be living, and I’m thinking, once again, “What does that look like anyway?” As I look back over my life, I am amazed at how much my hopes for myself changed and how much they were governed by my circumstances. When I was, say, in my twenties, I think I believed it was possible that I could still turn out to be Dorothy Day or Emma Goldman.

When my children came along, many of my hopes for myself became centered on my desire to be better at mothering them and supporting them and educating them. As they grew stronger, and more independent, my own goals began to focus on my career—I became more intent on honing the skills I had and acquiring more information, more savvy.

Another thread or two always seemed to weave its way, however, through these musings on what I might improve in the year ahead, along with the improved mothering or the improved writing and editing and business managing. Those were the threads of improving my character and improving my ability to live my life. You know, to get more out of it or put more into it—I’m not sure how I would have expressed it exactly but the word “more” would definitely have been part of the explanation.

And it would have been quite shocking to me at the age of 20 that at the age of 60 (or very nearly 60) that I might actually be looking at religion to help me determine what a better, more excellent life might look like. But that seems reasonable to me now. Back in the 70’s, part of what trying to be a good mother looked like was finding a religion I could put up with for the sake of the children. It seems funny to me now that once in, I never really left the religion although my children certainly have. At least for the time being. Anyway, having chosen to participate in religion, I certainly feel I ought to be able to get some help there in trying to determine what “a good life” should look like.

Now, just so you know, if I hadn’t committed to being up here this morning, I’d be doing this much more casually. For instance, I probably wouldn’t have gone looking into the writings of William Ellery Channing. By the way, did you know that when you say the name William Ellery Channing it’s de rigueur to follow it with the words, “the great Unitiarian Divine”? Anyway, off to Channing I went because if you and I are going to talk in a few minutes about what leading a good life is, and we are going to do that, I thought Channing might be as good a place to start as we could find. Channing wrote about religion and he wrote about life and he wrote about church. He believed very powerfully in the action of religion and the church upon life, to its benefit.

So, William Ellery Channing, the great Unitarian divine, in an essay called “The Church,” said “The church as at first constituted, presents interesting and beautiful aspects. It was not a forced and arbitrary, but a free, spontaneous union. It grew out of the principles and feelings of human nature. Our nature is social. We cannot live alone. We cannot shut up any great feeling in our hearts. We seek for others to partake it with us. The full soul finds at once relief and strength in sympathy. This is especially true in religion, the most social of all our sentiments.”

But in speaking about church, Channing continues by speaking of what today we would say was the life well lived. He speaks of a need for “Inward sanctity, pure love, disinterested attachment to God and man; …sincere excellence of character. . .”

“This,” he says, “…is the essential thing in religion, and all things else—ministers, churches, ordinances, places of worship, all are but means, helps, secondary influences and utterly worthless when separated from this.”

So, let me tell you what “this” was again in case you didn’t get that down. Because it was exactly the kind of statement I went to Channing to find. I mean, in terms of a list of what a better life might look like. He said we needed to seek “inward sanctity, pure love, disinterested attachment to God and man; …sincere excellence of character. . .”

Now, I don’t want to go over every single word but I think I’d like to unpack that just a little. “Inward sanctity.” Inward sanctity, I think, means “holiness of life and character. Saintliness. A state of moral and spiritual perfection.” OK, good goal. A little out of reach for me, anyway, but I can certainly see it as something that Hamlet might call “devoutly to be wished.” Next came “pure love.” I think you could say that pure love is “self-giving love expressed freely, without calculation of cost or gain to the giver, or merit on the part of the receiver.” I think that parents, probably, or others who love the children in their lives come closest to that type of pure love. And possibly some of the great romantic lovers—Heloise and Ableard, maybe.

Although, I will say that when Auden says, “If equal affection cannot be, then let the more loving one be me…” it has always struck a chord with me. And, given the horrible choice between being loved and being the loving one, in the end I would choose loving over being loved. I’m not at all sure, however, that this is a selfless choice but rather it is always my choice to feel trather than to be simply the receiver of feelings. And I don’t know that there’s anything particularly pure about that.

Next comes “disinterested attachment to God and man.” I love that old word “disinterested” though it’s rarely used the way it used to be used. In Channing’s day certainly, if not always now, “disinterested” meant “free from selfish motive or interest. Unbiased.” So, roughly translated into 21st century Unitarian Universalist English that might mean “unselfish attachment to the spirit and to humanity.” Now, that doesn’t seem such a great stretch for us. I mean, it’s unlikely any of us is able to spend every waking moment with that attachment at the top of our minds, but it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that each of us here shares this value—an attachment to the spiritual and to humanity.

Finally we get to, “sincere excellence of character. . .” That value that James often reminds us is the Unitarian Universalist way—the people who value character over creed, he calls us. Is it possible, however, for any group of people to agree on just what sincere excellence of character is? Well, I don’t know, but it certainly is possible to have some terrific conversations about it. I’ve certainly had lots of conversations about character—and what constitutes really bad character and really excellent character. Our old hymnal, “Hymns for the Celebration of Life” used to have a reading that I loved. It was called the Stoic’s Prayer and it seemed to me that it was the prayer of a good man wanting to be a better man, and that it was as good a guide to what a person might strive to be as any I’d read. The prayer was written in the 3rd century:

“May I be no man’s enemy, and may I be the friend of that which is eternal and abides.
May I never quarrel with those nearest me: and if I do, may I be reconciled quickly.
May I love, seek, and attain only that which is good.
May I wish for all men’s happiness and envy none.
May I never rejoice in the ill-fortune of one who has wronged me.
When I have done or said what is wrong, may I never wait for the rebuke of others, but always rebuke myself until I make amends.
May I win no victory that harms either me or my opponent.
May I reconcile friends who are angry with one another.
May I never fail a friend who is in danger.
When visiting those in grief may I be able by gentle and healing words to soften their pain.
May I respect myself.
May I always keep tame that which rages within me.
May I accustom myself to be gentle, and never be angry with people because of circumstances.
May I never discuss who is wicked and what wicked things he has done, but know good men and follow in their footsteps.”

We don’t know, really, how can we, what it would actually take to be a truly excellent character. What is more important, Courage? Honesty? Love? Strength of purpose? Intellectual curiosity? Kindness? Don’t circumstances alter cases on occasion? And, just think, is it necessary to be so “high minded” that we need actually to think in terms of purity and sanctity and excellence? Might it not be enough to be good and kind? Must we strive for saintliness?

Another Channing, William Ellery’s nephew William Henry Channing, wrote something he called his Symphony. It’s a perfect view, it always seemed to me, of the values of the 19th century gentleman of good family and modest ambition. He writes:

To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with an open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common--this is my symphony.

It seems to me that those of us who are theological liberals need to live life experientially—and not just on Sunday mornings. We don’t have a script. We don’t have a list of beatitudes handed to us to guide our actions. We have values that we discuss together and we change as our lives and our minds change. As the year turns, it makes sense to me that we look at the coming year as a time of opportunity. We can look at the year past and consider what it might take to give it another shot—this business of living the examined, the thoughtful life. What is it that we want to dedicate ourselves to, that we might have neglected in the past year? What is it that we noticed in the behavior of another person that we would like to emulate? What have we left undone in our lives that we know would make us a better person if we could only achieve it. Part of what we do as members of a religious community is to discuss these values of ours; these goals; these aspirations. Let’s take a few moments now to share these thoughts with one another.