What On Earth Have We Done?

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, March 21, 2010

after a reading from Robert Fulghum’s What On Earth Have I Done?:

The Greek philosopher and teacher, Alexander Papaderos, ended a lecture by asking, “Are there any questions?”  So I asked, “Dr. Papaderos, what is the meaning of life?”

The usual laughter followed, and people started to go.  Papaderos held up his hand and stilled the room and looked at me for a long time, asking with his eyes if I was serious and seeing from my eyes that I was.  “I will answer your question,” he said.  Then taking his wallet out of his hip pocket, he fished into it and brought out a very small, round mirror, about the size of a quarter.  Then he said, “When I was a small child, during the war, we were very poor and we lived in a remote village.  One day, on the road, I found several broken pieces of a mirror from a wrecked German motorcycle.  I tried to find all the pieces and put them together, but it was not possible, so I kept only the largest piece.  This one.  And by scratching it on a stone, I made it round.  I began to play with it as a toy and became fascinated by the fact that I could reflect light into dark places where the sun would not shine – in deep holes and crevices and dark closets.  It became a game for me to get light into the most inaccessible places I could find.

“I kept the little mirror, and as I went about my growing up, I would take it out in idle moments and continue the challenge of the game.  As I became a man, I grew to understand that this was not just a child’s game but a metaphor for what I might do with my life.  I came to understand that I am not the light or the source of the light.  But light – the light of truth, understanding, knowledge – is there, and it will only shine in many dark places if I reflect it.

“I am a fragment of a mirror whose whole design and shape I do not know.  Nevertheless, with what I have, I can reflect light into the dark places of this world – into the black places in the hearts of men – and change some things in some people.  Perhaps others may see and do likewise.  This is what I am about.  This is the meaning of my life.”

And then he took his small mirror and, holding it carefully, caught the bright rays of daylight streaming through the window and reflected them onto my face and onto my hands folded on the desk.


  [www.robertfulghum.com]

 

 

What On Earth Have We Done?

What on earth have we done?  What was wrong with what we had?  What was wrong with the excitement of a full sanctuary every week and lots of long-time close friends to sit with and more showing up all the time?  Why would we step out into the unknown and do something we’ve never done before and risk ruining a good thing  - and in the process, change up all the traditions that kept us comfortable and grounded in familiar surroundings?  Why would we throw out our long-standing schedule of getting here at 9:30 for Forum and staying for 10:30 church and enjoying one coffee hour together at 11:30?  Why?

And now here we are, at the genesis of this cockamamie experiment, trying to free up a little space but sitting here all spread out and feeling very much alone and wishing for the good old days when we had to search for a seat and push our way into the pews and fight for a little room of our own to stretch out in.  And now, you’re way over there and I’m way over here and it doesn’t feel right and what are we gonna do.  What on earth have we done?

If you’re looking for a succinctly comforting answer to that question from this pulpit this morning, I fear you may be disappointed because my answer is, as of right now, today, this morning, in this moment:  I don’t know.  But I can tell you this:  I’m going to trust that if we keep asking questions, and keep going forward, and keep our hearts and our minds open, we may find some answers somewhere down the road.

Robert Fulghum, in his 2007 book What On Earth Have I Done?, lists some questions he heard in his young life that he says have carried through into his life today.  He says his mother used to ask him quite frequently, whenever she’d catch him at one thing or another, What on earth have you done?  which is a question, of course, about something he’d just gotten himself into in the very recent past.  And it never felt good, it never felt loving when she’d ask;  it never felt like there was a real answer, which for him to recognize as a kid is pretty good, because when we as parents ask that question, we most of the time forget that such a question is rhetorical at best, a form of oratorical punishment at worst - when you ask a child a question knowing there is no answer but simply wanting to watch her squirm.

Sometimes, Fulghum says, his mother would turn her query into a theological question in the present tense:  What in God’s name are you doing?  This is taking the inquiry to a whole ‘nother level, bringing the notion of God into it, something a lot of us don’t have worked out to any respectable degree as yet, and expecting a child to be able to say something meaningful about his Maker when he’s sitting in the midst of a mess of his own making.  Tsk-tsk.

And then comes, inevitably, a slightly disingenuous question ostensibly concerned about the future but coming straight out of the frustration of the present:  And what will you think of next?  How can a child answer?  If she’d already thought of what she’s gonna think of next, she wouldn’t be stuck in this predicament, caught at what she shouldn’t have been doing with no place to run and no place to hide.

It’s cruel, really, asking this series of questions of a child, these questions that Fulghum calls the great Mother questions;  questions that assume some awareness of past, present, future;  questions that touch on such sophisticated topics as archeology, theology, sociology, neurology. 

Almost as an aside, Fulghum says his father often wrapped all those Great Mother questions into one foreshortened and barely fathomable father question, which must be pronounced with a slightly different tone and which I’ll translate and soften just a bit for today’s lesson:  his father’s question was often simply, “What the…?”  My father asked me that a lot - as if it’s a real question - and since I learned my parenting style or lack of it from him, I must have asked my kids that a lot, too.

Fulghum goes on to get at those Great Mother questions one by one in a much more serious manner than you might think possible from my short recounting.  These questions may even be the basis of a deep spiritual practice done either in the regularly-scheduled meditative moment, in the odd, catch-as-catch-can ‘moment of awareness’ during an otherwise hectic day, or just by looking back at that person in the mirror each morning and considering each question in its turn: 

What on earth have I done?  What in God’s name am I doing?  What will I think of next?

For instance:  What on earth have I done?  Is there anything I can point to that I think I’ve accomplished in my time here on earth?  If I had to fill out a form outlining my best efforts at this ‘life’ thing, would I have anything to put down?  How have I contributed, what qualities have I brought, what values have I added to the lives of the people I’ve met and to the ecologies of the places I’ve been?  What on earth have I done?

What in God’s name am I doing?  Not what am I doing for myself, but what am I doing that might potentially point to something higher than this plane I live on or to something deeper than this surface stuff I attend to most of the time?  What am I involved in in the broader scheme of things that has some hope of illuminating the darkness or lessening the suffering of others?  Is what I’m doing all about me, or is what I’m doing concerned with that which is larger than me?  Do the beliefs I hold in my heart accord with the beliefs I espouse with my words?  Do my actions live up to what I truly believe and what I hold to be most sacred?  What in God’s name am I doing?

What will I think of next?  Am I mentally active as best I can be?  Am I still thinking and noticing what’s going on around me?  Am I still learning from what I read and see and hear and feel?  Is my head full of worn-out notions and archaic traditions and unquestioned assumptions that no longer serve in the world of today?  Or am I ready to ask hard questions and seek new ideas and find fresh answers?  What will I think of next?

A warning to the spiritual traveler:  it is possible as one is going through this exercise to fall prey to an extremism of sorts, the end result of which can be despair.  I know because I do it myself sometimes.  Okay, I do it myself often.  The problem is, rather than seeing the positive aspects of the things I do accomplish, I see that I’m never going to be able to do enough.  No matter how much I do, there are still going to be wars and rumors of wars, natural disasters and man-made ones, people are going to be hurting and broken all over the world and right here in my neighborhood, in my house, in my church.  I can’t ever do enough, I don’t have enough energy or enough know-how or enough personal power or even enough time to do everything there is that’s needs doing or to give to every cause that is worthy or to get righteously angry about every human failing I experience or hear about. 

I can’t do enough.  I can’t.  And I flounder.  And I despair.  And I pray.  And sometimes those prayers are answered.

Here’s one of those answers:  I detect some questionable assumptions underlying Fulghum’s set of Great Mother Questions;  they assume in each case some amount of agency on each individual’s part.  That is, they are about choosing one path over another, they are about exercising one’s will to act in certain ways, they are about doing as opposed to being.

Middle-class Americans are often all about choosing, all about exercising one’s will, all about doing - which of course is what we believe gets us ahead in our capitalist culture.  If you’re not getting ahead, if you’re a member of an underclass, if you lose you house or your job or your family, it must be because you made the wrong choice, it must be because you didn’t have the will, it must be because you didn’t do.  And God help you in this society if you don’t do.

However.  An awful lot of us middle-class folks are beginning to understand the fallacy of this way of thinking.  We’re learning the hard way that you don’t personally have to have failed at anything or made the wrong choice or lacked the will to do what had to be done for you to be in a world of hurt in this economy.  People, good people, are getting crushed, which points to the fallacy of what many of us once held to be true and many still do  - that people are hungry or homeless or hurting because of their own lack of character.  To some extent I suppose it must be true:  if you decide you just don’t feel like getting out of bed too many days, or if you attempt to work out your anger issues on your co-workers, I suppose you could lose your job or your house or your family through actions that you yourself have taken.  That’s true.  But as more and more of us are finding out, you don’t have to have done anything wrong for things to go wrong;  it may be that something is wrong in the system, because too many of us are being crushed by it.

I have been in the company of people who have been crushed, and who did not have the wherewithal in the moment of our meeting to do anything - at least as far as I could see.  They were ill or injured, depressed or imprisoned, semi-conscious or unconscious, beaten by others or by the structures of our society.  They seemed, in the moment, in a position only to be, not to do.  These people who could not do for themselves have been for me only the most extreme examples of the fact that your worth cannot be determined by the things you do;  your worth is determined by the fact of your existence.  It is your being that is of ultimate importance, not your doing.  You are loved regardless. 

You are loved regardless.  And only after you recognize that and absorb it deep into your bones do the Great Mother Questions then strike the right note:  not a note of blame and guilt but one of one of invitation - an invitation to uncover your light and to let it shine, to pick up your piece of the mirror and to reflect the brightness you find in your heart into the dark places of the world.

With that in mind let’s cycle back around to our first question of the day:  What on earth have we done?  Well, the most immediate anxiety-producer I can think of right here, right now is this little experiment we’re involved in, changing our Sunday morning schedule to include two worship services.  That’s a big change.  That’s a big change for a little church community that in the not-too-distant past had to wonder how much longer it could hang on.  That’s a big change for all the adults who came here every Sunday simply looking to discuss the issues of the day, not expecting too much of one another, not wanting to get too involved.  That’s a big change for our kids who worry that having two services will divide our church community so much that they won’t know where their friends are.  It’s not just kids who are asking, but adults, too:  “What if all my friends go to a different service and I never get to see them again?”

It’s a lot of change all at once.  And change is hard:  We humans need the comfort and stability of sameness to some extent to be able to function.  But comfort can breed complacency, stability can enshrine worn-out notions and archaic traditions and unquestioned assumptions.  So a shake-up or and experiment or some tension once in a while may not be all bad.

Of course we wonder what all these changes will mean to our experience of this community.  And of course we have to be here for each other and for our kids as we face an uncertain future.

But this community must finally transcend our individual experiences of it.  The things we learn together, the things we do together, the things we are together and the things we become together need to be shared.  We cannot hide our lights under a bushel basket any longer.  We have to find ways to put our little individual pieces of that larger mirror together.  And we have to find ways to invite others to bring their mirrors to bear, with ours, in increasing the light in the world. 

In that vein, I invite you to join in this little experiment, and to keep asking questions with an open heart and an open mind.

So may it be.