Antoine de St. Exupery's fanciful essay The Little Prince is one of the most prophetic books of our time. It shines the light of truth in the shadow places of our overly driven lives. You will recall the Little Prince travels from planet to planet to add to his knowledge. On one planet he finds a man who spends all of his time counting, and has reached the number of five hundred and one million.
"Five hundred and one million what?" asks the Little Prince.
The man, annoyed at the interruption, answers, "Millions of those little objects which one sometimes sees in the sky."
"Flies?" asks the little prince.
"Oh, no,' says the man. "Little golden objects that set lazy men to idle dreaming."
"Ah, you mean the stars?" says the little prince. "And what do you do with five hundred millions of stars?"
The man explains that he writes the number on a little paper and then puts the paper in a drawer and locks it. "I am concerned with matters of consequence: I am accurate." The little prince is puzzled. For what is of consequence to the little prince is a flower that he waters every day and three volcanoes that he cleans out every week, since he is of use to the flower and of use to the volcanoes. What is important is invisible to the eye. These, he announces to the man, are true matters of consequence.
The Little Prince's confusion is my own. In a culture obsessed with writing down numbers and placing them, not in a drawer, but in a computer, one wonders what is of human consequence. In fact, spirituality has been defined as distinguishing between what is important and what is not.
I was drawn to this issue through an article by philosopher Leroy S. Rouner, a Phi Beta Kappa lecturer: "Resolved: That Phi Beta Kappa Is Gloriously Useless." His thesis was that this academic honorary society "is gloriously useless because it is not an instrument for reaching a goal; it is a celebration for the love of learning, of the mind's adventure and the spirit's quest, simply and solely for their own sake."[1] "Phi Beta Kappa," he said, "is not an institution with practical goals, but a celebration. We are more like a party than a program."[2] That sounds a little like a Unitarian Universalist church.
Rouner wrote that, "...dreamers are people who must justify themselves in our popular culture, not . . . practitioners. . . . Today the mousetrap has a dot-com address, and the college kids who really want to major in philosophy or Greek or English are confronted by parents who have ponied up megabucks for their education and who ask the realistic, down-to-earth, practical question - with poignant sincerity, entirely in the interest of this dearly beloved, hideously expensive child - 'But darling, what can you do with that?'
"This is one of life's ironies," he continued. "Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens, when in fact it was the youth of Athens who were trying to corrupt him. These Athenian rich kids didn't want philosophical talk about the true nature of justice. They wanted to learn rhetoric: how to make an effective speech about justice in the Athenian Senate. Socrates thought it was important to know what you were talking about, but they wanted a short course in how to get elected without really knowing anything. . . .
"But what makes uselessness glorious? Or to put it somewhat differently, if use is not an appropriate criterion for decision making in the academic life, what is? Love. Next time you come to Boston, take a walk down Commonwealth Avenue to the Boston University School for the Arts, and look at the huge, blown-up photographs of one kid playing the Paganini violin concerto, and another doing a speech from Shakespeare, and so on. At the bottom of each of these wonderful posters is scrawled the message, 'Learn what you love.' That's what education in the liberal arts and sciences is all about: discovering not just something that you are good at, but something that you care about, something you can give yourself to, something you can lose yourself in, something you love. . .
He concluded: "My son Timmy, of blessed memory, wrote a senior thesis evaluating several private secondary schools. It was called "Too Much Success: Not Enough Happiness."[3]
I confess that one of the central dilemmas of my life has been summed up by E. B. White in his classic words: "It's hard to know when to respond to the seductiveness of the world and when to respond to its challenges. If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between the desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."
Or to plan a life. Having reached the age when I should be exhibiting some wisdom on this issue, I find myself still adrift - wondering. Having reached a critical transition point in my life and career, I reflect more and more on just this matter - to what extent should I be engaged in saving the world - being an instrument for justice - and to what extent should I be involved in savoring the world - celebrating life in all its rich dimensions.
On the one hand, my Puritan inheritance stimulates my conscience to the point of pain when I gaze out upon a hurting world in need of help. One of my favorite poems is Marge Piercy's "To Be of Use," which I use frequently in talks and sermons and essays on social justice. It is powerful.
"The people I love best jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. They seem to become natives of that element, the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls. I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again. I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out. The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real."[4]
No, how can you quarrel with that? How can I quarrel with that? One mantra of my ministry among you is "to be is to be of use." Here I extol utilitarianism - American pragmatism - which stresses the practical at the expense of the theoretical. We are a pragmatic people. We want to know what works. We want to be an instrument for achieving a goal.
And yet. And yet, I am haunted by Professor Rouner's son Timmy: "Too Much Success: Not Enough Happiness." Of course, there is a difference between utilitarian success in the commercial world of counting numbers like the Little Prince's friend who "owned" the stars and the social justice successes of Martin Luther King, Jr.
But there is more. There is the pure joy of engaging in this life without any expectation of producing a product or accomplishing a goal.
One of my favorite stories in this regard is about Oliver Wendell Holmes, who retired from the Supreme Court at the age of 91. On that occasion, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called on him and found Justice Holmes reading Plato in the original Greek with a book of translations and struggling with it. Roosevelt is supposed to have asked, "Mr. Justice, why are you reading Plato in the original at your time of life?" And Justice Holmes replied, "Just to improve my mind."
For the past 40 plus years my focus has been on the utilitarian. Virtually everything I experience is potential grist for the homiletic mill, and I am noted among my colleagues for carrying little index cards in my pocket on which I jot notes for sermons when something occurs to me. Even when I read a novel my yellow highlighter is poised to emphasize some illustration I can use in a sermon - which is why I tend to buy books rather than borrow them from the library.
At our Unitarian Universalist ministers' convocation last week in Birmingham, Alabama, I was a group leader for about ten of my colleagues. We were to process the events of our conference in the context of our ministries. One member said how much more she was enjoying this convocation than the last one in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Why? Because then we had a definite goal - we were to create a statement - an affirmation of our faith and ministry. Working in small groups we fashioned words which were in turned refashioned by other groups until we had a product. It was an arduous process - the proverbial camel created by committee when a horse was envisioned. This time, she said, we didn't have a specific tangible goal - we were to engage in a process of reflecting on and reviving our ministries - boosting our morale in a troubled time - a goal to be sure, but a far more intangible one than a several hundred word statement we could pack in our bags and bring home.
There were other events at Convo 2002 that illustrate our dilemma. We celebrated the civil rights movement and our Unitarian Universalist involvement in the 1965 Selma crusade for voting rights. Several of us who had been to Selma were present, including two friends who were with the Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist minister murdered there.
Another of our number told an inspiring story of his work in a Birmingham church during the civil rights movement. He was in the kitchen helping get ready for a big dinner when the phone rang. One of the women in the church answered, and he could hear her voice over the hubbub: "Oh, you'll just have to get in line, then," and she slammed the phone down. "What was that?" he asked. "Oh, just another bomb threat!" she said matter-of-factly, and went back to her work. That is goal-driven behavior. On the other hand the pure joy of singing with 450 other ministers was just shy of ecstatic. We sang between our 16 lectures, we sang at morning worship and at our vesper service and then at night as well. We sang, not for any utilitarian purpose, but for the sheer joy of singing together. There is nothing quite like it. Yet I can show no tangible result of my joy. It just was.
There are voices that call us from the utilitarian world of doing into the spiritual world of being: "Life is too short to balance a checkbook."[5] "Do something for the joy of doing it and pray you won't be punished."[6] "Life is more like painting a picture than doing a sum."[7] Poet e. e. cummings once admonished us to come out of the measurable house of doing into the immeasurable house of being.[8]
In the May/June 2001 issue of the UUWorld I read a fascinating article by Jeffrey Lockwood, an entomologist: "Good for Nothing: In the study of grasshoppers, an entomologist discovers the value of simply 'being.'" When he introduces himself at social gatherings as an expert on bugs, he invariably is asked something like, "I know that we shouldn't kill them all, but really, what are they good for?"[9] Lockwood assumes that the question presumes that value lies in utility, not what is of intrinsic worth. In his field study of grasshoppers he found that he has learned more from them than about them. They have taught him, "among other things, the nature and value of nothing."[10] In fact, setting up a video-camera and watching them 24 hours a day, he discovered most of what they do is nothing - 43 minutes out of every hour. Presuming initially they were just "resting," preparing for the real demands of life, he finally surmised that they really are simply being. He concluded "something can have worth in and of itself."[11]
Taking a page from Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn, instead of saying "don't just sit there, do something," we might consider the obverse suggestion, "don't just do something, sit there." Lockwood concluded that science is about understanding substance and activity. It doesn't tell us much about the empty spaces between things and deeds. He concludes: "The reason we value our children is not because of what they do, but because of who they are. That's why, as a spiritual scientist, my answer is that a grasshopper isn't good for anything. Its presence is of no significance - an ultimate zero. Its value is in being a grasshopper, nothing more. The grasshopper just is. And that is enough."[12]
That kind of thinking - focusing more on being than on doing - is sacrilegious in our culture, but it is that prophetic voice we need so desperately to hear if we are to bring a semblance of balance to our lives.
That focus is certainly evident in memorial services for our deceased comrades of the way. When we gather to celebrate their lives, we do not primarily pull out their curriculum vitae and tote up all their awards and accomplishments and successes. Instead we remember the stories of their humanity - not only their contribution to the world, but their enjoyment of the world.
And so here I am, still struggling with the age-old problem posed by E. B. White - whether to improve the world or to enjoy the world. Of course, there are products of my ministerial career - a large stack of sermons and bunches of bytes in a computer and on a website. And I do find it important to feel I have been a participant in the process of repairing the world.
But when I get right down to it, I'm not sure that is the most important thing. Perhaps the most important thing is the time I have spent being gloriously useless. Being gloriously useless means being liberated from having to always be "successful" as the world defines "success," always having to have something tangible to show for what I do, always being trapped in the measurable world of doing, counting the stars and banking them.
No, when I say I have been gloriously useless, I mean in the sense of inhabiting the immeasurable house of being - I mean the hours spent celebrating life in worship - grieving with families at the death of loved ones - presiding over rites of passage - hours spent in meetings which do more to build relationships than achieve goals. This has brought balance to my ministry and to my life.
So much of ministry is gloriously useless. So much of church is gloriously useless. It cannot be measured, cannot be banked, cannot be put on a piece of paper and locked in a drawer. Yet it is as important as anything we can imagine. The Little Prince could not be seduced into counting the stars to own them and put them in a drawer. Neither should we. He knew they were to be enjoyed. We should too.
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