My favorite thing about our old home in Syracuse was the view. Our house was perched on top of a drumlin, a fancy name for a small hill, but big enough to allow a view over most of the city. As a minister, I counted on that hill. So much of what ministers do - like so much of what we do for each other as a church community - is to sit and walk beside friends as they struggle with the unexpected, undeserved and inescapable pain of life. After being with a church member struggling with such pain, I often went out back to sit on our hill. The open sky above and the beauty of the parks beneath would restore my sense of belonging, possibility and stability - except in November. In November, the hill reminded me not of the presence of abundance, but of its absence.
And if the complaining about the weather I've heard lately is any indication, I'm not the only one who has experienced November this way. And who can blame us? The colorful leaves are gone. Bare and broken branches are everywhere you look. Gorgeous fall sunsets are replaced by gray skies and a lot of mud. And it's cold on so many levels. In November, life can feel very cold.
When more of us were farmers, we had at least the benefit of being able to sit back and contemplate a bountiful harvest - a seemingly bold and reassuring reminder that even during dark times, mother earth will never leave us stranded. But with farming days over for most of us, there's very little to prevent one from feeling that the message of the month is, "You're on your own."
Which reminds us that it's not so much the dreary skies that make November so difficult; it's the doubt. It's the way November and "November experiences" - with their removal of abundance from our lives - can cause one to worry that maybe life just doesn't care.
Which brings us to the role of religion.
I'll never forget the first class I took in Divinity School. "It is a mistake," our preaching professor said, "to see the task of religion as convincing people that God exists. NO. NO. NO!" he used to say, pounding his big German hand on the table. "The task of religion is to convince people that God loves them! It's not our doubts about God's existence that trouble humans so much, it is our doubts about God's love. Real people down in the real world dealing with real pain want and need to know that the heart of the universe cares about them."
And lest we think that this is only a Christian perspective, listen to what Houston Smith, arguably the greatest living scholar of world religions, says in his new book.
"The world religions are not carbon copies," he writes, "but they all reveal the same reality. The universal message of religion is that a happy ending blossoms out of adversity. The universal message of religion is, 'We're in good hands.'"
The same idea was echoed in a book I read recently on Zen Buddhism. Summing up Buddha's message into one sentence, this author said, "It's the same as all great religions. It is the message that everything is going to be all right - that the universe will find a way to work things out for us."
Martin Luther King Jr. declared that the arc of the universe bends toward justice. Gandhi invited people to find hope in the Hindu idea of karma, saying that eventually the universe will make sure that good comes to those who do good, and bad will come to those who do harm. Earth-centered traditions encourage us to see the universe as a caring mother. And Ms. Cora Fisher, my third grade Sunday school teacher, is still telling children that Jesus has his eye on the tiniest sparrow and worries about every hair on our head.
Taken together, it's an amazing list. Regardless of sophistication or religious tradition, regardless of liberal or conservative leanings, regardless of their quite different approaches, these religious voices all share the same goal: to remove our doubts and reassure us that the universe cares.
But my question this morning is "Should it?" Should this be religion's goal?
I titled my sermon today, "Does the Universe Care?" But that wasn't really fair. It's misleading. A better title might have been: "Is It Really Religion's Job to Convince Us That the Universe Cares?" That, it seems to me, is the more fundamental theological question. And simply put, I think it is important to answer that question by saying "no."
I started off today talking about November as the most doubt-inspiring month, but maybe it's the most clear-headed as well. Above all, November is unequivocally "gray." And it seems to me that when it comes to the question of the universe's concern for us, the fuzziness of gray, rather than the clarity of black and white, is all we have to work with. Is the intent of the universe best captured by the beauty and abundance of fall or by the cold, depleted world of winter? November says, "It's a tough call." November, the month in-between, says you're always going to be stuck in the middle, right on the fence, pulled both ways but never with experiences decisive enough to decide for sure. For instance, November's mud and mess is never quite muddy or messy enough for us to claim we're oppressed. November's cold is never really cold enough to keep us trapped inside. In the same way, when November surprises us with sun and clear, open skies, it never allows those reassuring days to stay around too long. Just when you begin to think sunny days are what November might truly be - Poof! - they disappear. So when they return, you're never sure if the good days are a gift or just another trick. In the end, the uncertainty of gray is the only thing that seems for sure.
And this morning, I'm suggesting that taking the gray of life seriously means having to judge my divinity school professor as well-meaning but ultimately wrong-headed. He may be right that we WANT and even NEED to know if the universe cares about us, but that doesn't mean that the universe is obligated to ever give us an answer. There are some questions in life we just have to let go of.
But if that's the case, which question should we hold on to? If convincing us that the universe cares is wrong-headed and a hopeless cause, what should religion be trying to convince us of?
In trying to answer that question, I find it useful to go back to a particular November day up on my hill in Syracuse.
It had been one of those weeks when everything was overshadowed by bad news. In this case it was two pieces of bad news.
The first came to me. On a Tuesday night, I got a call to come to the hospital. Sara was suicidal and clearly sinking into severe depression once again. What made this such a hard phone call was that just a year and a half earlier the right combination of medication had finally set Sara free. After ten years of living with a depression that eluded every doctor's expertise, she finally had her life and her self back. The sweet smile. The gentle laugh. The sharp, clear mind. The remarkable reservoir of kindness.
Mark, another member of church, couldn't help but notice. He was smitten and so was she. Both in their fifties. Both divorced. Both alone for a long time and thus having accepted the fact that single was just the way life was going to be. But then this second chance. This great gift of unexpected connection and relationship. For six months, it was unblemished grace.
Then the meds slowly lost their magic. It didn't happen fast, and in a way that was worse; it took a year of one-step-forward-two-steps-back before it was clear that things were back to square one. Mark hung in there the entire year. He held her. He cried with her. He let her scream at and even blame him. Then with a horribly complicated mix of pain, shame and regret, he decided that Sara's suffering was not his to live with for the rest of his life. So Sara was once again alone. Life had given her a brief glimpse of grace and then reneged. She was now in the hospital and needed her daughter and minister to come.
The next phone call that week was for Kaaren. It was Kurt. He needed to talk once again. But this time it wasn't about Joan's tests, it was about his. For three months, Kaaren had helped Kurt accept and negotiate the fact that his wife had cancer and would soon be taken from him. With only an expected two or three more months to go, a routine check-up told Kurt that he had cancer too. It was too cruel to seem true. The question now was, how do I tell her? How do I tell my dying wife that I'm dying too? How do I figure out a way to accept my wife's illness and death, while at the same time facing my own? Kaaren said, "I'll be over this afternoon," and then she hung up the phone, walked over to me, and cried.
This was one of those situations where being a clergy couple doesn't serve you as well as usual. You can offer each other only limited support and energy, because so much has to be saved for those directly experiencing the pain. It may sound odd, but in the days that followed these two phone calls, the best way for us to support each other as ministers was not to ask for too much support. We needed, in a sense, to try to leave each other alone.
And so that's why on this particular day in my memory, we didn't turn to each other but went our separate ways. I walked out to my hill and Kaaren stayed inside.
But since it was November, as I said at the start of all this, the hill only made things worse. Like my Divinity School professor, I wanted the hill to give me perspective, some message I could use to ground myself and help my friend with her pain. In a way, I think I wanted the universe to say, "Hey, not to worry, we're in this together; I'll be there to help your friend too." But there was no such message. No such reassurance. Just silence and gray. If anything, the message I got was, "Hey, get it into your head, will ya! I'm indifferent. If you're looking for guidance, don't look this way."
And so I turned around and went inside.
When I got inside, everything had changed. In no more than an hour, my wife had turned herself into a human tornado, transforming our clean and organized kitchen into an absolute mess. The chaos was made not of pots and pans, recipes and food, but of paint and brushes, sketches and cups filled with stunningly bright colors. What had been a blank yellow kitchen wall was now a wild garden. What was once empty was now full - full with flowers and fruits, vegetables of every kind - all of them painted in a way that made them look giant and bold and unapologetically alive. The view from my hill may have refused to send a message, but our kitchen wall wasn't bashful at all. Its message was loud and clear, and very specific - especially with Kaaren standing right there beside it all with this great giant smile on her face. The message: not "Life is good," but instead, "You can make life good!"
The scene reminded me once again of that simple, but important truth that is so easy to forget. It reminded me that even when the world is indifferent to us, we don't have to be indifferent to it.
Which is exactly what I think religion needs to remind us of as well. This, it seems to me, is religion's most important task: convincing us not so much that life loves and responds to us, but that we have the power to love and respond to life. Or to put it another way - with all due respect to my divinity school professor and all the other theologians and Sunday school teachers that are trying to help - I don't think the most pressing human question is "Does God and life love and care for us no matter what?" I think it's, "Can we love and care about life no matter what?"
And, when it comes to that question, I don't think we are in gray territory at all. If we choose, we most definitely can love life no matter what.
I don't remember where I first heard the phrase, but I find great hope in the idea that we human beings are born with the ability to "reorient our joy," a great and important phrase. "Reorient our joy." It captures so well the ability each of us has to redirect our affections when the source of those affections is taken from us. When the leaves lose their color and fall to the ground, we can shift the enjoyment of autumn to our feet and explore the amazing sound of leaves crunching and crackling beneath our step. When we can't hold or be held by our loved ones due to death, we can shift our connections to their memories and walk with them still, just in a very different way. When our sight is stolen, we can retain a connection with beauty through our ears. When relationships with others fail or can't be found, we can shift our attention to our relationship with our self. When life refuses to give us flowers, we can work with what we've got lying around and paint or create our own. This is what the wonderful American poet Wallace Stevens meant when he said, "After the final NO there comes a YES, and on that YES the future of the world depends."
It's what the deceptively hopeful philosopher Albert Camus was trying to tell us when he said, "In the midst of winter, I found there was. . .within me, an invincible summer."
And it's what I think we need most from our religion as well as from each other: to be reminded that even when the world is indifferent or unsympathetic to us, we have the power not to be indifferent to it.
May it be so. Amen.
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