The Happy Life Isn't Always the Easy Life
I want to start out this morning with a little journey into imagination together, as a means to determine whether or not this life I'm going to describe is happy or not.
Imagine waking in early morning at 5am. You kiss your slumbering wife on the cheek, swing your legs over the side of the bed and rest your feet on the cool wood of your bedroom floor. You get dressed in the dark while listening to your family sleep, a resonant harmony of breath filling the second floor. You find a tie to match your suit but are unsure if it is blue or black; but as you're rushed for time you hope it's close enough. Downstairs, you make yourself a cup of coffee, slurping loudly as to avoid burning your lip. You scan the newspaper, reading the articles on the first page, and stuff your toast between your teeth as you shove papers into your briefcase. At the back door, you hold the doorframe firm in your hand before you leave, reassuring yourself the family will be well in your absence. A week before this day, your house was bombed, with your family in it. You haven't completely figured out how to recoup from such a violent act of aggression, and each week a new death threat is issued, a looming invisible warrant on your life, you're up to 78 so far in total. Your hand still rests on the doorframe, giving you support and grounding. You pronounce a quick heartfelt prayer for your family's well being, for guidance and strength for the day. Amen, you say out loud as you walk through the door with the screen door slapping behind you in the cool morning air. By 6am, you're at the local diner attending a planning meeting, filled with people who like you are cranky at this Godforsaken hour, but hopeful and resolute.
You meet your companions at the booth, order more coffee and scan the room for any signs of ill will. This is a tactical meeting, you reflect, brainstorm, delegate. On the way out of the restaurant, one companion quickly recaps the second page of the paper's story, of which you didn't get to see. It's an article containing spiteful gossip about your personal life. The article alludes to you as a wife abuser and adulterer. You bow your head from this fresh onslaught of speculation and take a deep breath. You extract the pack of cigarettes from your jacket pocket and light up. This remains one of the few opportunities to release tension, encapsulated in a cylinder of tobacco and chemical. It's bad for you, you know, and you've just been told you have high blood pressure, but it's the best you can muster considering present circumstances.
The day continues to unfold. You meet with the mayor, and more colleagues. You call home but are cautious with details because your phones have been tapped, and disclosing too much information over the phone can prove detrimental to the cause. You tell your wife you'll see her later, and unfortunately you can't make it to your son's basketball game yet again this evening; alas, another meeting. You thank her for being there for the children. At dinner you meet with workers whose conditions are horrendous. Finally at 11:00pm you make it home. You hang up your coat, and walk into the dark living room. The house is asleep as it was in the morning when you left. You sit on the couch and stare into the dining room. The streetlights cast a pale eerie light onto the sheer curtains and you feel worried, anxious. You take off your dress shoes and rub your sore pinched feet. There is no doubt you are a workaholic, and with each recognition of this fact, you wonder when the next time you'll be free to see your son's game. You trudge upstairs. Your wife whispers hello from the bed in the dark. You drop your clothes on the ground too tired to hang them up and slip under the covers. You lie together in the dark holding hands, whispering the day's events to each other, strategizing once again before exhaustion -exhaustion like you've never known before- takes over. By the time you fall asleep, you've got five hours to rest before you wake to another day anxious for your energy, ideas, inspiration and input.
This was whose life? Martin Luther King Jr's. Now for most of us, I've just described what at first glance would seem like a pretty unhappy life. Workaholic, anxiety, the physical well being of your family and yourself always in question, rumors of impropriety and infidelity that shaped people's opinion of you, nicotine cravings, public retaliation on your character. You would think that his life was unhappy. Heck any number of these for many of us would make us unhappy. But here's what I find fascinating, Martin Luther King Jr. didn't describe himself as unhappy, indeed he made it a point to declare to everyone that he was happy!
In his speech, "I Have Found The Promised Land," he starts out by explaining to the audience that if he could pick any time in human history to be alive, if he had the option of picking, here's what he would choose. He says he would pass over being in Egypt at the crossing of the Red Sea, he would have passed over the age of Plato, Aristotle and Socrates. He'd skip the Renaissance and the age of Martin Luther with his 95 theses tacked to the church door.
Heck, he'd skip Abraham Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation, and a nation coming to terms with bankruptcy in the 30's, but ultimately pulling itself together. No, if he had his say, he would turn to the Almighty, and say, "If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy." He even goes on to say, "Now that's a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around. That's a strange statement (to make.)"
So why does he say he is happy? If you looked at his normal day, at the chaos and discontent, injustice, threats of violence, oppression and malice he experienced every day, how can he say he is happy? How?
In order to answer this, I think you have to explore the work he did around Alfred North Whitehead, a process theologian for his dissertation. Now process theology is often heady and dense. It feels quite thick traveling through the pages of Whitehead, but at its root, Whitehead called God, 'the poet of the world" and described God's power as that of an artist. Rebecca Parker gets at this process theology in very clear terms. She writes "In process theology, God is not an all-determining creator. Each creature is self-creating in relationships with all other creatures, including god, we are co-creators with the divine. We make God, as much as god makes us.
This theology points to another way of being, rather than being inherently self-interested individuals, we are all connected to one another, and caring for others is fundamental to our existence . . . The purpose of life, then is to discover the joy or well-being that simultaneously pleases us and blesses our neighbor. . . The basic question of life is not, what do I want, but rather, what do I want to give."
It is through incorporating process theology not just reading and thinking about it into his daily life that Martin Luther King found happiness. Even when he describes what makes him happy, it was Whitehead's co-creation of creating with others, that he cites. And MLK saw this as a profound privilege in life to co-create, one in which he hadn't truly experienced until the beginning of the civil rights movement. He gave his life over to this co-creativity and it made him happy. Alice Walker gets at what this is about when she writes, "there is a always a moment in any kind of struggle when one feels in full bloom. Vivid. Alive. One might be blown to bits in such a moment and still be at peace. MLK Jr. at the mountaintop. Gandhi dying with the name of god on his lips, Sojourner Truth baring her breasts at a women's rights convention in 1851. Harriet Tubman exposing her revolver to some of the slaves she had freed, who fearing an unknown freedom looked longingly backward to their captivity thereby endangering the freedom of all. To be such a person or to witness anyone at this moment of transcendent presence is to know that what is human is linked by a daring compassion to what is divine."
For MLK, it's not just this co-creativity with the divine that made him happy; it's the fact that process theology is acutely attuned to the interconnectivity of human beings. In interviews he said that his work gave him a window or a door to interconnectivity with his fellow human beings, and that he was never in his life as tired as he was at that moment, but was never as connected to humanity as well.
Again, if you look to this same speech, it's right there, this interconnectivity. He tells of being stabbed in the chest by a demented woman and how the NY Times had said that if he had sneezed after the stabbing he would have died. And how when he was in the hospital, he got many cards of "Get Well Soon" from the President and Vice President and a personal visit from the Governor of New York. He got hundreds of letters, but the one he enjoyed the most was from a 9th grade student. She said, " Dear Dr. King: I am a ninth-grade student at the Whites Plains High School. While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I am a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I'm simply writing to say that I'm so happy that you didn't sneeze."
And then he says in this speech, I want to say that I am happy that I didn't sneeze.
Why is he so happy he didn't sneeze. Well, he tells us. Because, he says, "if I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting-in lunch counters. And I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream; and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around in 1962, when Negroes in Albany, Georgia, decided to straighten their backs up. And whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been here in 1963, when the black people of Birmingham, Alabama, aroused the conscience of this nation and brought into being the Civil Rights bill. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have had a chance later that year, in August, to try to tell America about a dream that I had had. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been down in Selma, Alabama, to see the great movement there. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been in Memphis to see a community rally around those brothers and sisters who are suffering. I'm so happy that I didn't sneeze."
He is talking about a deep abiding, real, force of interconnectedness that he is a part of, that all of us are a part of. When we act. Not when we think about it, or discuss or argue the merits of interconnectedness, but when we act as if interconnectedness is the core of what it means to be human, to experience the holy. An interconnectedness so great that MLK, Jr. would have skipped all other periods of history to live in order not to miss the second half of the twentieth century which he describes as messed up, sick, troubled, and confused. Yet by picking this time, he got to co-create, to be interconnected. And this is what made him happy. Despite all the reasons to be miserable, he was still happy.
And so I ask you, aren't we just like him, somewhat miserable but happy.
I know that when a couple of weeks ago, we went to visit the migrant workers who toil in agricultural fields outside Brockport and work from 6am to 8pm during peak harvesting hours without the benefit of the labor laws of New York state sustaining their labor, I felt conversely miserable and happy. They told stories of leaving children behind which they hadn't seen in 2-1/2 years. I was miserable and happy. I don't mean jovial or giddy but I do mean, that at that table with youth from this church and migrant workers telling their stories through interpreters, I felt and knew this deep connection to a greater humanity, that these people were my people, that we were interconnected. It conversely threw in my face our complicity to their plight, and recognition that as Parker says, the question isn't, what do I want, but what do I want to give.
The truth is, we are, all of us just like MLK, Jr. ourselves. We are all somewhat miserable but happy. And like him, it is by acting, acting as if interconnectedness to all of humanity were our holy grail. Not talking about it, or debating it or discussing its merits. Again, what made him happy was the act of co-creating and the opportunity to experience through his actions an interconnectedness that transcended his daily life, that gave his life meaning, focus and intent.
In December, when we acted on our interconnectedness through the Greater Good project, we were happy. Scott and I have heard from some of you that this Christmas was your happiest ever! Which how can that be so, it came without packages, ribbons and bags, without the tags, the trimmings and the trappings. And yet it came. Christmas came. You folks gave away what was yours for the betterment of someone else; and in so doing you acted on your interconnectedness. You co-created together, you answered the question, what do I want to give to. You ushered in happiness in the company of each other.
I think if Martin Luther King, Jr. could have been in this room for the Greater Good Sunday in December when your brought your envelopes forward, he would be saying to us, "Yes, this is it. This is where the holy resides - in the company of each other, co-creating together; in acting on your interconnectedness with humanity. This is it my friends." And he would leave the room, with a smile on his face saying, "Keep it up, keep it up, keep it up." May we be so charged.
Amen.
January 14, 2007