Tillich's work, The Courage to Be, published in 1952 was
read widely, including by people who would not normally read religious
books. A lot of college students in the
50’s and 60’s had a copy of this book on their shelves along with books like
Walden by Henry David Thoreau, The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien, Siddhartha by
Herman Hesse, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts,
and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe. The 60’s was a time of turbulent change, a
time of putting aside old ways of looking at the world and opening up to new,
often radical ideas about existence, philosophy, psychology, and theology. 50 years ago, The Courage to Be not only
appealed to liberal Christians, it appealed to a broad spectrum of spiritual
seekers who were trying to find some grounding in a time of unprecedented
anxiety. Does the text have any
relevance for Unitarian Univesalists now in the 21st Century?
As we lit our chalice
today, I asked us to reflect on our first and fourth principles. We affirm and promote the inherent worth and
dignity of every person and we affirm and promote a free and responsible search
for truth and meaning. Tillich’s ideas,
at their foundation, call us to affirm and promote the inherent worth and
dignity of every person, and most importantly to affirm our own worth and
dignity. As part of this
self-affirmation process, we as rational beings search for new perspectives,
willing to examine truths that may differ from the one we came in with, willing
to consider different meanings that might help us manage the anxieties we
experience as we live and move through life.
Let these two principles float in the front of your mind as you consider
Tillich’s perspective on how we might live our lives in relative security
despite the many things we cannot control around and within us, in spite of
doubts we may carry in our hearts, in the face of the things that may cause us
anxiety.
In his book, Tillich
examines on how we can effectively manage the anxieties we face. He explored the concepts of courage, being,
acceptance and affirmation as a means of coping with life’s anxieties. He considered some anxieties to be universal
to the human condition.
Not surprisingly, the
first anxieties he addressed were around the idea of being in control and the
simple fact that one day we will die. He
called these the anxieties fate and nonbeing.
His position that in one way or another, we do think about these
anxieties as we are all impacted by these two anxieties. They impact our decision-making and are part
of our consideration when we think about the outcomes of our decisions—in
short: will a decision that we make lead more quickly to our
nonbeing/death.
I worry about things like
how I will survive financially until I die; will I die a painful death or a
quick death; I worry about the nature of my death—will it be quick and
relatively painless, or a long, drawn-out agonizingly painful death? My dad had Parkinson’s—is that my future? Will I have the time and ability to complete
my “bucket list”? I try to live my life
so that I can leave a legacy of kindness after I die, so that the difference
I’ve tried to make in the world will live on beyond me. But will it?
After I die, will any impact I’ve had simply die with me? I ponder both the concrete and existential
questions about fate, being, and non-being.
I would guess that in this room full of self-aware seekers of knowledge,
I am not the only person who considers these kinds of questions. I would guess I’m not the only person who
might experience at least some occasional mild anxiety about having not control
over the answers.
According to Tillich, the
second form of universal anxiety is guilt and condemnation. To a varying degree we are all moral and
ethical beings. Every day we make
decisions informed by our morals and ethics, and many times we all make
decisions that are unsatisfactory, that are not consistent with our morals and
ethics, thus damaging our self-esteem and/or hurting someone; decisions we wish
we hadn’t made. This can result in despair causing us to feel guilty or condemn
ourselves for our bad decision.
I am forever reflecting
on morals and ethics. It is part of the
job of being a minister. For each decision I make, I gather the best
information I can and consider my past experiences, then take an informed leap
of faith, and make a decision. I know I
will never have all the data I need and that my past experiences are not always
the best indicator of the best decision.
But I do my best and hope I don’t hurt myself or others in the decisions
I make. I’ve made countless decisions
here at this church, many with very positive results. Recently I decided that the church could host
and then co-host a LGBTQ panel discussion for the Naperville community. I didn’t think anything about it because this
church and other UU churches have done this for years. This was a decision primarily based on my
past experience. But what I didn’t consider
was the climate in which we live; a climate in which a person or people could
attend a gathering here at this church in order to be violent or abusive to
people whom they feel don’t represent their values or beliefs. I made the decision to okay the panel
discussion based on past experience, yes, but I didn’t fully examine the
situation. I went with my gut, even
though there were people who yelled at members of this church when we marched
in the Aurora Pride Parade screaming that we were going to hell. Even though last year, people protested
abortion rights with graphic signs in front of our church last year during an
Activist Expo here in our building. Even though every day I see on the news or
on YouTube another example of an innocent person being verbally abused with
racial slurs and almost weekly someone is beat up or shot for being black,
brown, Muslim, Sikh, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or gender queer. If an angry or violent person crashed an
event at this church things could get very tense and very ugly very quickly. I felt guilty for making a quick decision that
could have had disastrous results. I
don’t tell you this to say we’re going to stop hosting events that support the
LGBTQ community or advocate for abortion rights or immigrant rights or any of a
number of rights that are under assault.
Hosting these events is the right thing to do; they’re how we live our
Unitarian Universalist Principles and values.
But I need to be and we need to be more aware of how to prepare for
these events and the potential negatives of events like this. Now let’s get back to Tillich.
The final form of
universal anxiety is emptiness and meaninglessness. Most of us yearn for a sense that our lives
mean something and that we have some purpose or focus in our lives. Most of us want some worthy goal that we are
working toward in our lives, and when we don’t have a meaningful goal, we can
feel empty or feel a sense of meaninglessness.
Despair/depression/anxiety can be the result. We might find ourselves in an endless loop of
needing to make a decision but not being able to make a decision but needing
to, ad infinitum.
Right
now I feel deeply unsure how to proceed as your minister and as a social
activist. As your minister I am
struggling with how I can be authentic with you and meet the spiritual needs of
this spiritually diverse community, as well as considering what direction my
ministry will take over the next year and really for many years to come. As a social activist, I am struggling with so
many things being broken by the Washington administration, so many people harmed,
and our planet being harmed, and now a Supreme Court that will likely overturn
Roe vs Wade or at the very least seriously weaken the ruling, taking away the
right to safe abortions. I am
overwhelmed. I am feeling
empty/exhausted and flirting with meaninglessness, wondering about my
purpose. I have found myself at times
having less energy and motivation to write, to preach, to come to church, to
speak at rallies, to fill out witness slips.
I have toughed it out and done these things, but I have to say there are
times I would rather stay home in my basement and watch some mindless
television. I will tell you I will not
give up on my church ministry or my activism, even with these feelings dragging
on me. My call is still strong, it is
the external stressors that cause me doubt and I know that.
Tillich
says these types of anxieties are normal and natural for all human beings. That all of us struggle with anxiety about
non-being, fate, guilt, condemnation, emptiness, and meaninglessness. He offers some insights on effective ways to
deal with these feelings. For him it
boils down to embracing the courage to be, to affirm/accept oneself despite all
that is going on within and around you.
This self-acceptance can be achieved in a group, and Tillich believes
that group work is part of the equation, but more importantly the work must be
done within one’s self. As he says it:
“The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself, in spite of being
unacceptable.” When he says “in spite of
being unacceptable”, he is talking both about others treating you as being
somehow unacceptable and your own feeling that somehow you are
unacceptable. Courage is about embracing
self-affirmation and self-acceptance regardless of circumstances, even when we
feel we have done something to hurt someone else or when we feel a lack of
purpose or meaning or even when we fear our nonbeing/our death.
Tillich
wrote: “Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes
us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It
strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness,
our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable
to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life
does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for
decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a
wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were
saying: “You are accepted.”
“Grace”,
okay that’s a sticky term for some Unitarian Universalists. One meaning for grace is a god granting a
person some kindness. However, I offer a
different definition and one that is not inconsistent with Tillich, see if it
fits for you: grace is an unsolicited lovingkindness or positive regard. Now let’s see how that fits in Tillich’s
quote: An unsolicited lovingkindness can strike “us when we are in great pain
and restlessness…at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and
it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted.” Have you ever felt that from another person
or more importantly, have you ever fostered that experience within
yourself? Some part of you, when you are
in great pain, whispers to your heart, “you are accepted, loved, affirmed, just
as you are.” Isn’t that a lovely
thought? And isn’t that what we say we
do here in this church as Unitarian Universalists? Isn’t that at least part of what we do when
we affirm and promote the worth and dignity of each of us.
This
doesn’t mean we stop striving to do our best to live a worthwhile life, a life
in which we try not to harm ourselves or others. A life that will eventually end, but in the
meantime still affirms and accepts ourselves as having worth and deserving that
which is good. Tillich calls this being
rooted in the god who appears when god, the traditional god of religion, has
disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.
As I
reflected on Tillich, I felt that something was missing for me. I see the value in knowing that I can move
from pain to health, from feeling worthless to feeling that I have worth and
dignity, from feeling meaningless to finding meaning, but in my personal
theology I believe there is the potential for something more. Tillich gives me hope that I can get through
a difficult situation with my own self-affirmation and with the affirmation of
those who care about me. The thing that
was missing for me was transformation, becoming something new through enduring
the pain I am suffering.
Martha, seeing me go
through struggles with church and the administration in Washington, DC,
recently read me the following quote from Robert Bly’s book Iron John and I remembered
the work I did during the mythopoetic men’s movement many years ago. But I believe Bly’s quote relates to any
person with a wound. Bly writes: “where
a man’s wound is, that is where his genius will be. Wherever the wound appears in our psyches, whether
from an alcoholic father, shaming mother, shaming father, abusing mother,
whether it stems from isolation, disability, or disease, that is precisely the
place from which we will give our major gift to the community.” I don’t know if you are familiar with the
term wounded healer or wounded or flawed hero.
For the healer to heal or the hero to succeed they need the wound or the
flaw. The wound is necessary for the
transformation to occur. The wound I
have is to my ministry, the meaning of it, the future of it, the worth of it.
And
then last week, my spiritual director told me about a chick. Isn’t that a lovely little chick you see
there? Fluffy and yellow and cute. I look at that chick and think new life or
feel some hope for the future. But I
don’t think about life from an unhatched chick’s point of view. Put yourself for a moment inside the egg
where the chick has been living. Right
before the chick breaks out of the egg, it has eaten all of the food that the
egg contained, it is starving, unable to move due the restrictions of the size
of the egg and the size its body has grown in to, it is afraid, perhaps fearing
that it will die in this constrained space.
Desperate, it fights to break out of the egg. It is exhausted, starving, and using every
last bit of energy it has left, it breaks free.
Transformed, ready to face the world, a new life.
I
feel I am, and perhaps this church community is, and perhaps our country is in
the egg. I do not know what life will be
like outside the egg, what I will be like, what direction my ministry will
take, what impact the new me I will eventually be will have on others, and I
cannot know. I am still in the egg. I am struggling with feeling accepted for who
I am right now. I am trying to find the
courage to be at this moment. But I have hope.
Hope that I will break out of this egg.
I have done it before. I have
navigated change successfully before.
When I was a psychotherapist and the call the ministry came, I couldn’t
sleep for days, I couldn’t eat, I was in the darkness of the egg. I didn’t know what would happen at the end of
the dark time, if I would get out of it, what would happen when I got out of
it, who I would be when I emerged.
Today, while the anxieties of meaninglessness, purposeless, guilt,
condemnation, fate, and nonbeing persist, I know that I will get through
them. I listen for affirmations from
others who love me. I give myself
affirmation within. And I wait. Slowly eating away at the sustenance
available to me right now, knowing that there will be a time when I must
change, that I must break free of the egg.
I know I will be transformed if I choose to continue this journey, I
just don’t know who I will be transformed into or what future circumstances
will bring me. Today, I am willing to
embrace that journey, to find its many gifts and blessings and learnings. Today Tillich’s words give me hope, because I
know that by holding onto the god when god disappears in the anxiety of doubt I
will make it to…I really don’t know what, but now I am ready for it.
No comments:
Post a Comment