What Does It Mean to Live a Good Life

“What Does it Mean to Live a ‘Good Life’?”

Service for the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of

Fredericksburg, Virginia

October 18, 2009

the Rev. Jennie Barrington, Interim Minister

Opening Words [the words of Robert T. Weston, from Resp. Rdng #530]:

“Out of the stars in their flight, out of the dust of eternity, here have we come… earth warmed by sun, lit by sunlight: This is our home; out of the stars have we come… Ponder this thing in your heart, life up from sea: eyes to behold, throats to sing, mates to love… This is the wonder of time; this is the marvel of space; out of the stars swung the earth; life upon earth rose to love. This is the marvel of life, rising to see and to know; out of your heart cry wonder: sing that we live.”

Reading: adapted from, "Prophets of a Future not our Own" [Archbishop Oscar Romero]

It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view.

The [Beloved Community] is not only beyond our efforts, it is beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the

magnificent enterprise that is [the work of that which is divine].

Nothing we do is complete… ,

No statement says all that could be said.

No prayer fully expresses our faith.

No confession brings perfection, no pastoral visit brings wholeness.

No program accomplishes the [whole mission of our congregation nor our denomination].

No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about.

We plant seeds that one day will grow.

We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.

We lay foundations that will need further development.

We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything,

and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.

This enables us to do something, and do it very well.

It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way,

an opportunity for [divine] grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference

between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders,

ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future not our own.

The Morning Sermon:

“Captain’s log, Star date 45944.1. Following a magnetic wave survey of the Parvenium system, we have detected an object which we cannot immediately identify.”

Whoops. Let me back up a minute. I was supposed to start this sermon with the questions: “What does it mean to live a good life?” “What is the purpose of living?” and “What does it mean to live well?” And, more specifically, “How do Unitarian Universalists today answer those questions?” “And how do they live their answers to those questions, within their congregations, and in the wider communities outside of their congregations?” Those are the questions that were posed to me earlier this week by a class of undergraduates at Germanna Community College. I was asked to teach a class about Unitarian Universalism for their Introduction to the Study of Religions class. Their teacher, Professor Rick Mitchell, asked me to summarize for them what Unitarian Universalists believe about life’s Big Questions: the nature of God, or that which is divine; prayer and meditation; human nature; good and evil; morality and social justice; predestination and the afterlife. I handed out to the class a copy of this Sunday’s Order of Service, so they could see an example of what one of our worship services is like. So they saw the title, “What Does It Mean to Live a Good Life?” They asked me if I could summarize for them how Unitarian Universalists answer that question, in one hundred words, or less. I said: I can answer that pretty simply. Unitarian Universalists believe many different things about the afterlife-- about what happens to a person’s spirit after they die. Some believe in reincarnation; some believe we go to Heaven; many believe that we are reunited with loved-ones who have died before us, including pets; some believe that this is it-- that there is no afterlife after this life. But all Unitarian Universalists believe that we have both the ability, and the duty, to make this world a better place while we are here. We believe that instead of getting all bogged down in disputes about differences in religious beliefs, we should roll up our sleeves, reach out to other people, and do all we can to make this world more fair, more beautiful, and more enlightened, during our brief time on earth. –because there is so much that needs to be done! We believe we should join together in helping to provide food for the hungry, housing for the homeless, higher education, voting rights, and support of arts and culture. All of the undergraduates listening to me started nodding. All of them. That was heartening for me to see.

Yet there’s another answer to the questions, “What does it mean to live well?” and “What is the purpose of living?” that kept coming to me this week as I thought about this sermon. And that answer came from my favorite episode of “Star Trek Next Generation,” an episode called, “The Inner Light.” In that episode, the community of Ressik, on the planet Kataan, has to distill what of their way of life they want to preserve, and has to find some way for their civilization to outlive them, for the most dire of reasons– Their sun is becoming increasingly hotter– It is destined to go nova– All life on their planet is going to cease to exist. Captain Jean-Luc Picard is the only hope they have to be remembered, and remembered well. How do they convey what is worthy about their way of life to him? I’ll get to that in just a minute...

But first, what are the central philosophies many of you have told me help you, and other Unitarian Universalists, live a good life? Certainly Socrates’ quote, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and Erik Erikson saying that we should live so that we look back and see that what we did was worthwhile. What mindfulness it takes in our life choices to try to put these principles into practice... I think of the famous physician, musician, and humanitarian, Albert Schweitzer, who was said to have lifted the glass cover that shielded a candle from the wind, so as to let a fly escape and live. It was from Schweitzer that we received the phrase so common to Unitarian Universalists today, “my religion is reverence for life.”

Many of you, also, have told me you use, as guidance, the categorical imperative of Immanuel Kant, “to act only in accordance with a maxim that you can at the same time will to become a universal law,” or, in more plain language, you wouldn’t act in a way you wouldn’t want the whole world to act. Kant lived, in the mid-to-late 1700s, pretty much his whole life in one city: Konigsberg, East Prussia. Yet he was intentional about learning all he could about the wider world, keeping up with current original thought, and hosting people in his home for lively discussions and debates. His way of life raises the question: However ethical our lives are, how are we to convey our principles and beliefs to the wider community? One of you said to me that, for some people, the good life is to be out in the beauty of the natural world. This was certainly true for Thoreau and the other Transcendentalists of his day. But if that way of living in harmony with nature never becomes influential beyond one little corner of the world, then where is the lasting good in it?

Wondering about that question led me to recall a book I read in seminary. The book, by Christian theologian H. Richard Niebuhr, is about several ways communities of faith convey their values into the secular culture around them. So I recalled the book as being titled, “Church and Culture.” But I recalled the title wrong; it’s actually called, “Christ and Culture.” I propose, for our purposes this morning, we take Niebuhr’s models and adapt them to call them, “Unitarians and Culture.” That way we can assess how we might best make our values live on in society after we’re gone. To begin with, what does Niebuhr mean by “culture” anyway? He means that which human beings superimpose onto that which is natural; he means “language, habits, ideas, beliefs, customs, social organization, inherited artifacts, technical processes, and values.” [p. 32] He calls all that the “social heritage” that we inherit, contribute to during our lifetime, and leave behind us. “Social heritage” is the result of human achievement, including “speech, education, tradition, myth, science, art, philosophy, government, law, rite, beliefs, inventions, and technologies.” [p. 33] All of these things have been created as the end result of specific values human being were trying to convey. We preserve and recreate our social heritage as a way of trying to make our values live on. The first way Niebuhr describes is people of faith against culture, i.e., viewing secular culture as suspicious or sinful– something to do battle against. This tendency isn’t normative for Unitarian Universalists. The second way we could call “Unitarians of culture.” This way, there is no great tension between the ethics of the faith community and the norms and laws of the wider community. So people of the faith community can become influential leaders in government and community organizations, and we know that Unitarians do. We could call the third way “Unitarians above culture.” That would mean we believe our principles and beliefs are what the world needs in order to be saved. Niebuhr feels that the danger of thinking this way is that a faith community becomes too institutionalized– It begins to think too highly of itself and its members– to worship them, even– Its main purpose becomes to maintain and sustain itself, rather than serving a greater good. We could call Niebuhr’s fourth way “Unitarians and Culture in Paradox.” This may be how many members of our congregation feel in trying to speak and practice our beliefs in a geographic area that is more conservative culturally that our Fellowship is. It can easily feel, for us, that our wider community has great resistance or opposition to our values. Niebuhr feels the danger with the “in paradox” model is that it becomes too static. There is the danger that we will do nothing to try to change those we perceive as resistant or in opposition to us. Lastly, we could adapt Niebuhr’s fifth model to read, “Unitarians transforming Culture.” You can tell by the slant of the writing that this fifth model is Niebuhr’s favorite. It describes a faith community with a hopeful optimistic view of secular culture. The faith community’s affirmative outlook on humanity and all life motivates it to work for justice, beauty, and truth. In Niebuhr’s conclusion, he reminds us of the larger community of souls on whose behalf we labor. He calls that community “God’s Kingdom.” He was, after all, writing in 1951. But what if we adapt what Niebuhr was trying to describe so it suits Unitarian Universalists today? Instead of “God’s Kingdom,” we can say, “Beloved Community.” Or what if we think of that larger community of souls as our long rich Unitarian Universalist heritage– all the Unitarian Universalists who have lived before, and all the ones we hope will carry on our values? Or what if we think of that community of all souls as what Karl Jung described as the collective unconscious? If we adapt, somewhat, Niebuhr’s conclusion to his book, it reads: “To make our decisions in faith is to make them in view of the fact that no single person or group or historical time is the [beloved community]; but that there is a [beloved community] in which we do our partial, relative work and on which we count. It is to make [our decisions] ... in view of the fact that the world of culture –humanity’s achievement– exists within the world of grace...” [or, I might say, within the world of the collective unconscious, that place where everything of worth that we have learned and experienced abides eternally].

Niebuhr has given us five choices of how to be in relationship with our wider community– But one way is not an option in his book: the congregation apart from culture. He presupposes that there is always something of a relationship. Therefore it is up to us to be mindful of how we are in relationship with people who do not share our beliefs, and how the legacy of our lives will be in relationship with posterity.

And now to get back to that episode of Star Trek Next Generation, called, “The Inner Light.” Captain Picard suddenly finds himself in the community of Ressik, living the life of a man named Kamin. He feels as if he is dreaming, but his experience is as real as his life on the Enterprise felt. His life in Ressik, which continues, day after day, year after year, is immensely satisfying. He has friends; a respected voice in political decisions; a wife and two children; work, as an “iron weaver;” and the hobbies of exploring the hillsides and charting the stars. The community is gracious, caring, and optimistic. They are agrarian, perhaps entirely vegetarian, and they celebrate the arts. Theirs is a kind and gentle way of life. Though not as sophisticated as the world from which Picard has come, they are trying to expand their scientific knowledge of why their atmosphere is becoming hotter and hotter. In defiance of the drought, they plant a tree in the town square as a symbol of hope and affirmation of life. They keep it alive by each contributing some of their water rations to it. By the time Picard, living the life of Kamin, becomes 85 years old, the drought is so severe that crops can no longer be sustained. He tells the municipal authorities that extinction is inevitable. They tell him that there is a plan to save some piece of their civilization. Throughout his life on Ressik, Picard plays a small flute. [Though in his whole former life on the Enterprise, he had never done so at all.] Doing so brings him a simple but real pleasure, helps him think through problems, and provides him with meditative time. He becomes skilled enough to write and play a haunting melody for his son’s naming ceremony. His son grows to become proficient enough to be a professional musician. Though filled with love and pride for his children and grandchildren, Picard, as the eighty-five year old Kamin, is brokenhearted that their future looks so brief. Then his family surrounds him and draws his attention to the launching of a probe. The spirits of his deceased wife and best friend reappear and explain to him that the probe is being sent into the future. The community’s hope is that it will encounter someone, a teacher, to whom they can convey what they were, and how they lived. “Oh, it’s me... [Picard says] I’m the someone. I’m the one it finds.” They say to him, “If you will tell others about us, then we will have found life again.”