Since What We Choose Is What We Are
SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
In Kevin Brockmeier’s story ‘The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device: A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Story’, you are given the opportunity to more or less make up a story on your own. It’s not a big technological accomplishment, simply a matter of being directed from one page to another, but not in strict numerical order. From page 111, after the basic story starts with you combing your hair and brushing your teeth, you are given the options of going out for a walk – turn to page 120 – or spending a quiet morning at home – turn to page 154.
Now, the story of your choosing begins to develop. Out for a walk, you get to choose between having coffee at the little café (page 132) or going to McDonald’s (page 166). Staying home, after receiving a phone call you didn’t expect, you can either ring Susannah on the phone (p. 114) or send her an e-mail (p. 148).
There are other simple sorts of decisions and choices to be made: turning right or left, washing your hands or going out into the plaza, grocery shopping or cleaning the bathroom mirror, renting a film or just walking home. But some might well give you pause – they give me pause. ‘Is your adult life anything like you thought it would be? If so, turn to page 118. If not, turn to page 152.’ The choice of pages becomes something more of an introspection. Suddenly the choice is more personal. Is my adult life anything like I thought it would be? How should I know? How would you know? ‘Would you say that you’re not wasting your life?’ (page 126) ‘Would you say you are?’ (page 164) I was stopped in my tracks when reading this one, as I sat reading the short story, amused by the turning of pages and the options of where I might go and how I might construct this particular fictional day. I won’t tell you which page I turned to.
Circling in even more, after David in the café asks ‘But who’s ever really been happy?’, I need to consider if I have ever really been happy (page 158) or if I have not (page 174).
This low tech approach to creating a day in a short story eventually insists that we think about our life, and the choices we make. The choices make a difference, each one. Seemingly trivial, and sometimes honestly trivial and yet they carry us along from moment to moment, each one adding a little bit.
This story lifts up the two edges of how a life is constructed. There are circumstances that we inherit or which are presented to us, out of our control, but which create or limit opportunity. And then there are our choices of what we do with those circumstances, the choices we make.
Robert Frost reminds us of that in his oft repeated poem. How many of you could recite it? I’ve heard it more over here than I did in the US. ‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference.”
Frost, I think, puts rather more emphasis on the selection. It is his choice that makes all the difference, at least that’s how I read it. This path makes the difference. That it is the one that fewer people have come across is less the point, I think. More to the point is that he is the one who directs his way.
The opposite view is that put forward by Kevin Brockmeier. In his Rube Goldberg machine, one is sent off through a lengthy series of movements, catapulted through space, and led down dark passageways, spun around until dizzy, taking the next few steps with caution. But the marble in the machine just follows the already set, intricate path.
‘Everything happens for a reason,’ a friend of mine says. And I love her trust in the sensibleness of the universe. She inhabits this sort of existence, the one in which there is an elaborate planned path for her to take. She cannot see all the architecture that supports her path – she doesn’t know if this pause here is for the candle to burn through a string that will send her careening down a twisty path, tumbling helter skelter, or if the burnt string now frees a balloon to sweep up, seemingly free. No matter the trouble or worry that comes, she has a fundamental trust that it will all make sense in the end, that the design will become clear if she trusts in it and looks carefully. At least that’s how I hear her.
It is possible that she means that everything has its use, that everything that happens to us becomes a tool to craft out the soul that we have. Every experience no matter what it is can help us on our path through the world. Nothing – not loss, not betrayal, not injury, not disease, not a bit what happens to us – is without its use, no matter how bitter it might be to employ it as a spiritual tool.
This sort of speculation – do we have a choice? If there is a choice what does it constitute? – may feel like debating just how many angels there are dancing on top of that pin. It may feel fruitless. Is there order to the Universe? Did some consciousness put it there? Is this a Rube Goldberg device, or is it just laid out in a random order and we chart our path through?
John Updike – who recently died – had a fondness for Unitarians, having been married to the daughter of a Unitarian minister at one point. I’ve always liked a comment he put into the mouth of one of his characters. She said, ‘If Unitarians had a creed it would be “face it!”’
We’re not much given to the sort of metaphysics that this conversation describes. We tend to believe that as we each discover truth in our lives, the most important measure isn’t if it is in some grand scale ‘true’ as if we could discern all the needed facts to prove something like God. The truth of a belief or an idea or a hunch isn’t so much proof in an intellectual exercise, but in how it exhibits itself in a life as it is lived. I take as true those beliefs that help me to live consciously, aware of the people around me, aware of needs and glories, recognising what I can do to make a difference. I take as true those ideas that help me to be more compassionate, that help me support and enact something like justice, that help me to be more loving in my daily life, in the tiny instances, in my frustration and pain to turn toward love, not away.
Are we being tumbled along on a path built by some supreme intelligence that has in mind growing our soul? Or are we taking ourselves along the path, directing ourselves here and there, crafting our soul on our own? What does it matter?
In some ultimate sense it doesn’t. In Kevin Brockmeier’s story, no matter what turns you take, you’ll eventually be directed to turn to page 146. It may be that you’ve just noticed that you’ve dropped the Chinese take-away and spilt the rice out and find yourself – surprisingly – laid out next to it, or that after you finish putting away the tomato and ponder if it is indeed a fruit or a vegetable, you feel a bit of a pinch in your chest, or that the walls of the loo in the café become surprisingly luminous as you get light in your head. No matter what path you take through the story, you eventually have to go to page 146.
He says:
There you are, lying flat on your back, staring up into the air as if through a sheet of glass. The pain is not the worst you have ever endured, but it is intense and steady enough that you quickly cease to recognize it as pain at all. It becomes just another background component of your awareness, like the scratching of the insects in the trees, like the gradual churning of sensations on your skin, a simple field upon which to observe your reactions to the world.
By all the signs, on page 146 and following, the ‘you’ of the story dies of a heart attack. In a park, or in one’s own kitchen, in the cramped space of a public toilet – somewhere that her or his choices has led to. At the end of page 147 the words ‘the end’ appear and there are no more choices, nothing more to do.
Except, that what was left of the memories is in some future time, retrieved and exhibited. Those memories become popular, viewed hundreds, maybe thousands of time, provide insight and inspiration to others.
There is another twist to this story, however. Our reading this morning, as I noted, comes from this same story. The meditation on the Rube Goldberg device is a part of the story, but – here is the clever bit of it – you are never led to it in your choices of which way to go. You can only find it by trial and error, by taking a path not established by the book. Even so. After you have discovered this, you still go to page 146.
Our lives, crafted out of ourselves, designed by some beneficent creator, will be a series of choices about how we shall live. Pick at random, pick with conscience, it will all lead to that same end. May it be that our choices help us to create a life of beauty – simple or complex – that can be an inspiration to others. May we explore and discover the hidden truths that abound around us, learning again and again the essential truth that guides our living.
And may it be that in it all, we find some moment of peace, some luck, and that we live in love this day and forever.
Amen.