The Fifth Smooth Stone: Ultimate Optimism
A SERMON BY REV LINDA A HART
(This is the fifth sermon in a series about James Luther Adam’s Five Smooth Stones of Religious Liberalism. It relates to the fifth principle: "We have cause for ultimate optimism.")
When I graduated from my ministerial training some 23 years ago this month, one of my classmates gave all of the newly minted ministers small fabric bags that had within them five small smooth stones. They were to be reminders of the five smooth stones of religious liberalism that we’ve been reviewing over the last six months, and I was pleased that my small bag turned up when I was looking for something else a few weeks ago.
Before Jone handed us our own little bags, she reminded us that these five principles were taken from the work of James Luther Adams, a Unitarian Universalist minister and theologian. She could recite to us the five of them:
1. Revelation is not sealed.
2. All relations should rest upon mutual consent.
3. We have a moral obligation to create a world that is just and loving.
4. Virtue must be embodied, it must be lived.
5. We have cause for ultimate optimism.
Jone pulled a small stone out for each one as she said them, then replaced them in that little bag and handed one that was identical to each of us.
My bag has travelled with me a long distance since that party so many years ago, and as I noted, I was pleased when it turned up a few weeks ago.
So, try it with me now, to count out those five:
1. Revelation is not sealed . . .
2. All relations should rest on mutual consent . . .
3. We have a moral obligation to create a world that is just and loving . . .
4. Virtue must be embodied, it must be lived . . .
5 . . . 5 . . . Oh, dear, oh dear! There’s one missing.
And I have to say in my life this is the one that is most challenging right now. There are times when I have felt if not wholly optimistic about the future, I’ve at least been hopeful. These are, however, fretful times, with tremendous political change, massive transfers of wealth from the hands of the middle and lower classes to the already too wealthy, radical transformation of education here in the UK, and all manner of wars cropping up all around. It’s a fretful time.
As Howard Zinn reminds us, there has been huge, startling change for good, too, in the world at the most unexpected of times. Any predictions that we might make about what is likely to happen will – no doubt – be completely turned around. This last smooth stone is a good reminder to us all that while we have to live out our best life and be committed to accomplishing what we can of goodness, there’s very little that we can actually control, and all our best hunches of what might come are not necessarily helpful. Seeing the future as just more of what we have now isn’t necessarily accurate.
I might add that our nostalgia for what has been is equally unhelpful. In my youth, whenever adults would begin that tired old refrain of ‘when I was a kid....’, my brother and I would smirk at each other and begin to recite the litany, ‘car cost a nickle. House was a dime. Used to walk to school through the snows barefoot three miles uphill both ways...’ As I’ve gotten older, I’ve understood the push to nostalgia. Claire routinely glazes over when Peter and I try to explain life before computers and mobile phones. Occasionally I’ll have the wisdom to say, ‘you really don’t care about this, do you?’ and she’ll answer honestly that she doesn’t.
The point is, though, that we fall easily into the belief that there were times when things were better, and that stops us from noticing things as they are now. Longing for the past can draw us into a cynicism about the present and indeed the future. Every generation mourns that this next one is lost forever, destroyed by crazy music or drugs or by unbridled hedonism.
And the media don’t help us in this sense of doom or cynicism. The catch phrase from the US used to be ‘what bleeds, leads’, meaning that the more gory and horrific the news, the sooner it gets broadcast. When taking a course on working with the media, the consultant in charge gave us the things that we needed to include in any contact with the media to be noticed. It needed conflict and colourful characters, he said, and the more we could offer of that, the more likely that we’d be noticed. It’s what sells papers and gets hits on webpages and too often goes viral on the internet.
That’s why we need reminders like this one – the call to be optimistic – to keep us noticing that the world is more surprising than we have ever imagined, and often it’s a place of happy surprises.
Sarah Sentilles wrote a book called Breaking Up With God, about her journey as an Episcopalian woman who was on the cusp of becoming a priest but couldn’t go through with it. The book recounts her journey to make sense of her world without traditional religion, and her search for meaning without the structures that had always supported her. She tells a story that reminds us about happy surprises:
The founder of Architecture for Humanity, a nonprofit that uses the resources of design to solve social problems, visited my brother’s class in architecture school and described one of the first design contests he held. He asked people to come up with the best design possible for a mobile AIDS clinic for a town in a country in Africa. He posted the deadline, and he waited. He didn’t think anyone would submit anything, but on the day of the contest’s deadline, a delivery man from Federal Express rang the doorbell to his tiny studio apartment in New York City. He was carrying a huge bag stuffed with envelopes. “Wow,” the founder said. “Are all those mine?” “No,” the delivery person said. He pointed to three giant Fed Ex trucks lined up on the street behind him, their hazard lights blinking. “All those are yours.” I really love that story. I think it reveals how human beings are waiting to make the world a better place. We just need to enter the contest.
The optimism of this, the choice to be optimistic about the future is not the simply happy, happy refrain of people with blinders on about the nature of humanity. Adams had been in Germany at the outset of war. He reminds us that there are ‘ever present forces in us working for perversion and destruction.’ What insights we have gained and the good that we have helped to create in whatever small way is not the inheritance of the next generation, but theirs to achieve, to create in their own way. It is not, Adams cautions, ‘immediate optimism’, but ultimate optimism. The universe is bending toward the good, to paraphrase American Unitarian Theodore Parker.
Adams doesn’t tell us much about what this might mean practically. He is the sort who did tremendous good in his own life, but in his writings he is more concerned with how we think about it. And that’s good and necessary, but not quite enough.
Historian Howard Zinn tells us more about that. In the excerpt from his essay that we heard this morning – from a book with the marvellous title The Impossible Will Take a Little While – he offers a little more practical advice. He suggests that the future is really unknown to us all, and that we join the game – enter the contest – by what we do. Small acts are not meaningless, they both contribute to the amount of goodness and promise in the world and they are a way of making our own lives better. To act is to make a choice. Zinn describes that choice this way:
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places-and there are so many-where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvellous victory.
Carter Heyward has noted that choosing to love is not necessarily a rational choice, and I’ve long thought she was right about that. If we look at it rationally, the sureness of being hurt by loving would keep any of us from opening to that vulnerability. Even if love lasts as we hope it will, we are all eventually separated from those we love. Yet, I am more and more convinced that the rational choice is to open to love because the rewards of loving far outweigh the pain of loss. In the same way, the choice to be optimistic is the same sort of choice. We make the world by what we choose, we make our lives by what we live.
So this day, I would say to you:
Choose love.
Choose hope.
And in every choice we will
create the world
that we dream and hope.
My missing pebble today served to remind me – and you – of what can get lost in the midst of our lives: hope and a trust in the promise of the future. This day I will choose another pebble, another smooth stone to replace it, affirming again, indeed, that there is cause for ultimate optimism, for we shall make it so.
Amen.
Prayer
Spirit of love and life,
source of hope and promise,
we pause today to remember.
Our days come and go,
and we take up tasks and projects,
we fill the moments with
all that our lives demand of us.
Yet each moment is a time to choose:
will I be hopeful?
will I love?
will kindness rule?
And each day we make the choices:
sometimes we misstep, choose wrongly,
lose our way.
May we open in compassion for ourselves
and find a new way forward each time.
Each day we make the choices:
sometimes they open us to possibility
to the promise of the day.
May we bless whatever there is in our hearts
and spirits that make it possible,
and find the new way forward each time.
Breathe in hope
in this company,
and trust that
in the days to come
the world, our world will be just a little bit
better
more whole
from the choices we make.
May it be so with us all.
Amen.