Joyful Reality: Celebrating Life As It Is

A sermon delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation (Blacksburg, Virginia), April 1, 2007, by the Rev. Don Robert Johnson, a former Methodist minister, a former college chaplain, and Leader Emeritus of the Ethical Society of St. Louis. Rev Johnson will be in the pulpit twice a month during Rev. Brownlie’s sabbatical.

Readings

The optimist believes this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist is afraid the optimist may be right.

Popular saying

The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

Virginia Woolf

But then what should be one’s reaction when faced with the real? Are we condemned to a bleakly pessimistic outlook on life? Nothing could be more foreign than pessimism in the face of this dilemma. The healthy reaction to the real is joy , the embrace of life. That occurs when one lays aside all mediation between oneself and the real and has an unconditional allegiance to the simple and unadorned experience of the real.

David Bell, Introduction of Joyful Cruelty

Existence for us is a miracle.

Rilke, The Sonnets of Orpheus, X

Being thankful means saying yes to life in spite of all the obvious suffering and brokenness that’s involved. It means enduring unbearable hardships for no other reason than to show up again tomorrow and be part of this whole wild cosmic adventure. Being thankful means recognizing that all life is good - not enjoyable or easy certainly - but necessary and received.

Martin Bell

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Mary Oliver, When Death Comes

We study to deserve what has already been given to us.

William Stafford

Sermon

Let me set the mood with a story that exemplifies the message I wish to convey in today's platform:

Susan Woods, a very creative poet, asks questions with which we must all grapple. In one poem, Photograph, Circa 1870, she tells of a photograph from about 1870, taken in a climate that is so harsh and so difficult that it mainly grew gravestones. In it

a woman, with a child on her hip stands on one side of the photo and her husband sits with 3 sons as far on the other side as possible, by a door, with a sod house behind them. From the photo Woods ascertains that something has happened. Why does the woman stand alone? The distance between them looms unbridgeable, like the prairie behind them. Woods attempts to translate the need and pain. Earlier a fever took all 3 of their little girls at once. The husband, Albert, dug one grave for all 3 of them, as the snow poured down. While the death of children was common, it was not for the woman, it was a wilderness she didn't have a map for. And she grieves long, watching the immense, absolute darkness of the sky. Loneliness stung like a bed of brambles for years. Albert says he thought her heart slammed shut with the closing coffin. Then they had the 3 boys. But sometime later Albert, who had simply stayed all this time through the grief, turned, said her name and reached out his hand. She knew now she would have drowned in grief except for him. He then pulled her back to him again. She was learning to remember love again,the new baby girl on her hip.

If one gives most philosophers and theologians half a chance, they will generally devise an approach to reality which turns away from the world. They will replace it with some illusionary representation that supplants it and supposedly expresses its higher truth. This is known as speculative philosophy.

Since the world that exists holds absolutely no ultimate consolation for human beings, most individuals quake and turn away from reality, seeing it as unbearable. Speculative philosophy has traditionally come to the rescue to save humanity from meaninglessness and created the illusion of a truth that will offer consolation.

A second, less-used philosophy attempts to bring humanity face to face with the brutally chaotic nature of the real, its disorder, and lack of meaning or purpose except as we infuse meaning and purpose into it. One of the most profound current philosophers who takes issue with speculative philosophy is the French philosopher, Clèment Rosset, who, in Joyful Cruelty seeks to provoke an encounter with the real, with life as it is.

He believes elaborate philosophical systems always overstep the boundaries of the known, constructing schemes which cause us to lose sight of the world as it is.

In Voltaire’s Candide we learn of the philosopher, Dr. Pangloss, who always stated with certainty that this is “the best of all possible worlds.”

Candide’s experiences with life’s tragic made him question this outrageous assumption. Finally, Candide’s acceptance of life as it is leads him to talk of “cultivating your own little garden.” Voltaire too had little sympathy for the illusory certainties of speculative philosophy and optimism in his day.

Rosset delineates his view with two basic principles: the principle of sufficient reality and the principle of uncertainty.

The Principle of Sufficient Reality
It’s difficult for us as people to not distance ourself from the real. Rosset calls reality “a terrible affliction–it makes one see things as they are,” including the painful and tragic nature of reality. Yet we see all around us the human faculty to live in illusion. The basic point being made here is that reality, life as it is, is sufficient, is enough. And that it is harmful when we pretend it is other than it is.

The Principle of Uncertainty
So many of us choose to disguise reality, to find some remedy which temporarily eases the pain, to soften the confrontation. To believe that the knowledge one can have of reality is more important than the richness of reality itself is to chase after shadows.

The wrapping together of an unbending acceptance of life as it is, including its tragic and cruel nature, with the joyful, is what most intrigues me. This joyfulness results in an affirmation of existence in general, a sort of blank check granted to everything; inexpressible yet always engaged with the real. Joy can do without “a reason for being” and therein lies its relevance to reality as it is. It is not as if joy asks of reality more than it can offer, but rather gets more than could possibly be expected! Think about it for yourself–in spite of all the loss and grief connected to love would you rather live without love? And life itself, with all it entails, is yet ultimately a gift, a treasure. Joy consists in living, in realizing that the world exists and that one is a part of it. Joy suffices. What I want to have is an unconditional allegiance to the simple and unadorned experience of the real. This is all the world we get. It is enough. It is a gift.

Carl Sandberg says in Joy:

Let a joy keep you.
Reach out your hands
And take it when it runs by,

As the Apache dancer
clutches his woman.
I have seen them
Live long and laugh loud,
Sent on singing, singing,
Smashed to the heart
Under the ribs
With a terrible love.
Joy always,
Joy everywhere —
Let joy kill you!
Keep away from the little deaths.

In Antonia's Line, my favorite movie of all time, the grandmother Antonia says to her granddaughter: This is the only dance we dance!

Once existence simply happens, it then becomes a subject of constant discussion and passionate debate. Remember the times you try, with others, to remember accurately details that took place on a trip or on a particular occasion. Was the vegetable asparagus, the hotel in Bellagio, the eccentric sheep herder in Wyoming? Really passionate debates occur over such details. If this life is the only certainty, then we more likely will choose to live it more fully and passionately.

The central paradox of joy is that joy is an unconditional rejoicing in existence, whereas existence is anything but joyful and heartening if it is examined fully. 

Sandberg again reveals this in At A Window:

Give me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure,
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!

But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window,
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
And wait and know the coming
of a little love.

So joy exists with the tragic. No sorrow, no joy. The reality is that while we can remove some misfortune, the experience of reality would remind us that life by its nature includes misfortune. Surely we should work to remove human outrages, horrors and cruelties; all of us here are committed to this, and believe it is essential to an ethical and spiritual life. Yet the finite reality of life not only remains, but confronts us.

Joy is forever mysterious, impenetrable even for those of us who feel its wondrous effects. In the final analysis, nothing has changed for us, and we understand no more than before. We have no new argument to invoke in favor of existence; we are still perfectly incapable of saying why or for what we are living; and yet from this moment forth we value life as indisputably and eternally desirable. This is the mystery inherent in the zest for life

Rosset

I had sat down to rest with my back against a stump. The sun was warm there, and the murmurs of forest life blurred softly away into my sleep. When I awoke, dimly aware of some commotion and outcry in the clearing, the light was slanting down through the pines in such a way that the glade was lit like some vast cathedral. I could see there on the extended branch sat an enormous raven with a red and squirming nestling in his beak.

The sound that awoke me was the outraged cries of the nestling’s parents, who flew helplessly in circles about the clearing. The sleek black monster was indifferent to them. He gulped, whetted his beak on the dead branch a moment and sat still. Up to that point the little tragedy had followed the usual pattern. But suddenly, out of all that area of woodland, a soft sound of complaint began to rise. Into the glade fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties drawn by the anguished outcries of the tiny parents.

No one dared to attack the raven. But they cried there in some instinctive common misery, the bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade filled with their soft rustling and their cries. They fluttered as though to point their wings at the murderer. There was a dim intangible ethic he had violated, that they knew.

The sighing died. It was then I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life against death. I will never see it again so forcefully presented. I will never hear it again in notes so tragically prolonged. For in the midst of protest, they forgot the violence. There, in that clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the hush. And finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song, and then another, the song passing from one bird to another, doubtfully at first, as though some evil thing were being slowly forgotten. Till suddenly they took heart and sang from many throats joyously together as birds are known to sing. They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven. In simple truth they had forgotten the raven, for they were the singers of life, and not of death.

Loren Eiseley

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