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Principle #4
A Free and Responsible Search for Truth And Meaning
"The Journey of the Restless Heart:
Some Thoughts on Our Fourth Principle"
"Restless is our heart." This is a basic fact of human experience. St. Augustine continues the sentence: "Restless is our heart until it rests in God." But this does not mean that we first know God, so that our thirst for God is one among various things worth mentioning. Rather, all we know at first is the restlessness of our heart. And to the direction of our restless yearning, we give the name God."
The preceding words were those of Catholic Brother David Steindl-Rast. He says our hearts are restless but we don't at first know God but only our restlessness. How true that is! I am willing to bet that every one of us is restless in the inner recesses of our soul to some degree, now and always. But do we, as he says, give the name God to that yearning? Many of us, in fact, name our restless yearning somehow differently - in places where our hearts will not find rest - in fame, achievement, money or whatever. And the tragedy is, when we set out in the wrong direction we become lost in life.
There are so many examples. We hear all the time about folks who seem to have everything a body could want, wealth, eminence, importance, power, and yet who aren't happy. In recent years we've heard about President Clinton's friend, Don Foster, and rock star Kurt Cobain, among others who have committed suicide, and about a very long line of entertainers, Chris Farley being only the most recent, who have succumbed to alcohol and drugs. The fact that we see this kind of tragedy among our elite and wealthy shows us, should we need proof, that money, fame and power are not the foundations upon which a rewarding life is built. Of course, it's easier and safer to point to those in a distance and talk about them, but, in reality, I am speaking about us all.
The Declaration of Independence declared in 1776 that we are all endowed by the creator with the unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I wonder sometimes whether we got off track at the outset with Thomas Jefferson's eloquent words. Our restless hearts should not be pursuing happiness. CP Snow once said that the pursuit of happiness was a ridiculous phrase, because if we pursue happiness we'll never find it. I agree with him. My experience tells me that deep-rooted happiness is a by-product of something, not a thing in itself. Happiness, I suspect, is a side-effect we experience in those times when we feel deeply connected to ourselves as a result of being in relation to something outside of ourselves. Now, if you're going to lean forward in your seats because you expect me to explain how to achieve this connection or even to identify exactly what the connection is to-- don't -- your back could get very sore. I've said about all I can. I have no specific formula to propose here --but religions, each in their own way, offer an answer, or a means to answer, to the question of our connectedness, and ours is no different.
The Unitarian Universalist response to the quest for happiness, is, by indirection, to be found in the fourth principle in which we covenant to affirm and promote a search for truth and meaning. The fourth principle advocates this search as central to our faith. If we can move in the direction of truth, if we can find a way to give our lives meaning, I believe happiness will follow.
The church's job, as guided by the minister is to embrace travelers as they search, and to encourage them to share deeply with one another. Today I'd like to focus on two questions as we explore the fourth principle: Where do we begin our search for truth and meaning, and how can the church help?
I'm getting ahead of myself, however. I can hear your next question coming: are truth and meaning any more findable, if sought head-on, than happiness? Probably not. But they narrow the search because truth and meaning describe the essence, the vitamins and minerals of happiness -- the nutrition. A lot of what we commonly refer to as "happiness" is of the Doritos and soda kind - spiritual junk food. Some nights I will seriously tell you that I am happy to watch a Seinfeld rerun, or I'm happy when the Celtics win, or when I buy something and discover that it's on sale when I get to the register. I could go on...lots of things make me happy. This kind of happiness tides us over in the short run, but if it were the only type of "happiness" we ever experienced, we'd wither. Nutritious happiness connects us to something beyond ourselves that we value. The connection imbues us with a sense that our lives have touched something that is fundamental to our being. Not something big that's universal like brotherhood or peace; it's my observation that our meaningful connection is usually something that's quite particular that pertains specifically to us... it is usually something local in which "our hearts find rest." There is no one-size-fits all description of truth and meaning, but just like we can recognize good nutrition when we see it in others by subtleties such as skin tone and color, we know in our bones when we witness souls in the course of nutritious happiness. Let me give you some examples:
I remember attending a memorial service for a friend who had lived most of his life in an institution for the retarded. The rabbi, who knew Leonard well, said Leonard embodied an old Jewish saying: "Find the place where no man is, and be that man." Leonard had done that. He had been a member of several organizations that served the needs of retarded citizens like himself. Leonard saw that some staff members would occasionally forget meetings and some members couldn't come because they had no ride. Leonard became the person who phoned everyone to be sure all details were in place. He became an effective organizer, and a valued contributor to several organizations. His heart found rest in this work. He had found himself. Leonard wasn't happy all the time, no one is. But he had found a way to make a difference, and he walked tall.
Do you remember Dr Tom Dooley? He said he learned his formula for happiness the day a small boat pulled alongside his craft carrying his first close-up glimpse of SE Asia. On that boat were over 1000 refugees -- suffering from smallpox, terminal tuberculosis and diseases he couldn't even name. Many of the children on board were unconscious from the 115 degree heat. As the only doctor, Dooley attacked this great mountain of suffering with a feeling of hopelessness and despair. But before long, he said, a strange excitement began to grip him. A splint took the agony out of a broken arm, a boil could be lanced, some vitamins could help another. That day he learned he could be deeply, joyously happy. I've always appreciated his explanation for this happiness. He said he had learned a fundamental truth about himself: he was extrasensitive to sorrow, and that when he did something about it, no matter how small, he couldn't help but be happy.
My mother-in-law visited my home recently. One night my husband and I were both away at dinner hour, leaving my in-laws at home with a family that isn't particularly rewarding to cook for --it isn't possible to cook any one meal that will please our whole family. But when I got home my mother-in-law described, with great delight, our little dog's face turning orange as she enjoyed three servings of pasta! Feeding others has been one of her lifetime pleasures.
I hear happiness in this letter by Dr. Robert McAfee, president of the AMA. His love for medicine is very different from Tom Dooley's. Listen to him:
" You're summoned to the emergency ward where they've brought in a 19 year old. His blood-pressure is barely recordable, and despite his multiple long-bone fractures and serious head injuries, bleeding in the abdomen dominates his clinical picture. He's very unstable, his belly is expanding before your eyes. You whisk him into the operating room, the unprepared abdomen is opened and you see more blood than you've ever seen in your life.
You hope that it's a simple splenic injury, because you haven't got much time....
You quickly run your hand down ...and, between your thumb and your forefinger, you squeeze that barely perceptible, pulsating splenic artery.
And, as you squeeze... you hope, you begin to pray a little bit...you can feel the amplitude of that pulse get a little bit stronger, and stronger and stronger. And you look at the head of the table and the anesthesiologist is beginning to get a little blood pressure, and to record it, and is nodding his head, "yes, yes."....and in that exact same instant the thought comes flooding in that this young man is going to live 50 more years because of what you have just done....this is the single, greatest natural high that one individual can feel for another on the face of this earth!"
I hear happiness from housepainter Michael Gaul who wrote eloquently in Newsweek last month about the satisfaction he gets from simply painting a house. Gaul says he lost his way for a several years when his business grew from painting into paint contracting and it took soul searching for him to admit that his pleasure was gone; to realize that the primary appeal of housepainting for him lay in working with a simple brush and seeing immediate, colorful results. This is where his heart finds its rest.
I read recently about a busdriver in New York who seemed to know everybody on his route outside and inside his bus. The writer who wrote about him watched the busdriver as he asked a fruit vendor out the bus window how his ailing mother was. The fruit dealer filled him in and handed him a pear. The bus driver then proceeded to hand the pear to a policeman on the next corner. He was a man who transported people in more ways than one.
These are each snapshots of happiness - not of the Doritos and soda kind, but the deeper, nutritious variety. In each case the small description about what they did tells us alot about who they are. That shouldn't surprise us, perhaps, but think about it for a moment: if someone described your actions in a week, would anything of your essence come through in the telling? Do you do enough of what you love to be recognized for who you are?
The common denominator that unites these little stories is that each person was engaged in something that mattered to them. This is a clue to where we begin our search for truth and meaning. We begin with ourselves - because they key to our connectedness is finding that something which quickens our own pulse whether it be big or small; the key to our connectedness is in finding what opens us more deeply to ourselves, and letting our hearts rest in that connection.
David Ray Griffin, a Catholic writer contends that as religious beings we "seek meaning by trying to be in harmony with the ultimate nature of the universe as we perceive it." My feeling is that we can't take the universe on as a whole, and so what we tend to do is to find an area in our lives in which our inclination and skills can meet a need . Happiness consists in finding the right niche - the need that we can meet, our meaningful connection, if you will, and accepting it as ours, and then doing it graciously. Our heart has to say a firm 'yes!' to some part of ourselves before we can truly connect well in the world of experience. Once we can name the kinds of experience that bring us contentment, whether we exercise that part of ourselves in medicine, housepainting, cooking, or driving a bus is no matter: we have the raw materials for happiness.
I remember hearing a story once about a boy who got lost in a department store. Many people were nice to him but he didn't know them and he was terrified because he didn't know where he was. That changed and something wonderful happened the moment the store manager asked him his name. As soon as he realized he could say his own name, he knew everything would be all right: he wasn't frightened and he wasn't lost. In a way, the same is true for all of us. Once we can name ourselves inside we are no longer lost - we can connect.
The way I see it, the fourth principle which encourages us to undertake a search for truth and meaning points us to a need to broaden our understanding of the religious task. Harvard professor Dudley Rose once said that ministry is about "connecting the pain of the body with the pain of the body's world," a quote, he said, from Adrienne Rich. I wonder, sometimes, though, whether we fall into a trap of believing that authentic ministry occurs only when one person helps another who is wounded. It is good to focus on our woundedness, for it is through our attentiveness to our injuries that we will heal. But spiritual growth also requires that we look beyond our wounds. Our strengths and our capacity for joy need to be nurtured and explored even as we heal, and the church can help.
Unitarian Universalism has long felt that church should be a place which helps orient people to themselves. Because we cannot bring ourselves to God until we name ourselves, ministry should be offering resources which help individuals determine their own gifts and values. In the words of Roy Phillips, senior minister of the Unity Church - Unitarian in St. Paul, one purpose of the liberal church should be to "offer a setting in which the holy potential of people can be supported and nurtured... for the beauty of the flowering and for the fruit it will bear the world..." Therefore, any practices or courses of study which help us with introspection and self-reflection, that help us locate and say 'yes!' to who we are, will be a valuable addition to church life. By helping us to better name ourselves, the can church help us to live more fully, to live more rich, well-integrated lives. This is the challenge of the fourth principle.