Now, you know, this coming Wednesday is Ash Wednesday. You wouldn’t probably have seen streams of people pouring out of the building with ashes on their foreheads, not this building.
Unitarian Universalists don’t generally make much of Lent and the holy day with which it begins, Ash Wednesday. I was talking with a colleague the other day. Lent clearly wasn’t much on his mind. When I said that I was doing a Lenten theme he thought I said lentil. When I clarified I really meant Lent, he said maybe I ought to preach about Lentils anyway, as they’re a whole lot better for you than Lent.
Ash Wednesday and Lent are a little too — well, grovelly for us. Someone will say to me: Dust? Us? We are godlike, aren’t we? You said so yourself.
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Well — but. Yeh, I think old Christian theology often gets it wrong, but there’s a truth here, and we are just as capable of being simplistic and misguided in ignoring truth where we find it, to the impoverishing of our souls.
Once, in his Markings [1], Dag Hammarskjold wrote
Uneasy, uneasy, uneasy —
Why?
Because — when opportunity gives you the obligation to create, you are content to meet the demands of the moment . . .
Because — anxious for the good opinion of others, and jealous of the possibility that they may become “famous,” you have lowered yourself to wondering what will happen in the end to what you have done and been. How dead can a man be behind a façade of great ability, loyalty — and ambition! Bless your uneasiness as a sign that there is still life in you.
Surely you’ve felt uneasy. Question is, what to make of this uneasiness? Does it mean, as the old theology says, we are fallen, and mean and small and miserable — or does it mean that, when we feel it, we’re actually undergoing something that might exalt us?
Uneasy. To be human is to have this anxiety, to live with it. We ask (though not very loudly, muffling the question so we ourselves won’t hear it): do I have enough value to justify my being here?
But then, it’s when we question ourselves, — it’s then that we know we still possess that most precious thing that will ever be ours — our humanity. That is what it is to be a religious being, a moral being.
Now, we know that a person can, under extreme conditions, be robbed of a sense of worth. A child relentlessly bullied at school. Someone who’s simply different in some way, humiliated, violated, and alone with no one to believe in them. It takes extraordinary strength to survive emotionally in those circumstances.
And we know we need a community that believes in us. What if that bullied child has not a nurturing, faith-giving home and the loving arms of parents where they can find solace; what if the person who, because she’s different, and so has been humiliated and faced contempt — has no community in whose welcoming arms she finds again her pride and courage?
But in even the best of circumstances, there is an essential unease with which we live, and it cannot be relieved from the outside of us, and the answer to that unease can come only from the heart and soul of each of us.
Unease. A hole in the ego.
Sam Keen’s [2] phrase, from his little book Beginnings Without End: —
The hole in the ego
is where the holy
flows in and out . . .”
Poor, poor ego. Punctured daily. Why have we always to doubt ourselves?
On one of my trips to the UK maybe six or seven years ago I heard a BBC report about the work of some social scientists showing that those popular assumptions about “self esteem” might be misguided. The New York Times picked up on the story. This is from the Times:
We have created self-esteem programs in schools in which the main objective is . . . “to dole out huge heapings of praise, regardless of actual accomplishment.” We have a National Association for Self-Esteem with about a thousand members, and in 1986, the State Legislature of California founded the “California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem . . .” . . . It was galvanized by [an] Assemblyman [who] fervently believed that by raising his citizens’ self-concepts, he could divert drug abuse and all sorts of other social ills.
It didn’t work.[3]
Instead, there was a positive correlation between high self-esteem scores and poor social skills and poor academic performance. In fact, one of the researchers wrote this:
There is absolutely no evidence that low self-esteem is particularly harmful. It’s not at all a cause of poor academic performance; people with low self-esteem seem to do just as well in life as people with high self-esteem. In fact, they may do better, because they often try harder.
His research collaborator went further to say that high self-regard can maim and even kill.
And there were three withering studies of self-esteem in the United States. The news? People with high self-esteem pose a greater threat to those around them than people with low self-esteem and feeling bad about yourself is not the cause of our country’s biggest, most expensive social problems!
Whaaat!? To our ears, that sounds all wrong . . .
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Oh. In the background, I’m listening to the BBC again, and as I write, they’re discussing — again! — how it happened that the whole nation was led into a war somebody wanted enough that they cooked the intelligence to make it happen. Meanwhile, the supremely self-confident architects and deciders of this war, who dreamed it and planned it and executed it — show no unease, no lack of confidence.
So we ought to ask just what self we are talking about as the object of this esteem. If by self all you mean is ego, the esteem is misplaced.
There is a mass-egocentricity of nationalism — as if we had no part in the rest of the world except as its masters. That ought to cause us some uneasiness. The uneasiness begins in the heart of us, in our own want of humility.
This nation, and its leadership — it would seem — had gone to some extreme of self-deception to ease the unease, and in public life, truth seems the rarest thing, and to admit a mistake flies in the face of the image of the self-assured successful person. Or, as Stephen Colbert said, when corrected by a guest whose name he’d gotten wrong: “Okay, but I’m going to continue to call you that because if I admit I’m wrong, then I lose the argument.”
Once, many years ago, I was thunderstruck by a phrase from M.K. Gandhi. “The seeker after truth,” he wrote — “The seeker after truth must be humble as the dust.” Dust.
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Sometimes we disappoint ourselves. Sometimes we observe ourselves falling prey to mechanical instinct and to the desperate moves and maneuvers and hungers and self-delusions of the ego. Sometimes we need that unease that reminds us that we are “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust;” that reminds us that sometimes we are wrong, that our precious personal dramas are specks of dust in this great living Universe. That we are not the center of the Universe and we aren’t separate from it, and we have not forever to live, though this world of life lives on.
Sometimes our unease is just about unbearable, and when it is, we might do almost anything to drown out the voice of our unease. We know the ways we do it. It’s the story of our time.
v
Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
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Sometimes, to relieve the unease, people are driven to what they assume to be good works, doing the will of their god, maybe in the form of righteous judgmental scrupulosity, perhaps a crusade of faith-based bigotry, sometimes even in the form of genuine cruelty and violence.
They say that Ivan the Terrible would go down periodically and personally torture his prisoners, and he always returned feeling pretty good, feeling righteous and empowered.
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If you care about your inner life — how can you hold this unease you feel? how can you hold it within a vital, an authentic — spirituality?
Maybe you grew up with Ash Wednesday in a Roman Catholic, or Anglican, or Lutheran church, with the blessing of ashes, and they’re placed on the foreheads of the worshipers, and you remember those words that come from Genesis, “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” It goes back to a time when penitents would bestrew themselves with ashes and clothe their bodies with sackcloth on account of their sins.
“Human life,” says Sam Keen, “comes from the humus, that ‘brown or black complex and varying material formed by the partial decomposition of vegetable or animal matter; the organic portion of soil.’ To be human is to remain humble . . .”
We are a strange amalgam of god and dust.
God and dust. Nature’s highest achievement, crowned with consciousness, capable of the insight and art that created Shakespeare’s plays and Handel’s music and Dr. King’s moral vision. The human mind has penetrated deeply enough into the powers of nature to threaten the very continuance of life on Earth . . . godlike and demonic all at once. Alone among the inhabitants of the known Universe, we have the power to reflect, to choose, to make moral choices. No other creature can do that.
And so our humility cannot be a “grovelling,” the definition of which is, “to creep with the face to the ground, to lie or creep with the body prostrate in token of subservience or abasement.”
Our Unitarian forebears were enlightened enough to dismiss the old Calvinist doctrine of human depravity, the conviction that you and I are pretty much a mess incapable of any good whatever. The wisest and best part of our religious traditions have forever returned to the theme of the seed of divine life that is in us, have said that the final aim of all our efforts, the deepest longing of our hearts, can only be the freeing and full unfolding of this divine potential. At Yom Kippur, the call is for a return to our truest selves. Beyond our ego there’s an authentic human-divine self.
In 1828, William Ellery Channing, the founding figure of American Unitarianism, dared to declare — these are his words —
The idea of God, sublime and awful as it is, is the idea of our own spiritual nature, purified and enlarged to infinity. In ourselves are the elements of the Divinity. . . .
And he said that beneath and beyond the dust that we are — we have to be able to see:
the greatness of the human soul — that faith which looks beneath [the false veneer of ego, the failure, and all the worst that we are capable of, looks beneath that], and discerns in the depths of the soul a divine principle, a ray of the Infinite Light, which may yet break forth and shine as the sun.
We are not fallen, broken wretches. We are a very grand work — in progress.
We are, so far as we know, the dominant life-form in the universe, we, the product of 14 billion years of kosmic evolution, possessed of consciousness. We are part and parcel of a larger Whole, expressions of it; we share the struggle of Life Itself.
In us, and in perhaps no other way — the universe is aware of itself. If we awaken from our stupor, it’s the universe that awakens.
Our little dustlike egos only enclose and obscure and distort — something more, this big Self, this bigger identity.
And here is the heart of what is good and true about Ash Wednesday. Beyond all the gloomy guilty-ridden theology you may remember from your past: — is this call to humble silence; to contemplation, to wonder. It’s nothing more or less than the call of the soul, the call of our highest and most genuine selves, something that exists beyond the egos we present to the world, something that shares the One Life of this Universe and is not separate from the energy and intelligence that made it, and makes it still.
You are that. You are that.
In that light, — everything, even our failures, become steps on the path. We begin to see those mis-steps as what we do under the delusional influence of the ego, but at the very same time something from which we can learn that our small, bumbling, confused egos are not the final word about who we are.[4]
And it’s in the silence beyond the noise and tumult and pretention that our creative, godlike possibility turns up.
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A hundred seventy years ago [1841] Emerson asked:
What is the ground of this uneasiness of ours; of this old discontent?
Here’s his answer:
What is the universal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine innuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claim? . . . Man is a stream whose source is hidden. . . .
The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every [one]’s particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart, of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, . . . and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand, and become wisdom, and virtue, and power, and beauty.
And there it is. Critic. The Supreme Critic. It isn’t somebody out there who disapproves of you. The Supreme Critic in here, in the heart of you. It’s Hammarskjold’s “uneasiness” that he has decided to bless. It’s to that that we must anwer. Answering to that is something that no other person or entity or force can do for us. For that, you need silence, and in the silence, a reckoning, and a commitment to what in us demands the highest and best in us, a commitment to a rising, deepening human consciousness.
That supreme Critic on the quality of our lives is in us, and we in it — a Self bigger than our little egos.
It’s not enough to be supremely confident, not enough to affirm our human drives and passions, not enough to recognize the fallacy in the old theology’s dim view of human beings.
Not enough without the Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be.
We all can know this higher consciousness in moments. To be enlightened is to live in that consciousness. We can know it in moments, and those moments make all the difference.
A strange amalgam of god and dust. So we’ll have to find our way to that bigger Self that spills out into the whole Kosmos. We’ll have to be conscious and maintain consciousness of both the god that we are and the dust that we are, and while giving the dust its due, at the end of the day, it is the dust that must bow to the god; it is the god that will fill the dust with glory.
Notes
Readings
From T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday, 1930
Lady of silence
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among the noise and deny the voice
Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn
Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings
And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks, . . .
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto Thee.
And from Emerson’s great essay “The Over-Soul” —
What is the universal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine innuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claim? . . . Man is a stream whose source is hidden. . . .
The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every [one]’s particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart, of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, . . . and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand, and become wisdom, and virtue, and power, and beauty.
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