Sermons
'Moments That Mold and Freedom of Choice'
November 4, 2001Occasionally a really good, piece of unsolicited wisdom finds its way through cyberspace into my email. Such a piece arrived this past week entitled, 'Inner Strength.'
If you can start the day without caffeine or pep pills,
If you can be cheerful, ignoring aches and pains,
If you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles,
If you can understand when loved ones are too busy to give you time,
If you can overlook when people take things out on you when, through no fault of yours, something goes wrong,
If you can take criticism and blame without resentment,
If you can face the world without lies and deceit,
If you can conquer tension without medical help,
If you can relax without liquor,
If you can sleep without the aid of drugs,
Then you are probably a dog.
Why is it, do you suppose, that sometimes our highest values are relegated to our more inferior characterizations? What should follow at the end of this list is, “Then you are a really together person.” Or, “then you are some kind of Bodhisattva, nearing full enlightenment.” Or at least you are a, “…spiritually centered human being.
What makes it funny is that a dog is probably the only honest answer that fits. And while many of us may appreciate dogs a lot, most of us don’t aspire to be one. But we do want to have the inner strength, the spiritual fitness that would allow us to make the most of a meaningful life. The only problem is, unlike a dog, we carry a lot of baggage, and a lot of memories that make it a little more difficult of find our place in the ebb and flow of each new situation.
So, what is the balance between the moments that mold our lives, and our freedom of choice? How molded are we and how free to choose? Are we who we hope to be and, if not, what’s keeping us from it?
I can remember seventh grade science class. We studied how different animals learned things. Some animals learned by imprinting. The best example was always ducks. Within a certain amount of time after hatching, whatever passerby might happen to catch a duckling’s eye, that passerby would become the object that the duckling would follow and emulate. Usually it’s the mother duck, but not always. Studies provided to grade school students, through the ages, have shown that a dog or a chicken or, even a human being can be an acceptable role model for the hatchlings. Poor ducks!
For a young boy with a lot of imagination in a Catholic School though, I found this information to be a bit unsettling. What if imprinting was really a process that humans unknowingly participated in as well? What if it wasn’t just a biological process, but a psychological and spiritual process as well? I had a pretty good ideas of what a spiritual process was – though that idea has changed many times since then. I wasn’t at all sure what a psychological process was, but I knew it was something one didn’t get out of easily.
So what if humans were imprinted, too? What if I was born into the wrong family? Maybe I’d been exposed to all the wrong things. Was that where original sin came from? Maybe Adam and Eve saw the snake eat a bite of the apple at just the wrong moment and …IMPRINT… humankind was destined to sin forever.
Science has assured us over the years that imprinting is indeed a biological process, and one that is not among the human repertoire. But even science has been unable to let us off the hook. The ongoing debate is still one of determinism, but based in the balance between nature and nurture. Which has the greatest impact in prescribing who we become – our genetic make-up, or how we are raised? And where does freedom of choice fit into the picture?
Perhaps we are not totally free in our will to choose; perhaps we are though, or at least to some degree. And we may never know the limits of that potential. We can limit ourselves though, through complacency or even through thoughts about our limits. Or we can push onward forming new options and creating new areas of influence.
The 18th century German author and thinker, Frederick von Schiller comments on the reality of choice; he also suggests a means by which we might be aware of our use of it.
“If choice is real, if there really are alternatives, it follows that in choosing between them we are exhibiting our power as real agents, real causes and initiators of new departures in the flow of cosmic change, we thereby prove the existence of free causes [or free choice].”
We need only look around us to see the impact that humanity has on the flow of cosmic change. Granted we can only see the local manifestations of this change, but it’s not difficult to generalize them onto the cosmic scene.
Marriage is a great example, regardless of its gender makeup. (Although gender orientation does provide an interesting perspective on the question of choice, but that’s for another day). In marriage, two people chose to be married. They have no idea what that might mean in the long haul, only that they are choosing to traverse the long haul together. The cosmic impact of the relationship might be the result of the combination of genetic backgrounds that go into the progeny of the union. It might also be any of the many other ways in which the world is recreated by the combined forces of the union.
Let’s move from the personal to the cultural. If we view the flow of the human story prior to the events of September 11th to be representative of at least a strain of the cosmic flow- then choices made by the terrorists and their leaders have had an enormous impact on that flow, and on the human story as it continues from that point. The choices we make in response to those events have no less of an impact on that unfolding story.
The point here is that we are free to choose our responses. The question is, How much are we willing to allow those choices to be predetermined by our history? And how willing are we to take responsibility for our actions or for our inactions?
Let’s go back to the personal level for a moment. The other morning I was working out at the YMCA. As is often the case, when I’m not visiting with the person on the machine next to mine, I let my thoughts wander, unrestrained, into space.
The news of the day was about Kathy Ngyuen, the New York hospital employee who mysteriously contracted anthrax and died. I’m not so worried about getting anthrax, at least not yet. But being a somewhat spiritually oriented person, I often find opportunities to present myself with questions of life and death, so I can to try to figure out how I’ve been spending my life and how I want to spend whatever remainder of it that I have.
So, the question I posed to myself was, if I were to get anthrax and lie in the hospital dying, and if I had just enough time and consciousness left to visit with my children, what would I want to say to them? I wasn’t feeling morbid as much as practical.
I would want them to know that I know that in many ways and at various times in their lives, I have failed them. I would want them to know that I’m deeply sorry for those failings and for the impact that they’ve had on the kids’ lives. I’d want them to know, as best they could, just how I’d failed them, so that they could get over it, and get on with their lives.
I wouldn’t want my failings to be their crutch. I would want them to recognize that they are now responsible for who they are, and more, for who they are becoming, in the same way that I had to let go of my own parents’ inadequacies and become responsible for my own life.
I would ask my kid’s forgiveness; let them know that I loved them and that I had high expectations for what they would do with their lives. Then, as the thought concluded, I would slip away, somehow satisfied that I’d done right by them.
About then, my time on the exercise machine expired and I had to get off of it before I hurt myself.
As usual, I don’t suppose I’m saying anything that you have not already thought about yourself. But there are a couple of reasons why I raise these thoughts today. Again, the first is on a personal level.
While freedom of choice is very individualistic in nature, we tend to it more responsibly when we are in community with others who are intentionally and creatively exploring their own use of free will. When we keep company with others who hold themselves in high expectation, we participate in building community with unbound possibilities for creative – not pre-molded – responses to life.
Today we welcome new members into our religious community. Membership here is based on identifying, in aspiration, with others who are committed, as our mission statement says to, “…seeking transformation in our hearts, our homes, our community and our world.” We are here to aid and abet one another in our individual and cooperative efforts towards such transformation and toward such creation. And we are here to remind each other and ourselves over and over again.
The other reason I raise these thoughts about moments that mold and freedom of choice is because we are indeed at a pivotal moment in history. Everything in the world did change on September 11th, as the planes slammed into the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon. Everything changed again on October 7th as the United States started dropping bombs on Afghanistan.
Are we willing, are we free, as a people, to imagine new responses to these developments as they continue to unfold? Or are we pre-molded and unable to envision anything that hales from beyond our previous experience. If ever the world were dependent upon our capacity for creativity – that moment is now. If we want peace, we will have to create it.
In our own personal lives, we are responsible for creating new outcomes that allow us to live with spiritual integrity. If we want our lives to have meaning, we will need to let go of what has been, so that we can engage what is to be.
No less is true of our cooperative national efforts, or of our cultural efforts. No less is true of our accumulative human enterprise. On every level, we are responsible for creating new outcomes that can be more of a result of spiritual integrity, than a result of repeating unlearned lessons of the past.
So, what is the balance between the moments that mold our lives, and our freedom to choose? How “molded” are we and how free are we to choose? Are we who we hope to become?
We are not free from our conditioning nor are we inextricably bound by it. We do not have too much freedom, nor do we have too little. We have just enough to be responsible. (Idea from Man’s Freedom, by Paul Weiss)
“To be is a wonderful thing. It is a miracle itself enough to stagger the mind, should we ever really contemplate it. It is to sense within us the creative power of life, of growth, of being. It is to take the world that is given us into our own hands and to climb the mountain of excellence. It is to know the higher levels of experience not only in our full powers but also in suffering.” (Robert Killam)
“With heedfulness in the beginning and all the way through to the end…” (Lao Tzu)
If we can think it, perhaps we can do it. If we can wish it, if we can hope for it, we can help to make it happen. If we can have faith in it, whatever that future is, if we give it our full faith, we can help to create that new day that is being born.
May our faith be blest by grace that it may be so.
READINGS
From the Tao Teh Ching, by Lao Tzu:
Lightly made promises inspire little confidence.
Making light of things at the beginning,
one will meet with failure in the end.
Being prepared for hardship,
one will not be overcome by it.
In handling their affairs, people often ruin them,
just as they are on the verge of success.
With heedfulness in the beginning
and all the way through to the end,
nothing is ruined.
From, Here We Are, You and I, by Robert Killam
Here we are, you and I, and the millions of [people] and animals about us: the innumerable atoms which make our bodies, blown as it were by mysterious processes together, so that there has happened, just now, for every one of us, the wonder of wonders, we have come to life. And here we stand, our senses, our keen intellects, our infinite desires, our nerves quivering to the touch of joy or pain: beacons of brief fire, burning between two unexplored eternities.
To be is a wonderful thing. It is a miracle itself enough to stagger the mind, should we ever really contemplate it. It is to sense within us the creative power of life, of growth, of being. It is to take the world that is given us into our own hands and to climb the mountain of excellence. It is to know the higher levels of experience not only in our full powers but also in suffering. It is to understand, to know, to appreciate, to feel, to think, to wonder, to roll back the darkness and despair by faith and courage. It is to glimpse the new morning. It is the renewal of life.