2009 Jerry Davidoff Sermon Award Honorable Mention
Keeping the Faith
by Rev. Catherine Torpey
Delivered at the South Nassau Unitarian Universalist Congregation
Sunday, October 12, 2008
READINGS:
From the book The Earth is the Lord’s by Abraham Heschel. It is a loving description of the life of Hasidic Jews in Eastern Europe until the early twentieth century:
They were sure that everything hinted at something transcendent, that what was apparent to the mind is but a thin surface of the undisclosed, and they often preferred to gain a foothold on the brink of the deep even at the price of leaving the solid ground of the superficial. The words of the Torah, they believed, would not be grasped by means of literal interpretation. Nothing could be taken literally, neither Scripture nor nature. No man, even if he lived a thousand years, would be able to fathom the mysteries of the world. Rabbi Nathan Spira of Cracow in the seventeenth century interpreted in two hundred and fifty-two different ways the portion of the Pentateuch in which Moses pleads with God for permission to enter the Promised Land. A Biblical word, a custom or a saying, was thought to be crammed with a multiplicity of meaning. The plain was too shallow to be true. Only the mystery was plausible, while the one-dimensional, the superficial was inconceivable. Everywhere they found cryptic meaning. Even in the part of the Code dealing with civil and criminal law, they discovered profound mysteries…. The name of Poland, they alleged, was derived from the two Hebrew words po-lin, "here abide," which were inscribed on a note descended from heaven and found by the refugees from Germany on their eastward journey at the time of the Black Death and the attendant massacres of Jews. On the leaves of the trees, the story goes, were inscribed sacred names, and in the branches were hidden errant souls seeking deliverance through the intermediation of a pious Jew, who in passing would stop to say his twilight prayer under the tree.
Considering the itinerary of one's life, who could comprehend where the goals lie? One might go on a journey for the purpose of transacting business, while the true end was to worship in an inn, where the thought of God had never pierced the air, or to render help to a weary man encountered on the road. One might fulfill his destiny without ever intending to….
Once, it is told, Rabbi Israel Ba’al Shem, the founder of the Hasidic movement, looked despondent and sick at heart. When his disciples asked him for the cause, he told them: There was a man who was very wicked. After he died, there was no way of saving him. But God had mercy upon his soul, and it was decreed that the man’s soul should be incarnated in a frog and lie near a spring in a distant land, and should his son ever come to that place and drink of the water of the spring after saying the blessing over the water, the soul would be redeemed. But the son was very poor and had neither the means nor the opportunity to travel to distant places, so God caused that he should become the butler of a rich man who once became ill, and the doctors declared that he would be cured if he went to a certain spa. The rich man went there and took his butler with him. Once while taking a walk together, the butler became unbearably thirsty. He almost died of thirst. The reason his thirst was so great was because he was near the spring where the soul of his father was lying, but he didn’t know that of course. When he began to search for water he found a spring. In his great thirst, he forgot to say the prayer, the blessing over the water, and his father’s soul remained unredeemed. “The Holy One, blessed be He,” concluded the Baal Shem, “did so much to make the redemption of the soul possible, yet all was in vain. Who knows what will be the end of its way?”
SERMON:
In the movie “Castaway,” Tom Hanks stars as a man named Chuck who finds himself marooned on an uninhabited tropical island. Cargo from the plane he had been flying in washes ashore, and, desperately lonely, he draws a face on a basketball so that he will have someone to talk to. Chuck names the basketball Wilson. Several years go by and over time, Chuck, made a bit crazy by his loneliness, imbues Wilson with truly human characteristics. We see him not only speaking to Wilson, but responding to things that hears Wilson the basketball say. A complex relationship develops between Chuck and his imagined companion.
Eventually, some flotsam washes ashore which Chuck is able to use to build a raft, and he and Wilson climb aboard. After many days drifting on the ocean upon the raft, Chuck falls asleep and in the rough water, Wilson the basketball falls off, and into the vast ocean. Chuck awakens in time to see Wilson drifting away, but not in time to save him. A bedraggled Chuck swims desperately toward Wilson, the basketball with the face drawn upon it, which bobs up and down helplessly on a current which is rapidly carrying him away. Wilson! Chuck cries. Wilson! I’m sorry, Wilson. Wilson, I can’t. Wilson, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry Wilson. I’m sorry Wilson. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
Chuck’s mourning, his deep regret expresses itself as guilt “I’m sorry,” – an excruciating guilt. He has failed his friend, Wilson. His innocent act of falling asleep on a raft has caused his friend to be lost forever at sea. His effort to secure Wilson to the raft failed, and now Wilson is given over to who knows what fate.
But of course, his friend cannot suffer a horrible fate, because his friend is an inanimate object. We, the audience, can see plainly that the loss is entirely Chuck’s. He is mistaken to feel guilt, we know, because there is no moral failing; no harm has been done to Wilson; Chuck hasn’t been the cause of another’s pain. We see so clearly that what is really happening is that Chuck is grieving. Chuck is heartbroken. Yet oh so humanly, Chuck experiences his loss not primarily as his own loss; he experiences his loss as guilt.
He experiences what is his loss and his loss alone as guilt – the pain is transferred, projected, as a harm done not to him, but a harm done by him to someone else.
In this moment in this scene, we observe a man feeling that painful sense of regret and guilt, which all of us can relate to: “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I didn’t protect you. I’m so sorry I let you down. I’m so sorry that you are suffering because of what I did, or because of what I didn’t do.” And it could not be more plain that our protagonist, Chuck, has done no wrong. Ah, the beauty of great literature and film. We can see with crystal clarity what in real life is so impossibly obscure. We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Chuck has done no harm to Wilson. Chuck has harmed no one. Chuck has nothing to feel guilty about. And yet, the pain of his guilt and regret is real; it is true; its power wrenches him.
How often is our loss, our mourning, our sorrow, attended by the companions guilt and regret. How often does our feeling of guilt indicate that we have, in fact, done something wrong, and how often does it indicate, rather, that we have suffered a great loss which we fear that we cannot handle? How often does our guilt stem from a deep sense of loss, of powerlessness, of anger at a world which has taken so much away from us? Are our feelings of guilt a way to direct our sorrow at the most convenient enemy – ourselves.
As a minister, I have rarely observed the death of any person when it was not accompanied by feelings of guilt among those who were close to that person. I should have told her “I love you” more often; I should have treated him more kindly; I should have been more honest with him; I shouldn’t have been so honest; I should feel sadder at this loss; I shouldn’t feel angry at her for how she died; I should, I shouldn’t, I should have, I shouldn’t have.
Guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt. I see how much guilt so many of us carry – for years, for decades, for things that we did, or didn’t do, completely innocently. We were simply living our lives the best way we knew how and something very sad happened.
And so we need a holiday that tells us to remember all the things we’re guilty of? Why do we need a special day for wallowing in guilt?
I have heard Yom Kippur described as a day that is intended to afflict the soul. Many of us have afflicted souls already, thank you very much. There are things that we feel guilty about that we are not guilty of – our Wilson the basketball guilt. But do our feelings of guilt bear any relation to the acts of omission or commission in which we have, in fact, caused others pain or harm? While we are busy feeling guilty about one thing, it may be that we have done or left undone things which really do make a difference in the lives of others. If a time for atonement is to help us live our lives, then it would be useful to consider the difference between guilty feelings and responsible actions.
In 1994, I traveled to El Salvador with the Fair Trade coffee company, Equal Exchange. I was part of a delegation of college and graduate school students who went to build relationships between those producing the coffee and those who consumed it. We lived for part of our two weeks with the campesinos or “peasants” who labored in the coffee fields, and in the case of the Fair Trade coffees, now also cooperatively owned the land. We met with businessmen in the city as well; we met with journalists and members of the Salvadoran congress. We learned how the rulers of El Salvador had brutally oppressed and killed those advocating for political and social reform in the recent turbulent decades. We attended the church where Oscar Romero was shot while saying mass, and met with his friends and associates. The constant theme was the role the United States had played in supporting corrupt rulers through its provision of training and money and its turning a blind eye to much of what was going on.
For some of the young college students, it was the first time their eyes had been truly opened to the enormous, overpowering influence of US foreign policy on the real lives of people in other countries – countries we hardly think about most of the time. Over the course of our two week trip, these young people expressed greater and greater feelings of guilt. As the days passed, there were more and more expressions of, “Oh my God, I am feeling so guilty. I can’t believe what we’ve done to these people. I feel so bad. I don’t know how I can ever feel proud to be American again.”
The feelings of these students was natural – almost inevitable, given what they were hearing and seeing. Almost every Salvadoran we met urgently wanted to communicate to us the role that the United States had played in their troubles. They did not wish to excuse the actions of Salvadorans – they just wanted us as Americans to know that our country’s foreign policy had been complicit, and that America did and still would influence the fate of this small country.
One afternoon, as I sat in the back of the van that took us all from location to location, I was listening to the students once again process their guilt. And in that moment, I was struck powerfully by the difference between feeling guilty and taking responsibility. Perhaps because I’d been listening to them re-hash the same feelings for several days; perhaps because I was sitting all the way in the back, and therefore couldn’t readily participate in the conversation, and was therefore forced to just listen in; for whatever reason, in that moment, as I listened, something became glaringly obvious to me: their feelings of guilt were actually getting in the way of their contemplating what useful actions they might take. Their feelings of guilt did not equate with taking responsibility. Their feelings of guilt had the effect – intentional or not – of avoiding responsibility. If they had been seeking to take responsibility, I would have heard them saying:
“As an American citizen, what can I do to influence foreign policy in my country so that we as a nation are using our power for good and not for evil? I don’t like what I’m learning. I don’t want the country I love to be complicit in injustice and oppression, so how can I communicate that to those in power? What can I do to share my new insights with my fellow citizens? Should my country have the kind of power it has, and if not, what actions could I take – however small – to alter the balance of power in the world, so that more people have the chance to live in a freer and more just world?”
These young people were still in the early stages of processing everything they were experiencing, so my point here is not that what they were feeling was wrong – only that I became aware of how often we get trapped in worrying about our own feelings of guilt instead of actually asking ourselves what, in fact, we might do about situation which trouble us. The students were not asking themselves the kinds of questions that would have actually made a difference in the lives of the Salvadorans we had met.
Instead of focusing on responsibility, they were focusing on their feelings of guilt. They were bemoaning, “Oh, I just feel so bad.” Their guilt was keeping them looking backward, “Oh, we shouldn’t have been giving that kind of money to the ruling junta. Oh, how we’ve harmed these people.”
This was, in many ways, Wilson guilt; for none of the college students in that van had trained the Salvadoran military. None of them had personally authorized any death squads. Their feelings of guilt were like Chuck’s guilt at the loss of Wilson – really, the guilt was a displacement of loss, sorrow and sadness. They felt connected to the people we’d met. They felt great compassion for these campesinos who, before recent reforms and advances, had worked on plantations in a system that person after person described as little more than slavery. They felt great compassion for the woman whose sons were killed by death squads because they had tried to unionize factory workers. The students were loving human beings who felt connected to the people they’d encountered, and so they were feeling loss, sorrow, regret – both for the sake of the individuals we’d met and for their own sakes. What was being expressed as guilt was really the painful loss of what had been a happy naïveté. What was being expressed as guilt was, underneath, disappointment at their beloved country, disorientation that the world was not nearly as friendly a place as they’d recently believed it to be.
In that moment, in the back of that van, I saw how quickly these students had turned their feelings of sadness, grief and confusion into guilt. That, in turn, made them ask not, “What can I do to make the situation better” but “What can I do to make myself feel better?”
Our guilty feelings can make us feel as though we are taking responsibility, but often, guilty feelings actually stop us from taking responsibility. Guilt – especially lingering guilt – has less to do with atoning for sin and more to do with wanting to push away feelings of sadness, sorrow and loss. Guilt often is a way of protecting ourselves, though it often feels quite the opposite of that. It protects us from the full weight of loss.
Yom Kippur is a serious holiday with a serious job to do – to help us face the ways in which we have fallen short, and to take the actions that are necessary to make things right. Wallowing in guilt isn’t – or isn’t meant to be – the point. In fact, wallowing in guilt may be the very thing we need to confess and turn away from.
I love Abraham Heschel’s description, read earlier, of how the Jews of Europe, in the times before the Second World War, had such a sense of humor about our role in the fate of the world. None of us can know what ripple effects our actions will have. So many things happen in this mysterious world, which we never see, we never know, we can never know. And while we imagine that our innocent, perfectly reasonable actions have caused great calamity, they imbued even self-interested actions with a benevolent purpose known only to God.
So when Jews tried to escape the Black Death in the fourteenth century, and traveled eastward into Poland, it turns out, they told themselves, that the true reason that God wanted them to go to Poland was because of all the branches of the trees in Poland where errant souls were trapped. Those pathetic souls could only be released by the prayer of a pious Jew – who knew? The Jews walked along the roadways, and when it came time to say their prayers, they might stop under a tree for the shade, or to lean against the trunk for a back rest. They didn’t know that the prayers they said under those trees were releasing unhappy souls. They just finished their prayers, packed their things back up, and went on their way. They might have spent all day feeling guilty about some imagined fault, never knowing the blessings they had bestowed.
And the butler to the wealthy man, who thirsted so. He went to the spring for a drink, not to rescue his father’s soul, which was captive in the form of a frog. He never knew that his ordinary actions had the potential to free his father’s soul – that God had arranged everything for this moment. He took his sip of water, and forgot in his thirst to say the prayer that would have performed the great miracle. He went on his way, never any wiser that a great moment had been lost. He would never know that if he had simply paused, slowed down and given thanks, it would have made all the difference.
That butler was not responsible for ordering the universe. He wasn’t even responsible for releasing his father’s soul or keeping it captive. He was only responsible for remember to say thank you to God for the water.
So often, our guilt is accompanied by a scenario we imagine where our actions have caused great suffering to others. What if, like the Jews who entered Poland, it turned out that our actions were not the cause of suffering, but were the causes of mysterious blessings to ourselves and others?
When Wilson drifted away into the vast ocean, Chuck’s guilt came out of an imagined reality – he imagined a sorry fate for Wilson. He imagined Wilson in despair. He imagined Wilson angry at him for having allowed this to happen. This imagined reality arose spontaneously out of his grief. If he could take the grief on as his own, if he could allow himself to feel the frightening weight of sorrow that was his, then perhaps his imagination might be released to envision a fate for Wilson where Wilson is free. If Chuck could have felt his loss as his own, perhaps he might have imagined that Wilson had been set on some great adventure, where he would encounter another man on another raft, who needed a companion even more than Chuck needed one.
And what if the students on that delegation to El Salvador could have experienced their sadness and loss as their own, rather than projecting it outside themselves as guilt? If they allowed themselves the true weight of their sadness, perhaps they might have imagined that all of the difficulties El Salvador had gone through were going to be the catalyst for a new, more dynamic society, with a new and mutually beneficial friendship with the United States. Perhaps they might have imagined that our presence as a delegation was going to prove some day to have been the beginning of something new and wonderful.
We make up stories in our minds about why the actions we took have had horrible consequences. If we’re going to make up stories, perhaps in this season of repentance, we ought to take a page out of the book of the Hasidic Jews of Europe. What if we made up stories that the actions we take yield miraculous benefits for other souls?
So often we imagine that if only we had done things differently, there would have been a better outcome. But what if it were true that our actions, taken as a whole, have created the best of all possible worlds? What if mysterious blessings have come to others – people we will never meet or know, because of innocent actions we have taken? The world is an endlessly mysterious place. Stranger things have happened.
You know what you’re guilty of? Imagining that you have been a curse, when in fact, you have been a blessing.
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© 2008 Rev. Catherine Torpey minister (at) snuuc (dot) org
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