by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given October 19, 2003

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning everyone. Marilyn Sewell is not able to be here this morning. She has had a bad cold for the last few days and while she is feeling stronger, her voice is not. Her doctors have advised her that it was best that she not preach today. You’ll hear the sermon Marilyn wrote for today, just not from her voice. 

Welcome to our worship service this morning. 

May those of you who come with a weary spirit find peace. 

May those who need to be inspired have your hearts lifted up.

May those who come to learn and to explore a new faith, find here fertile ground.

It is good that we are here together.

Come, let us worship.

Living as I did in the Bay Area for eight years of schooling, I always had an awareness of the Golden Gate Bridge.  There is scarcely more beautiful a sight than that bridge at sunset, when it really does take on the gleam of gold.  But the bridge is known for a darker reason as well—it is the bridge of choice for suicides.  Dr. Jerome Motto tells the story of the suicide of one of his patients.  “I went to this guy’s apartment afterward with the assistant medical examiner.  The guy was in his thirties, lived alone, <in a> pretty bare apartment.  He’d written a note and left it on his bureau.  It said, ‘I’m going to walk to the bridge.  If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.’”  The doctor paused.  “That was it,” he said.  “It’s so needless, the number of people who are lost.”

It’s not just in San Francisco and Oakland that people feel isolated.  Walking the streets of the city, I see people with furrowed brows and mouths cast down, looking neither to the right nor to the left as they stride along.  In grocery stores waiting in line, we are strangers to one another, and we stand, mute, until it is our turn, and the grocery checker gives the perfunctory greeting, “Hi, how are you today?”  Dead set on getting somewhere, drivers commonly plow through red lights even here in laid-back Portland.  The ubiquitous cell phone, which I personally despise, cuts us off from others in common spaces like airports, coffee shops, and doctors’ offices.  We are individuals, pursuing individual ends, hardly seeing those around us.  We have lost all sense of community.  In a land of plenty, we feed the body but not the soul; we are starving for a sense of connection with others.  We are a lost and lonely people.

Through the years many fine writers, poets as well as prose writers, have treated the subject matter of loneliness in this culture.  In 1970 Philip Slater published a book entitled The Pursuit of Loneliness, in which he says that Americans “deny the interdependence upon which all human societies are based.”  He decries our emphasis on individualism as a value and says that we have ruptured the bonds of family, of community, of place.  Others become an impediment or a nuisance as we rush along, he says, unmindful of the needs of the earth and of the needs of our fellow human beings.[1]

In 1985 sociologist Robert Bellah and four co-writers published a book called Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life.  The book, again, focuses on individualism, saying that we are encouraged to find meaning exclusively in the private sphere, neglecting the common life among us and the public role of citizen.

And now there is Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, published in the year 2000, in which the author cites the decreasing involvement of Americans in community activities of all kinds in the last 1/3 of the 20^th century. Volunteering, civic participation, club attendance, informal get-togethers, church, socializing at work: all these have gone way down in the last 30 years—across the board, for all age groups.  Putnam asks the question, “Why would this be so?”  Incidentally, his title Bowling Alone comes from a bowling alley that has huge TVs above each lane, so the groups of bowlers do not speak to one another while they are waiting to play.  They are connected only electronically to each other by the TV.  This is a perfect metaphor for how he sees our society as it has evolved. 

Let’s look for a moment at the possible causes of our drift away from one another and from the common life of the community.  There are several that stand out, as Putnam sees it.

First, there is the movement of women into the paid labor force.  You see, it has been largely the women who have held the warp and woof of the fabric of our common lives together—the women who give the birthday parties, write the thank-you notes, volunteer at the church and the P.T.A., who prepare food for the potlucks, who invite friends for a dinner party.  These same women now work outside the home and do the majority of the childcare and the housework, so their energies cannot now stretch to cover much of anything else. 

A second cause is that we are expected to do more work in less time, as companies downsize and try to remain competitive.  When people are asked why they don’t join a group or volunteer, the big reason is “lack of time.”

The rush to the suburbs is significant.  Long commutes take time—time spent alone in the car means time not available for family and friends, for meetings, for community projects.  Also sprawl lends itself to social sameness, and reduces opportunities that cut across class and racial lines. 

Then there is technology, which I see as a two-edged sword.  Democracy is surely getting a boost when we can use e-mail to organize and to communicate. Technology can bring us together, whether as political allies or in just keeping up with family and friends.  And yet, the handwritten letter is rare, and the telephone call is just inconvenient, so even the voice is missing.  We can shop on-line, so we don’t have to deal with those messy trips to the store, where we actually feel textures, leaf through books, encounter people—experiencing the sensuality of the concrete world.  Our world is becoming a virtual world, and we are the poorer because of it. 

Here is how psychologist James Hillman describes his life:  “Look, a great deal of our life is manic.  I can watch 34 channels of TV, I can get on the fax and communicate with people anywhere.  I can be everywhere at once, I can fly across the country, I’ve got call waiting, so I can take two calls at once.  I live everywhere and nowhere.  But I don’t know who lives next door to me.  Who’s in the next flat?  Who’s in 14-B?

“I don’t know who they are, but, boy, I’m on the phone, car phone, toilet phone, plane phone, my mistress is in Chicago, the other woman I’m with is in D.C., my ex-wife is in Phoenix, my mother in Hawaii, and I have four children living all over the country.  I have faxes coming in day and night, I can plug into all the world’s stock prices, commodity exchanges.  I am everywhere, man—but I don’t know who’s in 14-B.”[2]

One of the big villains in Bowling Alone is television.  Once in a while TV brings us together, as when JFK was killed, and when the Challenger exploded, Putnam says.  But mostly it separates us.  It is precisely those Americans who watch the most TV who are less involved in socializing, parties, sports, community and religious organizations, and public affairs.  The Detroit Free Press asked 120 families if they would be willing to give up TV for a month for $500, and only 5 agreed to do so.  In one family that did, a woman reported, “It was terrible.  We did nothing—my husband and I talked.”

I believe that one of the biggest causes of reduced civic involvement is a cynicism that has been growing since the ‘60s.  When John Kennedy intoned, “Ask not what your country can do for you; rather, ask what you can do for your country,” we cheered, and we believed.  We believed that our country embodied the values we cherished: democracy, truth, integrity of purpose, values that could compel sacrifice.  Then there were the assassinations:  John Kennedy himself, Martin Luther King, Jr., later, Bobby Kennedy.  There was Vietnam, which took over 50,000 of our young men and women, for dubious reasons.  We learned that our government lied to us.  And then Watergate.  If there was not something larger than ourselves that we could believe in, then we might as well concentrate on our own self-development, as many of us did in the ‘70s, and in the ‘80s and ‘90s—well, we might was well get while the getting was good.

The malaise in our society grew.  Young people in particular felt and still feel a good deal of depression and disquiet: between 1950 and 1995, the suicide rate among young adults ages 15-19 quadrupled, and the rate among young adults ages 20-24 tripled—at the same time there was a remarkable decline in suicide among older groups.  No clear cause has been isolated for this phenomenon.  Putnam suggests that the cause is social isolation, pointing out that the average teen spends 3½ hours alone each day, more time than with family or friends. 

There is probably a multiple causation here, but if I had to make a guess, I would point to disillusionment—our young people grow up in a culture that has dubious values. They need heroes, and there are few.  They need civic integrity, and that, too, is difficult to find.  What to believe in?  What to trust?  Young people are idealistic; they are terribly disturbed when they want to give themselves to something, and they find little that is worthy.  I think that is one of the major jobs of the church—that is, to set before young people a model of what is possible in human life, to help them understand that love and truth are values that are alive and well, and that there are adults who will support them as they seek to live lives of integrity and meaning.

Human beings are not meant to be alone.  I remember when I was ministering in a small church years ago, a church where the members took some time after the service to comment on how the sermon touched their own lives.  I suppose I was preaching on intimacy that day—I don’t remember—but an elderly woman, a woman in her late 80s, spoke up.  Her name was Ruby, and she had a few months back lost her husband of many years.  She didn’t say much, only this:  she said, “Anyone who does not have an intimate relationship is deprived.”

She is right—intimacy is crucial to our well-being.  Not necessarily marital intimacy—in fact, you can have a marriage with no intimacy.  You can have sex with no intimacy.  You can have kinfolk—brothers, sisters, even mothers and fathers—with whom you cannot be intimate.  On the other hand, you can have a friend with whom you share your secrets, a co-worker who supports your values.  With them, you may find real intimacy.  And why is it crucial, as Ruby said?  Being intimate involves engaging ourselves in what is real, what is true, what is closest within.  It involves self-revelation, affection, acknowledgment of the other as who he is, not what we would want him to be.  Intimacy over a period of time leads to love, and love is the great healer of us all.

Many of you know St. Exupery’s little prince.  In this scene from that story, the fox and the little prince have a conversation, a conversation which lays out before us the path and pleasures of intimacy:

“Come and play with me,” proposed the little prince.  “I am so unhappy.”

“I cannot play with you,” the fox said.  “I am not tamed.”

“What does that mean—‘tame’?”

“It is an act too often neglected,” said the fox.  “It means to establish ties.”

“To establish ties?”

“Just that,” said the fox.  “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys.  And I have no need of you.  And you, on your part, have no need of me.  To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes.  But if you tame me, then we shall need each other.  To me, you will be unique in all the world.  To you, I shall be unique in all the world . . . .  If you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life.  I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others.  . . . .  Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me!”

In an intimate relationship we risk being who we really are with another.  We are each of us trapped within our own mind and body and consciousness, and we try to break those bounds with the crude tools we have at hand—we try with look and language and touch, to at least partially bridge what is unbridgeable.  We join our inescapable private life with another such life in the space between us, where meaning lies.  The reaching out is imperfect, we will be misunderstood at times.  But besides the food we eat and the air we breathe, it is quite literally what gives us life.

Let me tell you about Roseto, a small town in the Eastern part of Pennsylvania.  Something strange was going on there.  They smoked as much as people in nearby Bangor.  They ate similar food, and they went to the same doctors and hospitals.  Yet they seemed all but immune from heart disease—their death rate from heart attacks was significantly lower.  Why?  Well, Roseto was characterized by a very tight-knit social life.  Founded by immigrants from Southern Italy, it had many three-generation households with strong commitments to both church and family.  But all that changed in the 1960s, and when these traditions eroded, so did Roseto’s health.  By the mid-70s the residents were as mobile and anonymous as other Americans—and just as prone to heart disease.[3]

We have a problem here—we have a culture that breeds loneliness, and we have a human need for companionship and closeness.  What can we do, then, to invite the intimacy, the soul connection that is so life-giving?  Well, that is the subject matter of next week’s sermon.  I invite you back then.

But today let me leave you with this thought.  Human life is not about getting new toys.  It’s not about the Dow Jones average.  It’s not about winning.  It’s not even about self-development.  It’s about loving.  Really.  It’s as simple as that.  I wish that all of you could go with me and be a fly on the wall when I plan memorial services with families.  Nobody says, “Hey, Dad made a ton of money.”  Or, “Mom was great at multi-tasking.”  No.  They say things like this:  “I remember so many evenings when Dad threw a football with me, until it was just too dark to see the ball.”  Or they might say, “She laughed from way deep inside—she loved life so much.” 

Finding the closeness we need, deciding not to walk as a stranger in this world, isn’t easy, especially for those of us who’ve had some hard knocks.  Our intentions get twisted, our voices distorted.  It doesn’t always work.  But we keep trying.  We keep trying because we long to touch that center, that depth, in another—and we long to have it touched in us.  We keep on trying because that’s where our true story resides, and if our story falls untold, we are nothing.  We will not have lived. 

It is risky to come close, to know the uniqueness in another and to need that very self-same person and no other, in just the same way.  With love eventually comes loss in all its multitude of forms, and grief.  It is the nature of things.  But with love comes the joy of living, the sure knowledge that life has meaning.  May we choose, in spite of all our fears and frustrations, to open our hearts to the beauty of this earth and to one another.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, we struggle daily within the structures that would isolate us, would cut us off from our fellow human beings.  Help us to find a way to make our lives less fragmented and more given to the common good.  Let us know how much we need one another.  Every day we are tempted by our busyness to look past others—children, spouse, friends, the homeless man on the street corner.  Every day we are tempted to dismiss our hearts.  Bring us back again and again to the center, where true life is found.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

May you know love in all of your days. As you are blessed, may you bring that love back into the world in all that you do. Go in love and go in peace.