Heaven on Earth: Can I Take My iPhone, by Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz Dec. 6, 2009

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READING

Love the earth and sun and the animals,

despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,

stand up for the stupid and crazy,

devote your income and labor to others,

hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,

have patience and indulgence toward the people,

take off your hat to nothing known or unknown,

or to any man or number of men,

go freely with powerful uneducated persons,

and with the young, and with the mothers or families,

re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book,

and dismiss whatever insults your own soul;

and your very flesh shall be a great poem

and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and

face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body

~ From the preface of Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman

Heaven on Earth: Can I Take My iPod?

        Which was it for you? – the Friday after Thanksgiving. Did you line up outside Best Buy with a charcoal heater at 4:30 in the morning? Is this an annual thing for you? – It’s okay; you can tell me. It’s an annual thing for lots of people – like the two women outside the Toys R Us in Hoover, AL, quoted by NBC saying, “We’re carrying on the tradition. Our moms used to go when we were little and now we’re going for our children and eventually we’ll take our children.“

         Or was that Friday “Buy Nothing Day” for you? Are you determined that on these days you will sit on your pocketbook? The whole world is out moving in one direction, and by God you’re not going to join the stampede.

        This is a crazy season, isn’t it? Full of the imagery of absence, of loss, of yearning, in the very landscape of the naked trees outside our clerestory windows and in all the hymns in minor key – and in the beautiful Southern Harmony hymn we sang – “The Hills Are Bare at Bethlehem.” “The heart is tired … No human dream unbroken stands ….” It’s true, the nights are long and getting colder, and we yearn for … something. It is a season full of longing. And also full of a billion zillion suggestions of how we could patch over that sense of emptiness that arises so strong in us this time of year.

        Nope! Still no app for inner peace. I can’t find one for truth and meaning, either, though I can get verses from the Bible or lines from “The Secret.” The one spiritual practice application I found – the “Happy Tapper Gratitude Journal” -- was nearly lost amid dozens of apps for making more money, being more productive, mixing better drinks, finding the right restaurant. Apropos to the season, there’s an app for parents to program a phone call to their kids from Santa – reminding them they better watch out, or they’ll get all the wrong stuff in their stockings.

        Geez, I really thought this was going to fix everything -- especially after I found the website for “the iPhone heaven community.” So now we’re defining “community” and “heaven” by who owns an iPhone? It’s worse than I thought.

        In places in the world that have winter, as the days grow shorter, people have always come together to dance, to sing, to tell stories, to pass the darkest hours together, waiting for the return of the sun. Rev. Linda talked about this last week, and this week I am wondering: How did that human need to be together get bent toward standing in line by a charcoal burner in the dark, waiting for Toys R Us to open?

        We know that heaven is not reached nor community created by who owns what, or how much of anything, unless it’s Love. Not by how much we have accomplished, how high we’ve climbed on our particular ladders, how many books we’ve read.

        Well, books – I do have to admit to an unseemly acquisitiveness toward books. The book I just had to have this season was the new biography of Ayn Rand, titled, provocatively, Ayn Rand and the World She Made. Rand was the apostle of selfishness who in the 1940s wrote The Individualist Manifesto and the novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. In a 1991 survey, Americans named Atlas Shrugged as the one book, next to the Bible, that had most influenced them. In 1998, the Modern Library Association asked Americans to name the 100 greatest books of the 20th century; Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead were Numbers 1 and 2.

        “If a life can have a theme song,” Rand wrote in her journals, “mine is a religion, an obsession, or a mania or all of these expressed in one word: individualism.” Now there’s nothing wrong with individualism, per se. The bard Walt Whitman sang himself gloriously, and our Clerestory Choir sang him gloriously also earlier in the service. But Whitman never argued that celebration of one’s own life meant that one should eschew relationships or obligations to other human beings. These were an integral part of the self Whitman sang.

        Ayn Rand’s individualism was nothing like Whitman’s. About her first great protagonist, Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, she wrote this: “He doesn’t understand, because thankfully he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people. Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should.” This was her hero.

        In our post-ideological age, when the dream of a perfect market state -- capitalism -- is no longer opposed by the heaven-on-earth dream of a perfect collective state – communism -- these words of Rand’s seem antiquated, over-the-top. The author of the biography, Anne C. Heller, called Rand’s description of her character Roark “practically a diagnosis of narcissism, and also a description of Rand herself.”

        But do not be deceived: Rand’s in-it-for-myself individualist heroics retain their hold on the American imagination; more, this philosophy has been coded so strongly into our economic and social systems that we scarcely see it. It is the very air we breathe.

        Howard Roark, according to Anne Heller, is “as American as Huckleberry Finn or Holden Caulfield,” full of “self-determination, originality, defiance of authority, hard work – all qualities Americans prize in themselves and in the national character.”

        “Achievement is the aim of life,” wrote Ayn Rand in her journals. On our deathbeads we may know that it is only Love that matters, but all along the way to get there many of us – most of us, I’d say, here inside the Beltway -- behave as if she had it right – that it’s all about achievement.

        The Puritans, who were among the first Europeans to settle in the land we call America, believed in a God who chose some for Heaven, and some for eternal torment in Hell. Prosperity was a signal, they believed, that could indicate whether one was among the elect. This set up a trend toward conspicuous consumption that still infects the American psyche and leads many of us to the charcoal brazier outside Best Buy on the day after Thanksgiving.

        It leads also to the longing to have a bigger and better house, with more stuff in it – so much stuff that we can’t even move, like the little snail in our story, who built himself such a huge and fabulous house that he couldn’t haul it around on his back.

        Americans have built an economy that works hard to satisfy those longings, and the global economy is coming right along to pick up any slack in our own manufacturing prowess. It wasn’t always this way, but it was articulated during the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s: “the ultimate purpose of our economy is to provide more consumer goods.” A half century later, the environmental consequences of the production of so much stuff have become critical for our planet. There’s a great video about this on our UUCA website; it’s called “The Story of Stuff.”

        I wonder what will happen to this (the iPhone) when it’s obsolete?

        I wonder what will happen to make it obsolete? Will I decide it’s obsolete when the next new thing comes out, and I figure that’s the thing that will fix my life?

        Achievement and individualism, and the conspicuous consumption that make individual achievement visible, are woven snugly into the American character. They are reinforced by the “science” of economics which equates happiness with consumption, and which has imposed a mathematical model on human behavior. “Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system,” Paul Krugman wrote this fall in the New York Times Magazine.

        “That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets.” In other words, Krugman said, economists mistook the beauty of a mathematical system for truth about the way human beings behave – much as a thinker like Ayn Rand could take a grain of truth about individual worth and effort and make it an ideology that denies human relationality.

        Meanwhile, there are increasing numbers of us, even in this country, who are not able to think about having the biggest house in the world, or any house at all.

        Twenty-five years ago, my freshman college roommate and her new husband bought a sweet little Tudor house on a lovely street in an American city. Their house is paid off now; they own it free and clear, and it is worth nothing. They live in Detroit, the city which has been, perhaps, the most ravaged by the hollowing out of the American economy that has been going on for years but which accelerated sharply in the financial collapse of 2008. Most of the houses on her street, Susan told me, are abandoned; squatters live in them and trash is piled in the yards.

        The scene she described is like New Orleans without the flood, and it broke my heart.

        How many of you saw Michael Moore’s movie, “Capitalism: A Love Story?” He filmed some of those streets in Detroit. Bob Herbert wrote about the city recently in the New York Times: “Detroit was the arsenal of democracy in World War II and the incubator of the American middle class. It was the city that taught mass production to the rest of the world. It was a place that made cars, trucks and other tangible products, not derivatives. And it was the architect of the quintessentially American idea of putting people to work and paying them a decent wage. It’s frightening to think seriously about what we’ve allowed to happen to this city.”

        In Michael Moore’s movie, two clergy people startled me by saying it, outright, full face to the camera: “capitalism is an evil system.” If evil is, as theologian Carter Heyward says, the intentional destruction of relationship, then it is not hard to see why these two ministers, both of whom pastor churches in Detroit, would say this. The destruction is all around them, and we also have to name that race and racism are a part of why a city like Detroit would be allowed to fester so miserably in the wounds of economic dislocation. It is not only the American middle class, but the black American middle class, that has been decimated in Detroit, just as it was predominantly black homeowners and renters who were driven permanently out of New Orleans by the floods that followed Katrina. This is systemic racism at work.

        In the coming year, 2010, Gordon Gekko returns. Do you remember the 1987 movie, “Wall Street?” Gekko was the Michael Douglas character who proclaimed that “greed is good,” an idea that follows logically and inevitably if you apply Ayn Rand’s individualist manifesto to an economic system. In next year’s movie, “Wall Street 2,” Gekko gets out of jail and returns to Wall Street, and given the times, there’s no telling what he’ll do.

        So here we are: waiting for the light to return, and waiting for Gordon Gekko too. What is there for us to do? We can learn more about the forces, historical, intellectual and political, that call to us to line up at Best Buy. Resist them, and not only by sitting on your pocketbook when everyone else is out shopping. Resist them by paying attention. This is the most powerful thing I can tell you to do: Pay attention to your own sense of emptiness, that yearning in your spirit, especially as it comes upon you so strongly this time of year. What is it telling you, this yearning? Hold it close; don’t try to buy it off.

        Don’t be alone in it either. You’re not alone, after all; I’d be surprised if you can show me one person who does not feel the tug of longing. Let it open your hearts to one another; support each other in mindfulness; gather in communities where you can have conversations that matter … where you can look into one another’s eyes without fear or embarrassment … where you can hold a candle against the darkness, and join your light to others’.

        Listen to the poets.

        Listen to the greatest prophet of individualism, Walt Whitman: “Love the earth and sun and the animals; Despise riches; give alms to everyone who asks. Devote your income and labor to others. Re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book. Then your very flesh shall be a great poem ….”

        Ayn Rand was wrong. Achievement is not the aim of life. Love is. Community is. Relatedness is. This is how we get to heaven – heaven on earth – and we can get there before we’re on our deathbeds. The emptiness will be filled, but it won’t come cheap. “O listen to a song,” the poet said. “Dance! Shout! Sing! Joy! Fill me with sweet music! Listen, o listen!”

        BENEDICTION

        These are lines from the great Sufi poet, Rumi:

           There is a candle in your heart,

           ready to be kindled.

           There is a void in your soul,

           ready to be filled.

           You feel it, don't you?

        Know that your yearning is a gift.

        Go out into the December whirl and share your gift, abundantly. AMEN.

Photos from the Service

The Story of Stuff

• Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis
• Anne C. Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made
• bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters
• Paul Krugman, “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong,” New York Times Magazine, Sept. 2, 2009
• Michael Moore, 2009 film “Capitalism: A Love Story”
• Joshua Muravchik, Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism
• Reverend Billy and ;the Church of Life After Shopping

Covenant Group Questions

1. Think about Christmas songs like, “O Come O Come Emmanuel” – seasonal songs that are full of yearning. How do you experience yearning this time of year? What is it that you yearn for?

2. How do you experience your own sense of self? Do you feel your will to be an individual self is in conflict with your will to be in relationship with others, or to be part of a community?

3. How would you define evil? How do you feel about Carter Heyward’s definition of evil: the intentional destruction of relationship?

4. How do you feel about the statement, made by two clergy people in Detroit, that “capitalism is evil?”

5. What was the last thing you bought, thinking it might fix your life?

6. What have you done in your own life, or your family’s life, to resist the pressure to consume more? What would you like to do?