Reading –
from The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder“On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below. The bridge was on the high road between Lima and Cuzco and hundreds of persons passed over it every day. It had been woven of osier by the Incas more than a century before and visitors to the city were always led out to see it. It was a mere ladder of thin slats swung out over the gorge, with handrails of dried vine. … The bridge seemed to be among the things that last forever; it was unthinkable that it should break. …
“Everyone was very deeply impressed, but only one person did anything about it, and that was Brother Juniper. By a series of coincidences so extraordinary that one almost suspects the presence of some Intention, this little red-haired Franciscan from Northern Italy happened to be in Peru converting the Indians and happened to witness the accident.
“It was a very hot noon, that fatal noon, and coming around the shoulder of a hill Brother Juniper stopped to wipe his forehead and to gaze upon the screen of snowy peaks in the distance, then into the gorge below him filled with the dark plumage of green trees and green birds and traversed by its ladder of osier. …at that moment a twanging noise filled the air, as when the string of some musical instrument snaps in a disused room, and he saw the bridge divide and fling five gesticulating ants into the valley below. …
“[This] thought … visited Brother Juniper: “Why did this happen to those five?” If there were any plan in the universe at all, if there were any pattern in a human life, surely it could be discovered mysteriously latent in those lives so suddenly cut off. Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan. And on that instant Brother Juniper made the resolve to inquire into the secret lives of those five persons, that moment flying through the air, and to surprise the reason of their taking off.
“It seemed to Brother Juniper that it was high time for theology to take its place among the exact sciences and he had long intended to put it there. What he had lacked hitherto was a laboratory. …this collapse of the bridge of San Luis Rey was a sheer Act of God. It afforded a perfect laboratory. Here at last one could surprise His intentions in a pure state. …
“You and I can see that coming from anyone but Brother Juniper this plan would be the flower of a perfect skepticism. … But to our Franciscan there was no elemnet of doubt in the experiment. He knew the answer. He merely wanted to prove it, historically, mathematically, to his converts,---poor obstinate converts, so slow to believe that their pains were inserted into their lives for their own good. …
“This was not the first time that Brother Juniper had tried to resort to such methods. Often … he would fall to dreaming of experiments that justify the was of God to man. …
“Thus it was that the determination rose within him at the moment of the accident. It prompted him to busy himself for six years, knocking at all the doors in Lima, asking thousands of questions, filling scores of notebooks, in his effort at establishing the fact that each of the five lost lives was a perfect whole. …
“Some say that we shall never know and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.”
Personal Search For Meaning –
“This I Believe,” by Henry ErnstthalI was raised in a Judaism so reformed that, on the religious continuum, it probably abuts Unitarian Universalism. It assumed a watchful and active God and it encompassed a Sunday school on Sunday, a Christmas tree, lighting the Chanukah lights, and a Seder.
In college, I went through the normal flirtation with Zen Buddhism and Existentialism. Both continue to intrigue me.
What I got out of my brush with existentialism were two ideas: First, that death rendered life essentially meaningless and absurd, and Second, that meaning comes from the exercise of free will in spite of the absurdity. I also decided that the intense discipline of Zen, while admirable, is inconsistent with my basically lazy nature. As you will see, my brush with existentialism has had a larger impact.
So what do I believe?
I believe that religion begins where science leaves off. Humankind is, for some evolutionarily beneficial reason, programmed to want to understand. We have a strong preference for knowing rather than a tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity. But, when we do not Understand, we create meaning and, once committed to that meaning, defend it against attack and challenge. We call that Faith or Religion.
Because tribes were also evolutionarily advantageous, we find comfort and support in groups – family, clan, people who have a common set of beliefs. The greater our general sense of insecurity, uncertainty, or anxiety about the randomness of life, the more likely we are to seek the comfort of a rigid belief structure and an “us versus them” mentality.
I believe that explains why organized religion has been the cause of so much pain and suffering.
What about God?
I don’t believe in God, although Kim Beach stopped me in my tracks for a moment when he asked me, “ What kind of God do you not believe in?” A great question. Here is my answer. I don’t believe that there is a god or goddess that either cares for or is involved in the world in any way.
“Why?” you may ask.
Satan, in Archibald MacLeish’s JB says:
If God is good, He is not God.
If God is God, He is not good.
In spite of the character speaking the lines, I agree.
I find it infinitely easier to believe in no God, or in one that is so uninvolved as to be irrelevant, than it is to believe in a God that acts on the world and permits the evil and pain that is so widespread. If there is no God or, if God just started things rolling and then stepped away from the process, His, Hers, Its existence doesn’t matter. Nothing we say or do can change things. The only remaining, and equally repugnant, alternative is to believe in a malicious God who created the universe for its cynical amusement or who intervenes in earthly affairs like the Greek gods in ancient myths, to play out on Earth, their Olympian rivalries.
This leads to a couple of grim metaphors about human life by two of the characters in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot that have stayed with me for about 40 years
In Act 2, Pozzo says: “They give Birth astride a grave, the light gleams for an instant, and then it’s night once more.”
A few pages later, Vladimir, echoing Pozzo’s statement says, “Astride of the grave and a difficult birth, lingeringly, the gravedigger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries.”
And yet. And yet. I am an optimist, believe it or not. Cynical, yes, but still optimistic. How in the world, you may well ask, can I believe in a Godless universe, think of life as that relatively brief and painful instant between birth and death, see AIDS, terrorism, and man’s widespread inhumanity to man, and be an optimist?
Perhaps it is because I have been personally lucky in my life, my wife and children, my career, my country. Perhaps I am just being willfully blind to reality. Or maybe I just have an excess of endorphins floating around in my brain. I don’t know.
I prefer to think it is because I have read enough history to get some sense of the balance of good and evil, and that, by and large, the world has, over the last few hundred years, moved towards peace, tolerance, better and more widespread health, increased knowledge, and so on. Not that we have reached utopia. We still have a long way to go. But progress is being made.
I also believe that humor and wit help us and sustain us. Mark Twain said, “The secret source of Humor itself is not in joy but in sorrow.” Laughter is the great restorative. Shared laughter binds us together.
And there is still plenty of beauty in the world -- both in the physical world around us and in the people around us. In JB, what follows Satan’s line:
If God is good, He is not God.
If God is God, He is not good.
is this:
I would not be here if I could,
Except for the little green tree in the wood
And the wind on the water.
What moved me most, on September 11th and the days that followed, was the incredible courage, caring, charity, and community-feeling that resulted. Not just in and around the ground zeros, though it was particularly intense there, but around the world.
The precipitating events reinforce my basic cynicism. The responses reinforce my basic optimism.
I believe that progress is being made.
Sermon: “A Matter of Randomness? Or Fate? –
Things aren’t really getting better. We go along a little bit, involved in our lives as if nothing happened, sort-of, and then we read something in the newspaper or hear something on the radio or TV news reports, and the feelings of fear and helplessness well-up inside us again. We’ve been trying hard to integrate the reality of the devastating terrorist attacks of Sept. 11; trying to understand the trail – or the web -- of people, travels, activities, alliances, motivations, and preparations that have gone into the long-term covert planning for this devastation.
We’re being told that we can expect more attacks carried out by a larger, more organized, better-supported, and clearly focused hate-driven network of criminal extremists than we expected, and that we, civilians, are now in harms way.
We all know that things are more complex than the Presidential rhetoric about “Good vs. Evil.” So many are asking – what will happen next? What’s going on between these scurrying behind-the-scenes decision-makers? What does this all mean?
It’s no wonder that the decision was made to temporarily suspend our church’s Strategic Planning process. Hard to think about the future of the church five years down the road, when we don’t even have a firm sense of personal and national security about the next couple of weeks. And when we renew our imaginings about the direction of this church, we know we must take into consideration the strange New World that is emerging, in which we practice our faith.
The UU ministers of Northern Virginia have their monthly meeting in our church. We met last on September 19 and shared personal feelings, and what was going on in our congregations at that time after the terrorist attacks.
I can’t remember what triggered it, but something someone said, at that meeting, made me think of a particular book, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder.
I first read the book when I was in my twenties, and it made quite an impression on me. Fledgling theologian that I was then, I embraced with gusto that little novel that examined the themes of fate and love. Wilder’s question was essentially: Is there a reason, a purpose to our lives and what happens to us, or is life meaningless, and all things that occur basically random in nature? Or, it might be put this way, “Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual’s own will?”
Of course this book came to my mind after the attacks, when, as a result of such terrible destruction and loss of life of innocent civilians, we have been jostled to our core. What can be made of “Meaning” in the face of this incredible and devastating event?
Wilder’s novel begins with the collapse of the bridge of San Luis Rey. The five people on the bridge at the time that it broke apart, plunged to their deaths in the river gorge below. For the Franciscan monk, Brother Juniper, the question was, why were those five persons singled out to die on that particular day, in that particular way. For Juniper, there must be a reason, a purpose for why the event happened. Either God governs the universe according to a divine plan or the collapse of the bridge is a meaningless phenomenon and the universe is without divine purpose.
Through Brother Juniper’s painstaking analysis of detail upon detail, getting to know about the lives of the dead and their survivors, he concludes that there is no reason for the death of the five. They did nothing to warrant their fate.
Brother Juniper’s conclusion, after so many years of diligent and detailed study, was that there is no plan or purpose; life and death are determined by chance. God was not “in the details” after all. The church, of course, did not accept Brother Juniper’s careful work, and his book was burned at the stake, along with its author.
What might Juniper think of these terrorist attacks today? What would he have to say when he found out that the perpetrators were motivated by a religious zeal; that God was very much a part of the plan, at least for the terrorists. And, if he were in New York City following the destruction of the two World Trace Center towers, what could he believe about Divine Providence, or even about the existence of God, after he heard of the death toll?
In the hours after the World Trade Center’s twin towers fell, New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani predicted that the number of people dead in the ruins would be “more than any of us can bear ultimately.” He was correct.
Particular religions, and Religion in general, are created by individuals and groups for the purpose of helping us make sense of life. By establishing particular stories and rituals, structures and moral teachings, -- religious beliefs and faith communities are then able to help us establish meaning, direction, and comfort for our lives.
But, clearly, through the actions of this particular terrorist band of Sunni Muslims, and their allies, we see that when the“Meaning” created by a religious belief becomes rigidly controlled and interpreted, distorted in its orthodoxy, and exaggeratedly exclusive, it can turn out to be profoundly dangerous to others. It is as if it has denied its life-giving source, and exists only to enslave minds and hearts.
Much of the world is grieving now; America is grieving; each of us is grieving. The reconstruction of meaning is the central process in grieving. I think we’re all, collectively and personally, involved in re-framing reality; seeking one we can trust.
We may need to slow down.
I came across a copy of a talk given last May by Paul Greenberg, editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Mr. Greenberg was being honored as this year’s Distinguished Journalist, a Lecture sponsored by the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Media and Public Policy.
His talk was titled, “The Loss of Meaning: Searching for Significance in the Instant News Ocean.”
He said, “The problem with finding the thread of meaning in the news is that there is so much news and so little meaning. … the data pour out indiscriminately—until our senses are overloaded and overwhelmed.
“… Still, everybody always asks, what’s new? What’s old might be a lot better question, for in history, in literature and poetry, we might find what the present lacks, which is direction.
“Just try making the circuit of your cable channels in the middle of the night within 30 seconds. The result is a whirring, whirling kaleidoscope of all America and maybe all of the world as seen by some distracted and unfortunate combination of Alfred Hitchcock and Geraldo Rivera. The tube has become a kind of gigantic spin cycle, like your clothes dryer grown mad and gargantuan, but minus the lint catcher – which is what American opinion really needs.
“Click after click of the remote control and the world goes spinning through the whole cycle of one voyeuresque scene after another: Murder, mayhem, cowboys, Jerry Springer, car chases, stupid court cases, pornography, the secret success in business or religion or bodybuilding….. Just call our toll-free number and have your credit card ready.
We now offer Analysis in the form of shouting matches, or maybe it’s the other way around. … Only occasionally does sanity surface, when … sometimes in the middle of the night you happen to come across those perfectly silent pictures from NASA, visions of whole continents, of the curvature of the Earth, and we obtain at least some perspective, some idea of our place in time and space.”
Mr. Greenberg would like journalism to go to a deeper level of conception. He’d like to see events and ideas treated not in isolation, not within the boundaries of a single story, but in a context beyond their own transience.
He says, “It means going back to the roots of our ideas, if we can still find those roots. … Commentary should invoke shared experience and build on it, and not pretend the world begins anew each day. … And if we just shake our heads sadly and say War is Hell and go to the next indigestible chunk of news, the next event, then of course we fill find it equally mystifying and equally meaningless.”
The events of September 11, and all we’ve been learning since then, are overwhelming. How has the world changed? What does it all mean? As my mother used to say in response to these kinds of big questions, “God knows!”
And, speaking of God. Henry Ernstthal introduced me to a pretty funny magazine which does parody on the news. It’s called “The Onion.” The September 26th edition I read on the Internet, had stories with headlines like, “U.S. Vows to Defeat Whoever It Is We’re At War With,” and, “Hijackers Surprised To Find Themselves in Hell,” and, my favorite -- “Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake.” How’s that as a model for our Search for Meaning in a Meaningless World?
Even Thornton Wilder, in his play, The Skin of Our Teeth, written in 1942, had one of his characters say this: “My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate – that’s my philosophy.”
But, back to God --- here’s the latest news about Divine Providence versus Free Will!
From The Onion. The headline reads: “God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule.”
NEW YORK—Responding to recent events on Earth, God, the omniscient creator-deity worshipped by billions of followers of various faiths for more than 6,000 years, angrily clarified His longtime stance against humans killing each other Monday.
“Look, I don’t know, maybe I haven’t made myself completely clear, so for the record, here it is again, said the Lord, His divine face betraying visible emotion during a press conference near the site of the fallen Twin Towers. “Somehow, people keep coming up with the idea that I want them to kill their neighbor. Well, I don’t. And to be honest, I’m really getting sick and tired of it. Get it straight. Not only do I not want anybody to kill anyone, but I specifically commanded you not to, in really simple terms that anybody ought to be able to understand.” …
“I tried to put it in the simplest possible terms for you people, so you’d get it straight, … but somehow, it all gets twisted around and, next thing you know, somebody’s spouting off some nonsense about, ‘God said I have to kill this guy, God wants me to kill that guy, it’s God’s will,’” God continued. “It’s not God’s will, all right? News flash: ‘God’s will’ equals ‘Don’t murder people.’”
Worse yet, many of the worst violators claim that their actions are justified by passages in the Bible, Torah, or Qur’an.
“To be honest, there’s some contradictory stuff in there, okay?” God said. “So I can see how it could be pretty misleading. I admit it. I did My best to inspire them, but a lot of imperfect human agents has misinterpreted My message over the millennia. Frankly, much of the material that got in there is dogmatic, doctrinal b---s---. I turn My head for a second and, suddenly, all this stuff about homosexuality gets into Leviticus, and everybody thinks it’s God’s will to kill gays. It absolutely drives Me up the wall.”
God praised t he overwhelming majority of his Muslim followers a “wonderful, pious people,” calling the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks rare exceptions.
“This whole medieval concept of the jihad, or holy war, had all but vanished from the Muslim world in, like, the 10th century, and with good reason,” God said. “There’s no such thing as a holy war, only unholy ones. …”
God stressed that His remarks were not directed exclusively at Islamic extremists, but rather at anyone whole ideological zealotry overrides his or her ability to comprehend the core message of all world religions.
“I don’t care what faith you are, everybody’s been making the same mistake since the dawn of time,” God said. “The Muslims massacre the Hindus, the Hindus massacre the Muslims. The Buddhists, everybody massacres the Buddhists. The Jews, don’t even get me started on the hardline, right-wing, Meir Kahane-loving Israeli nationalists, man. And the Christians? You people believe in a Messiah who says, ‘Turn the other cheek,’ but you’ve been killing everybody you can get your hands on since the Crusades.”
Growing increasingly wrathful, God continued: “Can’t you people see? What are you, morons? There are a ton of different religious traditions out there, and different cultures worship Me in different ways. But the basic message is always the same: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Shintoism… every religious belief system under the sun, they all say you’re supposed to love your neighbors, folks! It’s not that hard a concept to grasp.”
“Why would you think I’d want anything else? Humans don’t need religion or God as an excuse to kill each other—you’ve been doing that without any help from Me since you were freaking apes!” God said. “The whole point of believing in God is to have a higher standard of behavior. How obvious can you get?” …
“I’m talking to all of you, here!” continued God. His voice raised to a shout. “Do you hear Me? I don’t you to kill anybody. I’m against it, across the board. How many times do I have to say it? Don’t kill each other anymore—ever! …
Upon completing His outburst, God fell silent, standing quietly at the podium for several moments. Then, witnesses reported, God’s shoulders began to shake, and He wept.
Thornton Wilder, in his book, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, comes down on the side of randomness. There doesn’t seem to be any reason for the bad things that happen. These things just happen.
Randomness is defined as “accidental or haphazard; an apparent absence of cause, planning, or design.” It implies not being able to predict outcomes, or not being able to find any pattern in a series of outcomes.
If you believe in the notion of Free Will, then you must believe that human behavior is ultimately “random!” I mean, if it’s known ahead of time what course of action someone is going to choose, then his or her choice is not completely "free," is it?
But, a pretty savvy scientist, Albert Einstein, said – “God does not play dice with the Universe!”
Chalk one up for Divine Providence or determinism. God calls the shots!
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross said -- “Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from.”
Chalk one up for Indeterminable Cause. And that means there is a cause behind events, but our knowledge of the cause is incomplete. The mystics and the agnostics snuggle together on this one!
You have choices of just how to find or redefine meaning in the randomness of things. That’s what Human Beings do; we’re the meaning-makers. It’s in our nature.
Stay close to family and loved ones. Pour out your love.
Come to church to talk about the current crisis – in groups. Talk about your feelings and what needs to be done.
Do something – individually and together. Give generously of yourself, for no reason!
Discover new possibilities and grow into them.
Change something.
Don’t avoid laughter.
Thornton Wilder tells us that the answer to his question is that there really is no answer. But, he doesn’t leave the reader with a bleak picture of life and death. At the end of the book, he shows us characters who were brought together because of the accident at the bridge. People who would not otherwise have met. Who together can now perhaps affect a greater good than they would have on their own. Wilder tells us that the real point is love. In the words of one of the characters, he concludes this way:
“But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
Go forth, and change something!
Benediction
Now go forth with faith that life is worth living, that defeat and adversity can be transformed into victory and hope, that love is eternal, and that life is stronger than death.
And may that faith inspire us to live our lives with dignity, love and courage in the days and weeks ahead.
-William R. Murry
Amen, Shalom, and Blessed Be!
