October 05, 10:30am (Sare Gordy)
Our lives, indeed the whole world, is not a set formula of interlocking causes and effects that have conspired to write a verdict upon us. We get to choose the meaning of our lives. We get to choose the meaning of life itself. We get to choose the commentary and footnotes that narrate the meaning of the events in our lives to all who might want to learn from us.
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SERMONS AT TRINITY
Sunday, October 5, 2008
“Steam Room Diary”
The Rev. R. Cameron Miller
***
Good morning.
This morning I offer you the latest installment in the series called Steam Room Diary.
If you have not enjoyed one of these stories before they are real-life stories
that real people tell me while really sitting in the steam room at the Jewish Community Center. Some of have been bizarre, others surprising and all of them amazingly personal.
I do not know the identity of this man, as is usually the case in the Steam Room Diary. He is 87 and began his catalogue of woe with the stock market crash of 1929. His father lost 1 million dollars in one day – and then he added, that was when a million dollars was real money.
He said he remembered people coming to the door asking for bread or a sandwich, “And it wasn’t just one person coming to your door in a single day, but 5, 6 or 7 almost every day” he said.
He talked about people he had known at the time, friends of his family since he was only 8 years old, who had held high positions in business and ended up riding the rails in search of something. “Not like now” he said, as if our current woes were nothing. But that led him to tell me something else.
Seems that six months ago he met with his financial advisor and said things were starting to remind him of those dark days before the Great Depression.
He asked his advisor if maybe he shouldn’t put his stocks into bonds or something else that was safer.
His advisor said he could do that but he didn’t recommend it – “The market will go back up eventually” his advisor offered, “But I’m 87” the old man reminded his advisor, “I don’t have 10 or 20 years to wait.” Nevertheless, he took the advice and left his stocks alone. “I lost $200,000 dollars in one day last week” he grumbled.
Then he told me about a run-in he had had with “the Commies” as he called them. It was difficult for me to make out the exact nature of the conflict but it was a public and political struggle of some kind, just after WWII. He was involved in some kind of debate or power struggle with “the Commies” and reckoned he had lost argument, the memory and regret of which has stayed with him to this day.
He told me he doesn’t like Socialism or “the Commies” but he was now ready to begrudgingly admit some regulations are needed to restrain the greed. (Greed was my word, I think he called it “ambitions”).
Then he told me that he had been in business until he retired twenty years ago. He sold his business and because of something he had neglected to plan for, and that his accountants had not done properly, he ended up owing over $300,000 in state and federal taxes.
But that paled in comparison to his other losses. Two of his three children died, one of cancer and another from a heart attack.
As we got up to leave the Steam Room I remarked at how many tough times and losses he has been through. “It’s no different than anyone else, everyone goes through it” he said. “You just got to keep going on.”
They were striking words after having heard the depth of his losses over time, but even more striking was the emotional quality of them.
He said it without bitterness. He said it with a softness that didn’t deny his own pain but that put his own pain in perspective with everyone else’s. He said it without any sense of victimization. He said it without any sense of resentment. He said it with humility.
And he told me something else. “I try to look up at the sky and enjoy the beauty of the world and life…you know what I mean?” he asked as if slightly embarrassed. “Oh yeah, I know what you mean.” I answered.
Years and years ago, as a rector in my first congregation, there was an older woman I used to visit every month. She insisted that I bring her communion because there was no way she could possibly make it to church. While she was unable to make it to Church on Sunday, she was able to play Bridge and go out to lunch with friends, and other such things that seemed a lot like
what it would require to come to church. You get the picture.
Anyway, every visit would begin with my asking how she was and her beginning with the phrase: “Oh Cam, you just don’t know the trouble I’ve seen…” And then she would tell me all the difficulties, challenges, pains and hurts of her long life in roughly the same sequence and detail each month.
Now what I am about to say is pretty obvious and I don’t want you to feel as though I am insulting your intelligence, but it is something with which I think we need to remind ourselves from time to time.
Our lives, what happens to us, what we are able to do and accomplish as well as our failures, is not an objective set of facts that must be put together in exactly the same way, the right way, every time as if they were the elements of a chemical formula.
We get to choose the ordering of our experiences; and we get to choose the meaning we construe from the events of our lives; and we get to choose the filter through which we take them in and learn from them.
Our lives, indeed the whole world, is not a set formula of interlocking causes and effects that have conspired to write a verdict upon us. We get to choose the meaning of our lives. We get to choose the meaning of life itself. We get to choose the commentary and footnotes that narrate the meaning of the events in our lives to all who might want to learn from us.
Isaiah, Tupac Shakur and Matthew are stewardship parables; they are negative evaluations turned in on the stewards of justice. As parables they recognize the bad behavior but they do not explain the cause.
Do you know what the first and most critical element of good stewardship is? It is our perspective.
If the glass is half empty we are going to be anxious about scarcity and it may well drive us to become stingy, greedy or paranoid.
If the glass is half full then when we are thirsty we do not fear that we won’t be able to quench our thirst. If the glass is half full, we will assume that even if it is not exactly what we want to drink at the time, we will be able to find something that will slake our thirst.
I’m not talking about being a Pollyanna and pretending everything is peachy
when in fact the dark forces of greed and the violent passions of hate are there with us all the time – and not just around us but IN us.
I am talking about our choice, yours and mine, to perceive the world and our lives as taking place in the crucible of scarcity or in the ocean of abundance. If we perceive the world and our lives are driven by the forces of scarcity,
we will assume that the problem is there is not enough, and then the challenge is to make sure that we are ones who get what we need and want.
If the problem is there is not enough then the solution is winning.
Whether we are talking about affection and approval from our parents, or cash, rice and cars, if the problem is that there isn’t enough then our task is to get it before someone else takes it.
But think about this: If we perceive that the world and our lives take place in the context of abundance, then the problem is distribution.
If we really do live in a world of abundance then our task is to improve the methods of distribution and the sharing of recourses. If we really do live in a world of abundance then our task is to use our strength and power to improve distribution rather than winning personally. In fact, in a more abundant life, winning is not something you or I do personally, it is something that happens when we improve distribution.
My homely little punch line for today is that it really matters what we think and how we think about it. If the frame in which we view life, our lives and the world itself, is the frame of scarcity, then we will be very different people than if our frame is abundance.
The first principle of stewardship, and the first element of becoming good stewards, is perspective.
So I am going to invite us to cogitate on that a little bit as we come forward to light candles. There may be a bunch of things or people you have in mind to light candles for today, but I am inviting us to enter into a prayer for abundance – the hope and the faith and the perspective of living a more abundant life even as we walk in the midst of our losses.
Amen.
