Our Common Life

The Rev. Mark Ward, Minister
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

March 8, 2009

READING

From the first Inaugural Address of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, March 4, 1933

This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.

In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone. More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. . . . The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.

SERMON

Last Wednesday marked the 76th anniversary of the day when Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke the words you heard earlier, a moment beyond the memory, indeed the lifespan of most people in this room. And yet the scene reported from that cold, grey day in March has a strangely familiar feel: throngs of people gathered around the steps of the Capitol, stretching around the reflecting pool and onto the mall beyond, anxious amid stunning economic loss, looking to hear from a newly elected leader bringing a new administration that promised change and new hope to a struggling nation.

We need to be wary of drawing too many parallels between 1933 and 2009. The economic catastrophe facing Roosevelt, after all, was far deeper, direr and more longstanding than what our nation faces today. And yet, in important ways the stresses placed upon us are not that dissimilar.

Listen to Roosevelt’s litany: values have shrunken to fantastic levels, taxes are rising, our ability to pay has fallen, government of all kinds faces curtailed income, the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade, industries are failing, savings are evaporating, unemployment rates are soaring and many who have jobs “toil with little return.”

Sound familiar? No, this is not the 1930s, but there’s no question that all of us are hurting, from captains of industry down to the minimum wage worker. With credit locked up, the largest banks and manufacturers flirting with bankruptcy, home values dropping, foreclosures rising, and unemployment rising into double digits around the country, it’s getting hard to find a bright spot.

We place some hope in the activism of a new administration seeking to shore up the lynch pins of the economy – something the government neglected to do when the Depression came in the late 1920s. But even then, officials confess they are navigating in uncharted waters. No one can be sure how soon or even whether these steps ultimately will turn the economy around. Today, no less than in 1933, it is fear – fear that paralyzes action, that distances us from one another – that poses the greatest risk for us as people and as a nation. And the response to that fear is ultimately a spiritual one.

I am taken with Roosevelt’s comment at his inauguration, before he introduced the ills facing the country, that “they concern, thank God, only material things” – only material things – and, later, his observation that “our distress comes from no failure of substance.” The natural world, our innate human capacity – the ultimate source of all of our wealth – are still available to us. Where we have run into trouble is in how and to what we fix value.

Roosevelt called for us to restore “the ancient truths” to “the temple of our civilization,” truths that speak to “social values” beyond “mere monetary profit.” In the end, he says, “these dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto, but to minister to ourselves and our (fellows).”

Others have taken note of another parallel between the days leading up to our current economic collapse and the 1920s. Both were characterized by a rapid run-up in monetary wealth based on increasingly shaky ground. You’ve heard the drill, I expect, of how deregulation, globalization, productivity growth, tax cuts and the rest fueled an explosion in corporate profits, which in turn fueled growth in the stock market and with it real estate and other assets. Much of this wealth went to a tiny share of the wealthiest Americans, but some also trickled down to others, and it attracted the interest of many more seeking a way to get a share.

The stock market offered a way in, but few had the time or understanding to follow it and so trusted their money to managers. Investors got a share of the returns, but those managing the money benefitted far more and continued to press for higher and higher profits. These pressures led to increasingly risky practices, such as the marketing of increasingly obscure securities that few understood. Meanwhile, real estate went bananas. In hot markets properties were flipped over and over, pushing values into the stratosphere. Sales drove profitability, and so in time people were encouraged to buy homes they couldn’t afford for little or no investment of their own. The economy could run on these fumes for only so long before an accounting came.

Today, of course, many of us are left feeling a bit like victims. It wasn’t my decision, we say, to participate in this risky stuff. And it’s true that most of us are far removed from the financial world where all this happened. And yet in a sense it was our decision.

We expected to see a nice positive number each month when we opened our 401-K statements. We had an expectation of a certain style of home we would occupy, a certain model of car we would drive, a certain locale for our vacations, and so on. Part of the fear we feel is grounded what is essentially a loss of identity, an identity based in large degree in a sense of our own wealth. And this has been so even for those of us who don’t consider ourselves particularly wealthy. Easy credit gave us a way to feel that we were.

I think Roosevelt was right to frame the problem as a way of living in the world in which we each expected, in his words, “to be ministered unto.” We present ourselves to the world in terms of needs to be met, needs that our culture has encouraged us to measure by way of acquisition and accumulation. It is how we measure fulfillment and success. And yet, what it has succeeded in creating is a petulant sense of entitlement that pits one against another and ultimately each of us against the interests of the whole.

If we’re looking for an indicator of how deeply we each have bought into that way of thinking, we might ask, how many of us can look at our losses – the 40% decline in our IRA, the second car we have to give up, the vacations we have to forego – and repeat Roosevelt’s words: “thank God, they’re only material things”? Meanwhile, there are many more whose losses are so much more severe, who have lost jobs, who are having trouble putting food on the table, who are on the brink of losing their homes or being evicted from an apartment. And they’re not just out there somewhere. They are here, too, in this community, in these pews.

What might it take for us to shift our perspective from the receiving mode, expecting to be ministered to, to the giving mode, owning our duty to minister to others, and even to ourselves, by acknowledging our own fears and disappointments?

The upside of tumults like this, as Roosevelt suggested three quarters of a century ago, is that they give us an opportunity to shuffle the deck and shed habits of thought and action that bring us grief and to help us refocus on that which brings us an abundance of what truly serves our lives.

While I wish the Obama administration well in its efforts to reshape the economy and restore trust and confidence in the marketplace, I believe that resolving the deep fear we are living with will take more than getting people spending again. As I said earlier, the solution we require is a spiritual one; that is, it has to do with our understanding of what ultimately matters. And that isn’t something that we find in the marketplace.

The world’s literature is full of stories of protagonists who set out into the world, nearly always, as they say, “to seek their fortune,” who return eventually to learn that their true fortune is to be found in service and in love.

What ultimately matters, they learn, is not the pile of goodies that they have accumulated. The hunger for bigger and better stuff is one that can never be satisfied, and the joy of ownership fades quickly. Instead, it is the connections with others that feed them, the opportunity to open one’s heart to another in friendship or in love, to use one’s gifts in service to a larger good.

This discovery is grounded in a recognition of the ultimate, irrevocable worth of each person, seeing in each person not a means to the accumulation of goods or the advancement of our own wealth, but as an end, someone with whom we are in relationship, even if at first in the most tangential ways.

The nameless terror that FDR spoke to has at its center the fear of abandonment, of losing our grip on all that we have come to use to define ourselves and being cut adrift, left alone to perish. It is more than a matter of economic need; there is a spiritual sickness that divides us, a fortress mentality that defines our interests in the narrowest ways and leaves us isolated from each other.

So, I am intrigued by the emergence in recent days of new centers of activity intended to foster connections between people. One is a movement to create what are called “common security clubs.” They are groups that organize for study, mutual aid, and support. People share meals, buy in bulk, and strategize over such issues as how to help participants weatherize homes or get out of debt. In some places it is churches, including several Unitarian Universalist churches, that are the organizing points for these groups.

Here at this church we have already begun looking for ways of building broader community connections. More than 70 people attended our first F4 – free food and family fun – event, where we gathered for a potluck and watched a movie. Look for further events coming at the end of March, April and May.

We also post job openings that we hear about on the membership board in Sandburg Hall, and our social justice initiatives in the wider community are growing. I’m sure there’s more we could to do be of service to each other. If you have ideas, let me or a church leader know.

All of this is more than just nice, neighborly activity. It is practical theology at work, an opportunity for us to walk our talk in service to our vision of the beloved community. It is part of our recognition that we are not in this alone, that ours is a common life that is built by the ties that we create, honor and strengthen by our commitment, our caring, our concern.

Seven centuries ago at the height of the Black Plague in England, a Christian mystic by the name of Julian of Norwich lived alone in a stone cottage attached to an old stone church. We know about her because of a book she wrote, the first by a woman in the English language, that described religious experiences she had had during a severe fever in which she nearly died.

Today, though, she is famous mostly for one quote, words she is said to have spoken to villagers seeking spiritual support at a time of death and despair. “All shall be well, and all shall be well; and all manner of things shall be well.”

People have debated what Julian must have meant by that counsel. It seems unlikely that she intended it merely as a bland assurance that everything will turn out for the best. I prefer to think that she was counseling those villagers that their resources to endure their suffering were deeper than they knew and that if they would trust in those resources they would find a way through.

Last year my colleague Meg Barnhouse, minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Spartanburg, South Carolina, wrote a song centered on Julian’s words and the questions those words can’t help bring to our mind.

Julian, the lyrics ask, do you not know about sorrow, do you not know about pain, do you not know about hunger, do you not know about shame. Julian, do you not know about loneliness, do you not know about disease, do you not know cruelty. it has brought me to my knees.

And Julian responds, no one does not know about sorrow, about pain, no one does not know about hunger, about shame. No one does not know about loneliness, about disease, no one does not know about cruelty, and, yes, it’s brought me to my knees, and there I heard:

All will be well, all will be well, All manner of things will be well

And then Julian adds, babygirl, do you not know about tenderness, do you not know about friends, do you not know about the spirit, that it’s only love that never ends, and so,

All will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well.

My friends, it is no bland assurance to say that all will be well. We have the inner resources to weather this storm, to survive the losses that wash around us. They are, thank goodness, only material things. In the meantime, we have only begun to imagine the fullness of life, to know the power that is in us if we would join our solitudes in the communion of struggle. Even amid our losses, what we still have is our human ingenuity and this good earth, and we still have each other joined together in this community committed to a common life.

And that is enough.