Communities, large and small, thrive when they are ordered according to helpful, and respected rules. Drive on the right side of the road. Stop when the light is red. We bristle under oppressive laws. But the answer isn’t no rules, but the right rules.
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For the next several weeks, I want to talk about the second of the three spiritual questions.
You remember the first spiritual question because we talked about it all fall: the question of Identity, the spiritual question “Who am I?”
The second spiritual question is the question of Meaning. The spiritual question of “Why does it matter?”
The third spiritual question, which we will get to in the spring, is the question of Purpose, “What should I do?”
The question of meaning, “Why does it matter?” asks whether there is any larger goal for our lives. What are we giving our lives to? What’s it all for, anyway?
Without a sense that life matters, our lives have no meaning. We could do this, or that, or do nothing. We could live another hundred years, or die tomorrow. We could vote Republican or Democrat, or trash the planet, or switch to a vegan diet. We could quit work, or give to the poor or steal from the poor.
Why does it matter?
Does it feel like your life matters?
If you felt instinctually as I went through that little list of examples that some of those choices just felt wrong, while others felt right, the spiritual question is why?
From where does a sense of right and wrong come? It has to be right to something, or to someone, according to some standard. If something that is completely possible to do is wrong to do, then it isn’t the laws of physics being violated, but some spiritual law. A spiritual rule of right and wrong.
Why does it matter if I’m a moral person? Why does kindness matter? Why does generosity matter? Why does love matter? Why does life matter?
If you’re not a spiritually minded person, you might not be excited about thinking too deeply about a larger meaning to life, and you would just say, it doesn’t matter. It’s all just atoms bouncing around in a void. There’s no meaning. There’s no why. It’s all just an accident of matter and energy following unfeeling physical laws and we’re fooling ourselves that there’s any bigger sense to it.
It would make no difference if it all disappeared tomorrow, or if it had never happened in the first place. The planet Venus is just as worthy as the planet Earth. A rock is just as valuable as a person. All morality is just a human invention. And ideas like worth and dignity, and also justice and compassion, and respect, and responsibility, have no referent to any really existing thing. You’re free to follow or ignore. You should choose what makes you happy, because it doesn’t make a bit of difference, and there’s no judge at the end, and even if there were, there’s no standard of cosmic justice that a judge could measure your life again.
You don’t succeed or fail at life. You just live.
You have to obey the law of gravity, but the spiritual law? Eh.
So take what you want. Use what you want. Have fun without thought for others. Kick a dog. Jump off a cliff. Invade Ukraine. Storm the capital. Whatever. You might pay a social price, because human beings impose morality on each other for our own social purposes. But ultimately, nothing matters. Horrible people might get thrown in jail. But that doesn’t really matter either, in any larger sense. And life in jail may not be pleasant but it might be interesting.
Which is the only valuable thing.
And again, if that feels repulsive to you. You have to ask why? Why does it matter?
Why aren’t we all cynical hedonistic narcissists?
If you think a human life ought to be more than just screwing around until you die, claiming your own piece of personal pleasure, and being anarchic just to relieve the boredom of existence. Well great. I agree with you. Life should be more than random flailing against the void. But then, what?
What are you living your life, for?
What are you living for?
In one of the best books of the 20th century, Vicktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, he shares a lesson that he learned while living through World War II in a German concentration camp. Amidst the horrors of that existence, some people gave up. Even without the abuse and torture and murder of the Nazis, some of the prisoners simply faded away. They stopped interacting with other prisoners. They stopped talking. They stopped eating.
And other prisoners, like Victor Frankl, experienced the same abuse and degradation, and yet they kept going. They made their bed. They dressed themselves carefully. They were kind when they could be. They cared for themselves and watched out for each other. They survived.
What was the difference?
Frankl interviewed his fellow prisoners. And what he learned is that the survivors were living, because they had something to live for. They had a loved one outside the camp they hoped to see again. They had a symphony they were composing in their head and wanted eventually to write out and hear performed. They had a dream. They had a reason to live, and that reason kept them alive.
Frankl keeps coming back to a quote from Nietzsche, ““He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
What we’re talking about, in this question of meaning, is the theological issue of ultimacy. Every spiritual question eventually asks us to confront the largest possible context. Ultimately, once we get down to the deepest level, or reach up to the very highest we can imagine, or broaden out into the widest possible scope, at the place where we meet the universal that contains all else, what is existence for?
As I did when we discussed identity in the fall, over the next several weeks I’m going to give several different answers that might serve as the why, for you.
As with identity, there are a lot of different possible answers. Different people live for different things.
So as I present different options over the next weeks, I hope you’ll listen and consider whether that option has any particular resonance for you. Do you care about that thing, or not particularly. What is the thing that is your reason for living?
That’s the question.
When I teach this question in an adult R.E. class. I begin by asking everyone to write down just one thing that’s important to them.
Think of something for yourself now. One thing that you love. One thing that you care about. One thing that you think is valuable. One thing that you think you could give your life for, or maybe are giving your life to.
Maybe it’s a loved one you’re caring for. Maybe it’s a symphony you’re writing.
And once everybody in the class has written down that one thing. I then ask, “why?”
Why is that so important? Why do you love that? Why is that valuable? Why does it matter?
So, in coming up with a “why” we go a step deeper – toward the ultimate.
What bigger concept or value is represented in that one thing you wrote down? That thing is an example of a larger category of important things. Love. Or beauty. Or wisdom. What is that larger thing that makes your first example important?
And then once everybody has answered that question. Then I ask, “Why?”
“Why is Love important, or beauty, or wisdom or whatever you wrote down important?” Why does that matter?
I call this the two-year old method of getting to the ultimate. Like a two-year old, you can just keep asking why, endlessly. And every time you ask “why?” you take one step further into defining what is really important.
Until eventually, like the parent of a two-year, you just give up. No further questions. You just say, “because.” Eventually, after the third or fourth, or seventh, round of asking why, you arrive at a source of meaning so great and so self-evidently important (at least to you) that it needs no further, deeper, justification. It just is. By and for itself. That’s the thing. This is what it’s all about. That’s the ultimate.
Today I want to begin with an ultimate that may not seem as obvious as some others we will get to, but is certainly meaningful to some people. And some people arrange their lives around this thing.
I mean the ultimacy of “order”
A place for everything. And everything in its place. A sense of rightness. That the world is ordered in a certain way. And our lives are ordered properly. And the universe is ordered properly. The spiritual rules.
Meaning in life is created by discerning the order of the universe, and then fitting our lives into that order.
The Taoists speak about this principle as recognizing the natural flow of creation and then allowing our lives to move with the flow rather than fighting against it.
Orthodox Jews study the Torah as God’s rule book for humanity. It’s all set out there in the commandments. How you rise in the morning. What you eat. How you organize your relationships. When to work and rest and pray. How to resolve conflicts. What you owe your neighbors, and strangers. How to worship.
Meaning in life comes in knowing the rules of creation and in following them.
For some folks the rules in life are learned from a religious tradition. For others, we just have a sense in our head of the way things are supposed to be.
The vase is put on the table right there. And if the cleaning lady dusts it and puts it back slightly to the left, I will come along and move it back where it belongs. The vase is where it is because that’s the “right” place for that vase.
How you set a table. What clothes you wear to the beach, to a dinner party, to the opera. What you say to the queen. What you say to you friend’s mother. Women and children first. The response to the reading of the gospel. Sending a thank you card. What you do on the anniversary of a loved one’s death. There are right ways to live. We should do our best to live the right way.
When I was studying for the ministry, one of the requirements was that I worked for a summer as a chaplain at the UCLA Medical Center. I did that in the summer between the two years I did my internship here, so some of you might remember me doing my chaplaincy work.
I studied with a group of student chaplains like myself. And after one day at the hospital, I gave a ride home to one of the other student chaplains.
I was living in Sherman Oaks at the time and this guy also lived somewhere in the valley, so to drive home from UCLA we drove through the Sepulveda Pass. And, this being rush hour going north through the Sepulveda Pass, the 405 was completely packed.
No problem. I was enjoying the company. We were chatting and listening to music. The guy was a Catholic so he had a lot of questions about Unitarian Universalism. And the guy was Filipino so he had a lot of questions about Americans.
At one point, stuck in traffic, my friend looked over to the shoulder of the road and he pointed out that nobody was driving on the shoulder. Bumper to bumper cars in every other lane. Nobody moving hardly at all. And here was a whole additional lane. Wide enough for a car. Completely empty. And completely available except nobody seemed willing to use it.
In the Phillipines, he said, people would drive in that lane.
I pointed out that if people started driving on the shoulder then instantly that lane would be just as crowded as all the rest, so it wouldn’t really help. Furthermore, if a disabled car needed to use the shoulder, and the shoulder were full of traffic, it would make traffic even worse. Or if an emergency vehicle needed to get through to take someone to the hospital, or put out a fire, they’d have no way to get through.
He said he understood all that. And that in the Phillipines the traffic is worse than here for all those reasons. But he wondered. What made Americans follow the rules?
And thinking about it, I thought, at least for me, it wasn’t so much that I had carefully reasoned through the consequences of not following the rule, it was simply the rule itself that was meaningful. I like knowing the rules. I like knowing that we all agree to follow the rules. I want rules to make sense, if I think about them. But I followed the rule, not because it made sense, but because the right rules make life predictable, manageable, ordered.
I want a world of laws. I want people who break the laws to be held accountable.
I hate shopping in cultures where you’re supposed to bargain for everything. I just want to be told the price. I want bicycles to stop at the red light, and not ride on the sidewalk, and not go the wrong way down a one-way street. I want bus riders to pay the fare, not hop on at the rear doors. I want cigarette smokers to throw the butt in the trash, not in the gutter. If you’re supposed to water only two days a week I don’t want to see anybody watering on a forbidden day.
But I think it you apply the two-year old method of getting to the ultimate to the importance of order: “Why is order important?” I think that ultimately, what folks who are drawn to this mode of meaning are looking for is a different word: the quality of “perfection.”
All of the ultimates that we name, will end up have a quality of the divine. Because when we speak of divinity we speak of ultimate.
The universe is ordered, because it was intended to be this way. Because this is the right way. Because God is perfect, going against the order is going against the divine perfection.
God doesn’t need us to offer sacrifices: rams in thousands, or streams of oil. God needs us to be just and kind. To follow the rules. To live an ordered, peaceful life, in quiet fellowship. Everything has its proper role, its proper function, its proper place. Where you place a vase, which fork you use for the fish course, following the rules of the road, also implies that there’s a place for me, a proper usefulness for my life, a necessary role intended for me in this divinely ordered scheme.
The sense of rightness felt by a well-organized closet, or immediately being able to put your hand on that document we discussed nine months ago, or knowing the prayer to say when the bread is broken, means that the universe is designed correctly, purposively, in order. Divine perfection, able to be read in the stars, is available in our own lives, too. And by discerning the order and following its rules, we support the divine will, and give meaning to our lives.