February 2006

Isaiah 43:1-3

There was a time in my life when I was almost completely focused on the dark and discouraging aspects of life. If I experienced any degree of happiness, I would feel guilty. In fact, I wouldn't allow myself to experience any kind of pleasure without some guilt or to enjoy any material property without feeling guilty. My orientation was that as long as anybody in this world was suffering or lacking, I didn't have the right to enjoy anything. I think I was trying to stay in touch with suffering and with people in trouble, but the way I was doing it wasn't very helpful to me or anybody around me. There were three influences which finally changed my thinking.

The first came at a wedding reception for a young couple from Switzerland. They had been studying in the States and decided while here to get married in New York. Friends and family came from Europe for the wedding, so many that the parents rented a bus to take them around. The reception was held in a Swiss restaurant; they took over the whole place. It has been my experience that Europeans really know how to celebrate around a meal. It was that kind of evening--more than three hours long, with lots of warmth and love and laughter and humor, a very happy, upbeat, embracing time. It was just the kind of experience that would cause me to have waves of guilt. I wasn't supposed to be having this much fun.

Through most of the evening I sat next to the parents of the groom, both of them physicians. I was really taken in by their life stories. During World War II they had worked for the International Red Cross. They had been assigned to monitor prisons in Europe during that dark time. They had seen the worst of the worst first-hand. Yet these two people, very compassionately in touch with some of the most horrifying aspects of human experience, were celebrating--laughing, loving, upbeat people.

When I got home that night I couldn't stop thinking about this experience, and I had an insight. What I had experienced at that joyous wedding reception was a standard for the way we all ought to be and can be. We should be finding ways of coming together as family and friends, loving, affirming, and enjoying each other, celebrating, laughing, and having a good time. We need to look for the wells of deep joy, I realized, and then drink from them.

The second teaching influence was a Puerto Rican man named Ray. He was the superintendent of an apartment house across from the church I was serving in Brooklyn. Because of his thoughtful and curious mind I called him my street philosopher friend, although he might not have finished high school. One day we met on the street and after the "how are you, I'm fine," we got into conversation. I really wasn't fine. I was discouraged about something and started complaining.

And philosopher Ray looked at me with a side-glance. "Reverend, I want to tell you something."

"What?" I asked. He responded, "After today comes tomorrow. End of conversation."

Ray was right on target. Tomorrow always comes. Regardless of what we are feeling, how bad things might seem, after today comes tomorrow. For as long as this planet has circled the sun, millions and millions of years, every time it goes around, after the darkness comes the light. Even when the light is obscured by clouds, still, behind the clouds there is light. After today comes tomorrow.

The third influence started with a book called All They Taught Me Was Happiness, by Robert Muller. It is long out of print now. Robert Muller, who was from Alsace-Lorraine, was part of the French Underground during the Second World War. He was captured by the Nazis, and went through hell after torturous hell. Yet as he told the story of his life, he said that every negative experience taught him something about happiness.

I was so inspired by this book that I had to meet the author. He worked in New York at the United Nations and a mutual friend arranged for us to meet for lunch.

I learned he had joined the United Nations in 1947, a year after it was founded. Now he was head of all non-political activities of the United Nations; 25,000 people around the world were under his area of responsibility--UNICEF, the World Health Organization, all social programs. He was a man of enormous influence. He had been to just about every country in the world, and had seen and experienced some of the worst of human and natural disasters. Yet I became aware that I was in the presence of the most upbeat, optimistic human being I had ever met. He was not a man who had his head in the sand. He had seen the worst of the worst, yet he bubbled over with optimism.

I was amazed. As we were finishing lunch I asked, "Mr. Muller, with all that you have seen and experienced, how can you be so optimistic?"

He gave me a straight and swift response. "Arthur," he said, "it's the only way that works. Pessimism and negativity do not work. If we are optimistic and if we are hopeful, in time the world will become a better place." He went on to talk about the positive changes in the world over the last fifty, seventy-five years, a slowly evolving process of things getting better.

Recently, I came across an Ann Landers column which I'd like to read to you. She writes about perspective. "If I were asked to consider the single most useful bit of advice for all humanity, it would be this: Expect trouble as an inevitable part of your life, and when it comes, hold your head high, look it squarely in the eye and say, 'I am bigger than you, you cannot defeat me.'"

Let me put her advice on very solid ground. If I ask, "Who are we?" many will say we are flesh and bones, minds, and feelings. But we are more than that. In the long, long, spectrum of time, we are here only for a short time, a little blip on the screen of life. Our lives are not really long at all. Who are we? Where do we come from? Nobody really knows. It is a mystery. Yet many of us do know that we are spiritual. We come from a spiritual place and go back to a spiritual place. We know this in our hearts, we know this in our spirits.

As Tielhard de Chardin said, we are spiritual beings having a human experience, spiritual beings on a human journey. The purpose of the journey can be only one thing--the growth of the soul. Primarily, first and foremost, we are souls. When we look trouble squarely in the eye with confidence that we are stronger than it is, we are asserting that our troubles are a part of this temporal world, while we are part of the eternal world of the Spirit.

I take great comfort from something that Evelyn Underhill, the English mystical writer, said: "The universe is safe for souls." We come from God. We may have a tough time here, we may not work it all out, but in the heavenly movement of things, in the divine movement of things, the soul is safe. God never destroys the soul. It remains intact and has the opportunity to continue to grow.

Let us look at the 23rd Psalm. "When I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil." When I walk through the valley of darkness, I have nothing to be afraid of, because God is faithful to me. God is my shepherd. Because the Shepherd takes care of His flock, the universe is safe for souls.

Now let us look at the 43rd chapter of the book of Isaiah:

I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the Lord your God ...you are precious in my sight.

This is God in intimate involvement in the human story. Because of God's presence, we can find joy and hope, we can confidently face trouble, we can believe that no matter how dark things may appear we can still be upbeat. This is what I have learned over the years, and why I no longer force myself to be serious and sad because of all the suffering in the world. Because God is in our lives, because the Shepherd is taking care of His sheep, we are free to celebrate and enjoy life.

When I was a young boy there was a song that became popular, and it touched me. America was at war, there was darkness and fear. Even though I was very young I was vividly aware of the war because my father was a chaplain in the Army and was stationed overseas in England. I lived in a seacoast town with a naval base that sent ships overseas. It was a time of great apprehension and anxiety. Yet this song would warm my heart and give me hope. Maybe you are familiar with it--"The White Cliffs of Dover":

There'll be bluebirds over
The white cliffs of Dover
Tomorrow, just you wait and see.

There'll be love and laughter
And peace ever after
Tomorrow, when the world is free.

The shepherd will tend his sheep
The valley will bloom again
And Jimmy will go to sleep
In his own little room again.

There'll be bluebirds over
The white cliffs of Dover
Tomorrow, just you wait and see.

This is hope. This is the understanding that after today comes tomorrow. This is joy and optimism in the midst of fear and darkness.

The great Helen Keller became deaf and blind as a toddler. When people have suffered as she suffered, and lived in the world she lived in, I listen to what they have to say. If you have read her book The Story of My Life, you know the tone of peace and happiness that pervades her writing. What she learned that allowed her to live a full and interesting life is her gift to us. This is one of my favorite passages:

When a door of happiness closes and another one opens, we look so long at the closed door we do not see the door that has opened for us.

I found another illustration of this in a story by Dr. Rachel Remen, a physician who works with cancer patients, who are often overwhelmed by feelings of grief, loss and fear. She tells the story of a young man, twenty-four years old, who had to have one leg amputated to save his life. He became angry and bitter, feeling the world had not been fair to him. He developed a particular hatred for people who were well, because he had been cheated in life as they had not been. He felt the injustice of this.

Dr. Remen began working with him to help him through these negative feelings. She got the idea to encourage him to visit other patients in the hospital who were in equally difficult circumstances, so he could get some perspective, but for a long time he stubbornly refused. Finally, one hot summer day she persuaded him to visit a young woman about his age who was despondent because she had had to have both breasts removed. Nobody had been able get through to her to relieve her emotional suffering. Because of the heat, he went to her room wearing running shorts, and his artificial leg was clearly visible. For awhile he tried to get her attention, but she would not respond. Increasingly desperate, he kept trying, but nothing worked. That morning the nurse had left the radio on and it gave him an idea. He went off into a corner, took off his artificial leg, and started dancing around the room on one leg, snapping his fingers to the beat of the music. After a few minutes the young woman turned to him. "If you can dance," she said, "then I can sing," and she burst out into song. It was a turning point for her, and a turning point for him.

One day after this Dr. Remen brought out some pictures she had asked him to draw early in his treatment. One was of a vase with a big crack going all the way down the side. He had told her when he drew it that because of the crack the vase could never contain water. Looking at it now, he said, "This picture is not finished." He picked up a yellow crayon and ran it down the crack in the vase. "Through the crack in the vase, the light can shine through."

Just before He died Jesus spoke to His disciples about the grief they would soon feel at His loss. But He comforted them by reminding them how a woman in childbirth feels pain while the child is being born, but after the new life comes, she forgets the pain. Jesus was saying to them, "After the pain, after the sorrow, after the suffering, joy comes in the morning." Let hope be the light that shines through the darkness, and gives you a better day tomorrow. Let us pray.

You give us the gift of faith, and You give us Your faithfulness and Your love, Lord. Let us get together with joy and help make good things happen. AMEN.