Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
November 25, 2001

The Purpose of Life

I should begin, perhaps, by observing that I think Alexander Papaderos has his terms wrong. His metaphor of the mirror and the light is not about the meaning of life; the meaning of his life will be the cumulative impact of his work and his words upon those whose lives he touches -- those, like Robert Fulgham, whom he instructs with his efforts, and the way he leaves the world changed. It is they who will tell what his life has meant; a sum to be cast up only when he is gone. We never know the meaning of our lives while they are still in process. What Dr. Papaderos described, in that sun-lit classroom the island of Crete, was the purpose of his life. Nevertheless, despite this quibble, I believe that he has the right idea; what gives our lives their sense of meaning as we live them, day by day, and what will shape the meaning they will have had in retrospect, is how we understand their purpose.

What is the purpose of your life? What do you carry in the inner pocket of your wallet; what story, what symbol, what aspiration forms the thread upon which the beads of your hours are strung? Let me confess that this is an unashamedly personal and inward-looking sermon; the events of this autumn, both the tragedies of September and the celebrations of our building's fiftieth year, have all but dictated the course of preaching in this Society since the beginning of our program year. There will assuredly be more to say upon these subjects as events are even now unfolding, and we have plans for continued celebration of our anniversary. But I am persuaded that today, as we stand upon the threshold of winter, in the wake of Thanksgiving and the approach of the holiday season with its glamours, its ambiguities, and its opportunities, is a fitting time to pause for a brief moment of reflection, and to inquire of the most fundamental purposes we cherish as the tides of history and the cycles of the earth ebb and flow around us.

Now the first thing to make clear is that I am not suggesting that we should all run out and buy pocket mirrors, and start driving everyone around us crazy by flashing reflected light at them all the time. That symbol and that story belong to Alexander Papaderos, to the era and culture of his youth, to the challenge that he discovered and embraced as the purpose of his own unique life. What we should be about, it seems to me, is the discovery of our own symbols and our own stories; of our own answer to the question, that can be given as concisely and as persuasively as his. Nevertheless, I think it helps to hear the stories, to share the symbols and the metaphors, so that we may be enlightened by one another's discoveries, and so that we may measure our own purposes against those of the people whose lives we find worthy of admiration.

I suppose that at some level it is an emergent thing, this understanding of purpose in life. Papaderos recounts that it was 'as he became a man' that he began to understand that his 'game' of reflecting light into the dark places was really a sign of the work to which he had dedicated his whole being. It comes to us as we grow into it, and when we find it, we recognize that it has been there all the time, like the scarecrow's brain, or the tin woodsman's heart. It happened to me again this summer, at a very particular moment; I realized, suddenly, with a shock of recognition, what my life was about, and has always been about; what is, for me, the purpose of human existence. And if only in the service of truth in advertising, I feel obligated to tell those of you who depend to any degree upon my spiritual leadership about it, for it is the foundation of my work as of everything else I do.

I awoke on the 16th of August in a particularly tender frame of mind, it being the morning after Mark's and my 28th wedding anniversary, with some lines from Robert Frost going through my head. This is the poem:

No speed of wind or water rushing by

But you have speed far greater. You can climb

Back up a stream of radiance to the sky

And back through history up the stream of time.

And you were given this swiftness, not for haste

Nor chiefly that you may go where you will,

But in the rush of everything to waste,

That you might have the power of standing still --

Off any still or moving thing you say.

Two such as you, with such a master speed

Cannot be parted nor be swept away

From one another once you are agreed

That life is only life forevermore

Together wing to wing and oar to oar.

Outside the window, a long train ran along the tracks a few doors from us, giving a visceral reality to the image of 'the rush of everything to waste', and I picked up from the pile of mail waiting to be read a recently arrived issue of 'Criterion', the journal of the University of Chicago Divinity School. It contained an account of the celebration of Professor Wendy Doniger's sixtieth birthday at the conference of the American Academy of Religion, including a fetschrift assembled in her honor, and her response to the presentations at that occasion. I read in her words of thanks to her former students,

"I am particularly happy to see the great diversity of the subjects that you choose to write about, to see how different each of you is not only from one another, but from me... All I did was give you a culture to grow in, a culture in the yogurt sense. It thrills me to see that there is no Wendy Doniger school; rather the world of religious scholars is peopled with all sorts of interesting young scholars, each doing his or her own thing, who worked with me for a few years during a crucial period of their long intellectual and human development. I revel in your infinite variety. I once asked David Shulman what made him continue to regard himself as in some sense my student, and he said, "You taught me to love the myths." Really I think that is all I ever taught any of you... Also, perhaps to take joy in the work, to expect your readers and students to take joy in what you write and say; to have me as your imaginary audience, always on your side, always happy to learn something new, even in a book full of mistakes, even serious mistakes.

"In a sense you are my past; I worked with you when I was younger. But in a much more important sense you are my future, my living academic progeny, my Doktor-kinder (if I may invert the usual phrase). And as you continue to send me your own students, who become my Doktor-grandchildren, you have provided me with a legacy more enduring than my own books, let alone my flesh. It used to annoy me when people said that they liked my book about Shiva best of all, my very first book. I could have died at thirty-two when I published it, I figure resentfully, and no one would have missed any of the later books about evil and dreams. But you have reminded me that if I had died at thirty-two, I would not have had all my students, who came to me after I finished the Shiva book. And the books were not worth nearly as much as the people... This has been one of the very happiest days of my life. Thank you for it."

And I thought, as the train hurled itself along the steel tracks like the unstoppable flow of days and years, of my own doktor-kinder in ministry -- ten of them now, and counting, officially, and dozens of others informally -- half of them older than myself, who carry, as I hoped they would, the thumb-print of my teaching, and who carry, as I did not know would happen until it was upon me, my unfading love. I thought of those to whom I have ministered, here in our beginnings together, and all the other places; the couples I have married, and the families on whose behalf I have spoken the last words of eternal rest. I thought of 28 years of marriage; waking and sleeping, devotion and gladness. And I thought, this is it; this is the deepest heart of it; the thing that finally matters; this is the work that I am to do with my very being -- the purpose of life is to reconcile love with time.

Every love story is a tragedy; that is a given in this mortal world. Some lovers are star-crossed, and never have a life together. Some lovers betray each other, or are deceived in each other. Some love goes sour, or dries up and blows away, leaving two bewildered strangers staring at each other. Some love overcomes great obstacles and survives grave danger, only to founder in calm, shallow waters. Some love comes easily, has fifty or sixty or seventy happy fulfilling years together, and still the story ends with one person, old and alone, leaving flowers at a gravestone. And yet we speak of love forever, endless love; we promise everlasting, eternal love, when by the nature of the world there can be no such thing. Time, like the train thundering down the track, carries us through the reckless years, and we have no way to foresee what they hold. And knowing this -- holding the promise of everlasting love in one hand, and the knowledge of death in the other -- is our work, the purpose of human life; to reconcile love with time.

In fact, it seems to me that human life, the human heart and soul, is the only place the universe has found that can do this particular task. The sheer infinite expanse of time, light years across galaxies, the empty cosmic stage is sterile without the warm heartbeat of love, the human potential for self-transcendence. Yet that love itself is trivial, mere sentimentality, if it does not endure over time, if it does not aspire to the very everlastingness it can never achieve. It is in our intention to love always, in our capacity for covenant promise, in our willing acceptance of risk and pain and mortality, that love is reconciled to time. And it is, I would suggest, at that place where time and love are held together in the same consciousness that what is holy can be found.

There are any number of ancient myths which teach that the gods long to experience the fragile, infinitely beautiful intensity of human love, but cannot, for the very reason that they are immortal. It is not in the deathless eternity of a timeless heaven that this work of ours is to be done; in such a place, if it existed, there would be no need to reconcile love with time, for time would have no meaning. And indeed, I wonder whether love could have any meaning there, either. For if we had all the time in the world, all the time there is, what urgency would there be to love? No; it is here and now, in this world, that the purpose of life may be and must be fulfilled. It is in the midst of the train's roar, within the rush of everything to waste, that time and love are to be held together; it is our finite and fallible hearts which are the locus for that reconciliation.

We do it in our families, in our marriages and in our children, with our sisters and brothers; we keep love alive through all the chances and the changes of time; we love beyond deserving and even beyond parting; we bless and let go, though the pain is breathtaking sometimes; the bride of twenty or forty years ago lives on in our hearts; our arms reach out for the toddling baby even as the solemn new Bachelor of Arts stands before us, and the train runs down the track, unstopping and unstoppable. We do it even when love ends, in regret and forgiveness and as much grace as we can muster; we reconcile the love that was not timeless with the passing of time.

We do it in our work, in our serving of others, in our teaching of those who come after us; by our doktor-kinder -- our students, our books, our creations, our achievements. When we have loved knowledge, or justice, or beauty, or health, or a plot of earth, or freedom, or peace; when we have loved and served something beyond ourselves, and given that thing form in the world and sent it forth into the lives of others, there too is the reconciliation of love with time, the purpose of life fulfilled.

We do it also in the practices of the spirit, and the expression of gratitude, or so it is for me, anyway. My colleague Mark Belletini calls what ministers do when they come together for ritual 'high play', and in my mind he is right. It came to me again on Thursday morning, Thanksgiving day, as the ministers of the downtown congregations assembled at Plymouth Congregational Church for the annual community interfaith Thanksgiving service. The sanctuary was filled with people from all over the city, from all the various congregations, including one or two from our Society. The candles and flowers were charming, the stained glass was exquisite, the choir was magnificent, and the music sensitively chosen. I was glad to be there with my friends; glad and thankful for those who do, each in their very different ways, the same work I do, grateful to be among them, and one of them. And as we remembered the old story, and sought to be shaped as a new community of neighbors and citizens, I thought, here it is again. We do this 'high play', this thing that is not for the use of anything else, but for its own sake, down through the generations -- and every week, here and in every other sacred assembly across the city and across the globe, we do it -- for it is one of the ways in which we reconcile our loves with time.

You understand, it is not that we get the better of tragedy, or entropy; still our lovers leave us, still our loved ones die. And yet we affirm that whatever we have loved becomes a part of us, and is ours forever; love is reconciled to time through our memories and our promises; through the work we do and the sacrifices we make and the lives we shape and the memories we keep. It is not easy; do not think that this is not a costly way to live; it will demand all the depth and strength and wisdom and courage of which our hearts are capable. But dearly beloved, this much I know for sure; without some sense of purpose, our lives are mere driftwood on the ocean of cosmic time. We have the capacity -- we alone -- to hold the truth of enduring love and the truth of time's vanishing together in our mortal hands, and so to make holy meaning in the world. I think it starts simply, in moments like this week, in the recognition of gratitude; our thanks and our praise contain the beginning of our work; the reconciliation of love and time, the purpose of life.