First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Clean Sweep

The image is as riveting as it is terrifying; a wall of water smashes across the horizon, its unimaginable force shattering everything in its path, leveling cities like sandcastles in the incoming tide. It is a primal force, elemental; in the ancient religions, the first act of creation was to confine the oceans, for until that is accomplished, everything else is at risk. All that we build, all that we make, all that we have, even our very lives, can be washed away without warning, without reason. Here in Minnesota, in the middle of the continent, the threat is not so great, or so immediately personal; our nice domestic lakes can consume the hapless or careless individual, but they cannot gather the same kind of obliterating force. And yet the ambiguous miracles of modern technology set the images before our eyes; we can watch the fatal dramas play themselves out on camera, as anonymous people on the other side of the globe struggle for their lives and are swept away by the irresistible torrent. We are helpless, the camera is helpless, they are helpless; for that moment, the water has all the power.

The liberal religion and humanism of today was given some of its shape by another tsunami, and the earthquake that preceded it. On the morning of November 1, 1755, the city of Lisbon and all the Algarve coast of Portugal were struck by a quake which modern seismologists calculate would have to have measured close to 9 on the Richter scale. For a few moments afterward, the sea drained from the Lisbon harbor, revealing wrecked ships, lost cargo, and old bones. This was quickly followed by the tsunami, a wall of water that crashed down upon the already cracked city, obliterating in an instant churches, palaces, hospitals, libraries, residences of the poor and rich alike, treasures of art and scholarship, tens of thousands of lives. Over and above the incalculable personal suffering that ensued for those whose lives were most closely affected by the tragedy, this event had two lasting effects. On the one hand, it helped to create modern Portugal. Rational, energetic and personally competent government officials were demonstrably of more use during the crisis than the corrupt hereditary royalty. When the city of Lisbon began to be reconstructed, it was built along architectural and civic plans the good sense and beauty of which remain evident to this day. The modern science of seismology was born out of the precise inquiries that were pursued by curious scientists attempting to understand what had happened.

On the other hand, this unprecedented catastrophe had a profound impact upon the theological perspectives of the emerging European intellectual enlightenment. It was difficult for the liberal deists to understand how an ordered universe, constructed by the rational, just, and benevolent deity they envisioned, could include such an arbitrary, destructive event. Orthodox Christianity was not in a much better position; Lisbon was the fourth largest city in Europe, but far less intellectually secular or morally corrupted than any number of others. Why should a traditional God, even if he were offended by aspects of the culture of the times, choose to express his wrath in that particular location, and on a religious holiday at a moment when many people were actually at mass? The ancient question of theodicy, how tragedy and evil can be compatible with the existence of an all-powerful, benevolent god, was raised with traumatic urgency for philosophers and clergy of the mid 18^th century. Influential thinkers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Goethe and Kant wrote extensive arguments seeking to understand the implications of such random catastrophe for the moral systems they advocated. In a dramatic and tangible way, the destruction of Lisbon made philosophically untenable the supposition that the universe was self-evidently good, fair, rationally ordered, or dependable. The moral ambiguity of the natural world has been a reality with which all subsequent western religious thinking has been forced to wrestle. No doubt that unresolved conversation will take on a new energy while this week's terrible events continue to unfold.

As horrifying as it is to think of the more than 154 thousand people dead throughout southeast Asia, in Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, Kenya, Somalia, those lives are beyond our help now. What can be done in the way of decent disposal of the corpses must be done with haste to keep the living safe, but it is the living to whom our concern now must naturally turn. It is they for whom help and hope are now urgently needed, and they are the ones who may teach us once again the new year's lesson of what is, and what is not, truly essential to our humanity. When you lose everything, when all the plans and provisions and accumulations, whether they be pathetically little or indefensibly lavish, are literally swept away, what is it that you really need? What are the minimal requirements for a full, authentic human life? This is a question that spiritual teachers in all the world's traditions of wisdom have been posing since ancient times. From the Buddhist monk, with his vow of poverty and his eight possessions, to Jesus with his metaphor of the lilies of the field, there is an enduring suspicion of accumulated wealth as a kind of spiritual impediment, a poverty of the soul. In our own religious heritage, the Transcendentalist philosopher Thoreau links the 'quiet desperation' he sees in the majority of lives around him to the demands of ownership, and the heavy burdens imposed by the continual quest for, and maintenance of, property. In her search for 'simple abundance', author Sarah Ban Breathnach begins with the ordinary, familiar frustration of too much clutter in her life, and ends by acknowledging that the solution to material chaos is spiritual authenticity. How might we, half a world away from overwhelming tragedy, begin this new year not only in sincere compassion, sympathy, and generous assistance, but also in our own quest to understand what is really necessary in our lives, and what is actually, despite our best intentions, getting in our way?

No question about it, we Americans have a love/hate fascination with our 'stuff.' For many of us - too many, Thoreau would say - our possessions create our environment, and so determine the quality of our lives. We store our stuff, we transport our stuff, we live surrounded by our stuff. We even, these days, have TV shows about the struggles of managing our stuff. A new field of expertise is opening up, offering career opportunities for professional consultants who for a fee help other people to achieve at least temporary control over their stuff. We are intimidated, oppressed, overwhelmed by the sheer weight and volume of what we own. And yet I wonder - if the great wave did wash over us, carrying away all that we have, how much of it would we actually miss? What part of all that we now own would we truly need in order to start over again, to rebuild livable, meaningful lives? Ten percent? Twenty five percent? Less? Why is it, then, that we surround ourselves with so much that is inessential, needless, superfluous?

I want to suggest, here at the threshold of a new year, that the problem is not one of organizational technique or storage efficiency. Rather, I suspect that Thoreau and Sarah Ban Breathnach are correct; that it is essentially a spiritual problem, and that the solution lies not in greater control, but in deeper authenticity. The impulse to store against future need is surely part of our genetic inheritance; many creatures do it, even an organism as simple as a bee. The world of nature is both cyclical and arbitrary; we all know that winter is coming every year, that old age awaits most of us; yet we can never know what drought or blight or unseasonable heat or freeze may disrupt the cycles of growth and fruitfulness upon which we have come to depend. We are familiar since childhood with the fable of the industrious ant and the grasshopper who wastes the pleasant days of summer enjoying his leisure, only to find himself begging charity from the ant's provisions when winter sets in. What could be more natural than to want to surround ourselves with the products of our labor, to ensure that the unexpected will not find us unprepared? And yet, as Charles Dickens points out in his portrayal of the dead Jacob Marley's ghost, in human culture our possessions quickly become our chains; rather than protecting us, they shape our lives around our need to protect them.

Part of the problem arises from the expansive capacity of the human imagination. Given almost any physical object, most of us can envision at least one potential scenario in which that particular item would be the one thing we most urgently need. Bees' lives are simpler because the only thing they can foresee needing is more honey. We, on the other hand, can imagine needing almost anything - and therefore, find it reasonable to keep almost anything. We are programmed by evolution to gather things rather than to let them go, but as with other aspects of our genetic heritage, the evolution of our social culture has made this at times a counterproductive impulse. The notion that status within a group can be measured by one's accumulated resources also contributes to the dilemma; we may not always even consciously know that our acquisitiveness is a function of these inherited drives in our species.

As with many other aspects of our mammalian heritage, the development of our capacity to control the world and manipulate it to suit our interests has erased much of the practical constraint that once effectively modulated our ability to accumulate stuff. Because we can build houses and manufacture objects, the limits upon the amount of stuff that we can acquire and maintain are expanded far beyond actual utility. We keep stuff because it is beautiful, because it has sentimental associations, because of guilt, or greed, or most powerfully of all, because of fear - and not because it does us any amount of actual present good. And as a result, there is pervasive among us a sense of dis-ease, a feeling of clutter that is about something more than just our physical surroundings.

I can't speak for each of you, of course, but I feel it myself, and I hear it in the endless advice and household tips columns, in the rows of books about how to get control of your time, your stuff, your life. I see it on the TV shows like "Mission Organization", and "Clean Sweep", where one can have the vicarious satisfaction of watching someone else be badgered into a more ordered, de-cluttered household in the course of thirty or sixty edited minutes. I hear it in advertisements for filing systems, shelving systems, cleaning systems, storage units. We are possessed by our possessions, and far from making us happy or safe, our stuff is sucking the energy out of our lives. The truth, of course - and the tsunami surely demonstrates this conclusively - is that no amount of stuff can keep us safe. In fact, no amount of anything can keep us safe, for the world is always infinitely more powerful and arbitrary than we can imagine, let alone control. If I could bring myself to wholly accept this truth, it seems to me that I would be in a much better position to let go willingly of those possessions whose only function is to protect me from the possibility of want.

In the end, of course, the essential question is, what do we want - really want? For until we know the authentic answer to that question - and no one can tell it to you, for it is different for each one of us - until I know the answer to that question, and until you do, we shall never be able to make good choices, competent choices, about what it is that we truly need in our lives, and what part of our stuff is just fearful, protective clutter, that we would do better to let go of. While the more honestly and courageously and confidently we can answer that question: What do you want?, the more easily and naturally all that is in the way of what we most truly want will fall away as if of its own accord.

All that we truly need are simple things; the fierce simplicity of what is now urgent for our neighbors in Asia - food to eat, clean water, a place to sleep, a handful of clothes, a doctor when we hurt; the presence of our loved ones, if we are lucky, or if not, some knowledge of their fate. If you begin the year 2005 with these things, then you are blessed - not by some deity stage managing this production, but by the earth, the human heritage, and life itself. I promise you: you do not need what is crammed into your closets, what is packed in the boxes in the basement, what is piled on the floor or stacked precariously on the shelves. Whatever it is, you do not need it as much as you need space to breathe, and peace of mind, and order in your life, and freedom from stuff, and the knowledge of your most authentic dreams. I know this, because all that stuff could be washed away in a moment, in the overwhelming tides of the earth's arbitrary power, and as long as you have your loved ones and your true dreams and a morsel of food and a thread of hope, you have the essential building blocks of a fully human life. You have everything necessary to experience what Sarah Ban Breathnach calls "everyday epiphanies; to find the sacred in the ordinary, the mystical in the mundane; to fully enter into the sacrament of the present moment; to make everyday life become your prayer."

Ah, my friends, what might this new, unspoiled year hold for us, if we believed in ourselves and our dreams enough to let go of the waste of our stuff? If we believed in the kinship of our common humanity enough to let go of our fears and our grudges, and live out the compassion that is the defining quality of our best moments? Our lives are so brief and fragile, here in this overwhelming, random universe, and nothing that we do, and surely nothing that we own, can ever make them otherwise. The stuff with which we try to protect ourselves becomes our prison; our armor against the vagaries of the world is the burden that makes toilsome our journey. How hard it is to give up what we have so eagerly collected, and yet in truth, how instantly it can all be swept away, leaving us grateful for the smallest things, and glad just to be alive!

Start there, for the first few days of this new year, this year of infinite possibilities waiting to be realized. Start with gratitude, just for being alive; start with the sacrament of the present moment; with the search not for safety, but for your authentic, half-forgotten dreams. Start with the question, what do you really want? And let the awareness rise in its own time, of how little all your stuff serves the authentic self you long to become. Perhaps this is the year of your own clean sweep, the radical reorganization that might make your life more nearly what you have always wanted it to be. Perhaps this is a year of preparation, of growth, of discernment, of ripening toward the person you were meant to become. Either way, it is a great gift, a precious blessing of time. Let us be done with lives of quiet desperation; let us live as Thoreau and Breathnach and all the great teachers suggest, as authentic and generous selves, as souls made visible. Such a life is our best tribute to those crushed by the blind mechanics of an arbitrary planet, for in such a life lies our salvation, our wholeness, our freedom, our fullness of joy.

Take the next few moments of reflection to weigh these questions - what do I genuinely want? What do I actually need? Perhaps one of them, or something like it, will sink into the deep soil of your life, germinating unseen, growing quietly, blossoming when you least expect it into new possibilities and unimagined fulfillment. Dare to ask. Dare to dream. Welcome to the new year.