Theological questions, and theological truth, are often found in unexpected places. What I think of as the foundational challenge, which all religions, including Humanism, must strive to answer, is found in an ironic little motto that I first encountered as a form of interior decoration. Many years ago, when I was in seminary, I went with a fellow student to hear him preach at a small fellowship. We were invited to the president's house afterwards, and there on her mantelpiece, among other ornamental items, I saw a pewter plate, inscribed with the motto "Living well is the best revenge." I have since seen the same message reproduced in needlepoint and other forms of display, but I have never been satisfied that I completely understood it, for I seem to find new possibilities for interpreting the phrase each time I recall it or come across it.

Living well is the best revenge. At first I assumed - partly owing to it being on a plate - that it referred to living well in the material sense; that if your food is good and your bed is soft and your hearth is warm, why upset yourself worrying about the wrongs someone did to you, because what more could you want than what you already have anyway? And then again, I began to think of it in the moral sense; that if you are a good person, and have the satisfaction of knowing that your integrity is intact, why should you risk that satisfaction for the dubious rewards of revenge? But lately, as I think about it, it seems to me that the statement could be heard on an ever deeper level. What does it mean, really, to live well? I think, perhaps, that by the time one has constructed a satisfactory answer to that question, and put it into practice in one's own life, there is neither time nor motivation left over for revenge.

So it all comes down to that question: What does it mean to live well? And it seems to me that this question, although it is not the one that most catechisms begin with, is the foundational question of all religion. All morality, all ritual, all charity, all theological speculation, originate as an hypothesis about how people might be able to live better than they are living at present -- whether that is by propitiating an angry deity with sacrifices, or coming to a deeper understanding of Jesus's love, or emptying the consciousness of personality.

Most religious traditions begin their answer to the question of what it means to live well with an account of the nature of the universe. "This is what we know is so about the world, and about human beings, and about the forces of the universe, including God or the devil or Karma, or whatever other power is involved in constructing our experience." And that knowledge has usually been, as Peter Berger suggests, objectified and appropriated as having more authority than simply being the fruit of human experience. Direct revelation and literal inspiration are invoked to make the knowledge of the universe and its characteristics put forward by any given religious tradition seem built-in, inherent, infallible, unalterable, beyond human influence or human mistake.

But then here we are, many of us drop outs, failures in process of socialization that Berger describes. For we have not internalized the objectified structures of the universe that were presented to us; we have not ordered our consciousness and thus our capacity for experience, according to the prevalent hypotheses about the ultimate origins and meaning of the universe. Therefore, we do not participate in the security of those who have accepted any of the available theories about the plan and purpose of life. We are, in some sense, much like those whom Berger describes as fallen from a "right relationship" with the sacred cosmos; abandoned on the edge of the abyss of meaninglessness.

That awful cliff, with its sheer and dizzy drop into nothingness, is the starting place of all religion. In response to its anxieties, most people accept a sacred cosmos, an already established structure of meaning, and struggle with shaping their experiences to fit within it. The liberal tradition approaches this problem the other way around. We begin with our experience as a given, and work at the ongoing task of constructing a sacred cosmos that fits our experience.

As individual monads, it is easy enough to reject the social construction of reality and maintain a kind of solipsistic integrity. But what happens when we wish to participate in the dialogue which rests upon that construction? What happens when we discover that, as Berger suggests, we need that social interaction in order to create and maintain our own humanity, that in fact we are already enmeshed in it -- in institutions, in human relationships, in intellectual traditions -- and there is no possibility of knowing our "own" experience apart from it?

Now, it must be conceded at this point that neither Unitarians nor Universalists have ever really represented in practice the rejection of the social structure. You don't become the intellectual and financial elite of the eastern seaboard, or the backbone of the Midwest and frontier, by taking large exception to the basic premises of the surrounding culture. Nor do you become the exceptionally educated and well to do middle class from whom our ranks are drawn today. By and large it is not the activities or functions of society that religious liberals have rejected, but rather the supposed knowledge upon which those structures are based. This leaves us in a precarious position, a little like Wylie Coyote after the Road Runner has led him off a cliff into the open air. As long as he is intent upon his present pursuit, he runs easily across nothingness. But the moment he notices that there is no longer ground beneath his feet, he registers alarmed surprise and plummets down.

We function well in society, most of us religious liberals. What is often difficult for us is to plumb the depths of that living, to identify the meaning and the resources which endure beyond a visible successfulness. We take our living seriously, and we want to live well, but often it is difficult to discover what that means.

I believe that this is why we come here every week on Sunday mornings, why we give our precious spare time to keep this institution functioning, and our money to pay its bills, and our headaches and heartaches to oversee its problems. We are seeking something, and I think that what we are seeking transcends intellectual stimulation, though it certainly includes that, and even transcends community and fellowship, though fellowship is an important part of it. What we are seeking is guidance and support in the project of living well; the wisdom of others' experiences, as well as the wisdom of the human race, the comradeship and sharing which is an essential part of living well, and the space and time and focus that will allow us to touch those vulnerable depths where there are no structures, but only the raw and powerful essences of living and being.

This is one advantage of traditional religion -- it provides its adherents with rules and outlines and structures which serve to make an encounter with those depths safe. They have names for good and for evil, names for power, and words and gestures and settings to invoke that power without being shattered by it. Liberal religion has not built a wall of custom and ritual between the individual and those clashing forces of order and chaos. When we confront the power of life, those primary constitutive religious experiences - either in suffocating grief or in soaring joy - we do it without the defense of phrases and concepts that would domesticate that power. And in some sense we would not have it any other way. We came here, many of us, precisely to escape the barrier of belief that stood between ourselves and our experience, and whatever the dangers or the costs, we prefer to live without that wall. That is part of what we mean by living well.

There is, however, another aspect to that choice, one that also has implications for our living well. Having rejected the traditional formulas by which others structure and manipulate the sacred chaos, we have also given up the names by which those sacred forces are summoned. Ethics we undoubtedly have, and intellectual integrity, and fellowship. But we are also in a position where we must find a new roadmap to the spirit, new ways of talking about and thinking about that dimension of life which carries the thread of meaning, that "wonder and surprise ever springing in the soul, even while the hands hew the stone or tend the loom." My experience convinces me that living well, really well, is not possible without that access, and that some way of understanding and enjoying that experience, however we may name it, is absolutely essential.

This is the challenge we have taken on, as religious liberals; to live without the guidance of dogma, and at the same time not to lose the power and beauty of the truly sacred in our lives. I cannot claim that I know exactly how to do this, for it is not something that can be reduced to a formula, and we must each resolve our own relationship to the sacred powers of the universe, just as we must each work out for ourselves what it means to us to live well. But I do believe that we can do a lot of the working and wondering together, and I also believe that as someone whose calling is to offer leadership in that process, I have a responsibility to be up front about how I am going about it myself.

For me the only possible starting point is experience; my own experience - what I know because I have seen it, touched it, it has happened to me - and your experience - what I have learned through the reports of others is common human experience. For my own experience, I borrow a term from physics. Actually, it was given to me, by my high school physics teacher, who distributed small posters to the students, one of which read "Help stamp out entropy." I hadn't the foggiest idea what entropy was, and the more he tried to explain it, the more intrigued I was. So I did some research, and wrote a paper about it, and ultimately it became for me a very important theological concept.

I dare say that there are any number of people here who could give a better presentation of the second law of thermodynamics than I can. What I know about entropy is that it is a tendency toward undifferentiation and disorder. If you have a shoebox, with a pile of sugar on one side, and a pile of salt on the other, it is very easy to make a shoebox with a mixture of sugar and salt. It is very difficult to create the two separate piles again. This is entropy. Two bricks, set together, will eventually become the same temperature, as the slow moving molecules in the cold one speed up, and the fast moving molecules in the warm one slow down. Or in the immortal words of my mother, when I tried to explain the concept to her, "Everything is slowing down, cooling off, and messing up. Go clean your room."

This tendency toward disorder, sameness, lack of relative heat or motion, is one that I experience all around me, and I see that it has a mental and moral, as well as a physical, aspect. There is always the temptation not to try, not to worry about it, to just let things slide, one way or another. We are subject to entropy because we are products of a universe governed by entropy, and the joke of the poster is that there is no stamping it out.

What I know about our common experience is pain. Human joy is all too rare a commodity, and love is an ambiguous combination of experience and intentions, but pain is a part of living that every single human being shares. No one escapes physical pain, and then there is the bewildering variety of emotional pain. We are inevitably fellow sufferers, and from that beginning, once it is faced, much can be derived to our ultimate comfort.

What I know from those who have gone before me on this planet is death. It is not a part of my personal experience, but it is a fixture of my theological furniture, for I know that eventually I, too, and all those who are dear to me, must follow that same path.

These are the things I begin with, that the rush of everything is, as Frost says, to waste; that to be alive is to live with present pain and the prospect of death. There is nothing in my experience that suggests immortality, eternity, infinity, nor have I found any authoritative external statement of the meaning or the requirements of life. What I do have is the temporary, vulnerable, compromised fact of being alive, here and now, and a determination to have my best revenge on this capricious universe by living well.

A colonial needlework samples queries, "Dost thou love life?" and admonishes, "Then do not waste Time, for that is the stuff that life is made of," and one of my colleagues once told me that boredom is the prerogative only of the immortal. Living well is not a static state, to be achieved at the end of adventures and struggles, like living happily ever after. We cannot afford to wait until all the proper tools and circumstances are assembled to say, "Now I shall begin to live well." Living well, if it is to be done at all, must be done in the process of the struggle, in the midst of all the hectic, makeshift, provisional moments of our lives. Living well is not living without pain, for much of what I know about it was taught me by those who did it, who lived truthfully and gracefully and well under great stress or with deep pain.

Rather, living well has to do with that moment of poise and balance in the ongoing dance of living, when the motion and the music fall into place. It has to do with a sense of rightness and connectedness and satisfaction, a sense that even if entropy and death are the universe's final word, we have made of the time that was given us something lovely and worthy of respect. It is a moment of harmony with the universe, and acceptance of the terms of life as they are given, and of what we have made of ourselves. It is a moment when the sacred sticks out from ordinary life, not defined or domesticated, but powerfully present.

For although entropy may be the universe's final word, it is not the only word. There is a force; there has to be, for we can see its work -- a force which tends, as Whitehead put it, toward increasing complexity and intensity of feeling. There is a force which drives evolution, which impells the cell to split, and the music to form in the composer's brain; a force that calls us to mercy and justice, a force that drives us to learn and care. It may be only an eddy in the tide of entropy and death, but we are its product, evolved upon our two feet with our oversized brains, and my experience thus far is that we live well to the extent that we live in harmony with those tendencies and in conformity with those principles. Entropy is not a self-conscious, decision-making personality, and neither is this other force, nor do they have moral values except as we assign them. But as we make our way toward death, patient and implacable on the other aside of the time we share, and as we struggle with the burdens of our hurts, unique and all too common, this tendency runs like a golden thread of possibility through all our days. We can live well. We can make of the time available to us something worthy of our best aspirations. We can tap that source, that resource, of hope and meaning each in our own way.

Sometimes I think that I know very little about that source. I do not know how it works, or what it will ultimately lead to; I know the names that human awe and love and fear have given to it, but I do not know its ultimate name, if it even has one. I have never seen it face to face, in the harsh light of intersubjective proof. But it has touched my life; it has pushed me off the edge of that abyss of nothingness, and has been the ground beneath me at the despairing bottom of the fall. It has lifted me to joys that I never earned, has lead me, laughing, into quicksands, and tempted me until I floundered out of them. It has healed my old wounds, and has left me a hundred times as vulnerable to the world than I would have been without it. It is in the lure of the unknown, the appeal of the uncared for, the outrage of the unjust. It is love and courage and truth and something that runs sparkling beneath all of these, tying them indissoluble together. It is why I am standing in this pulpit, and it is what I think we come together here seeking.

This is what I am working toward, in the journey we have undertaken together, a better knowledge and a deeper experience of this force, for myself, for each of you, for all of us as a community. We cannot avoid death, we cannot avoid the crumbling of everything we build and the fading of memory, we cannot avoid hurting and being hurt. All we can do is to be revenged upon this absolute finitude by using it up, by squeezing as much joy and meaning and intensity and love as we possibly can into the time we do have, and living as well as we know how.

There are a few rules that I have learned about living well that guide my thinking and my actions, and that my vision of ministry seeks to elucidate within the life of religious community. These are qualities of living that I have found, and continue to find, contribute to living well; there are seven of them.

1. The first is to live with integrity, both intellectual and moral; to say what we know is so, and to do what we know is right.
2. The second is to live with compassion; to identify with our fellow human beings and earth's other creatures; to help and to be kind.
3. The third is to live with perception; to be sensitive to beauty, to feelings, and to hidden truths.
4. The fourth is to live in relationship; to be open to intimacy and to participate in community.
5. The fifth is to live with purpose; to make an ongoing commitment to growth, and continuing efforts to master new skills, and to use our abilities productively to change the world in helpful ways.
6. The sixth is to live with attention; to be aware of our pain and our joy, to be reflective in our knowledge of ourselves, and to savor all the moments of life.
7. The last is to live with depth; to keep a sense of connectedness to our own past and future, to the world around us, to those we love, and to that source of life which makes possible all the rest.

Surely there are other principles yet to learn. Surely there is much to be said and suffered and attempted in putting even these seven principles into practice. There is the whole journey of life to undergo, and for all that it is finite, no one of us is going to learn everything that it has to teach. And through it all runs that stream of sacred power, unharnessed and unnamed, but as real and as given as anything else we know.