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Living Life As If It Mattered

Readings:
Lift Not The Painted Veil Which Those
Who Live - Percy Bysshe Shelley

Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colours idly spread,—behind, lurk Fear
And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave
Their shadows, o’er the chasm, sightless and drear.
I knew one who had lifted it—he sought,
For his lost heart was tender, things to love,
But found them not, alas! nor was there aught
The world contains, the which he could approve.
Through the unheeding many he did move,
A splendour among shadows, a bright blot
Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove
For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.

The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham 1925
The Painted Veil is a 2006 film directed by John Curran and stars Naomi Watts, Edward
Norton, and Liev Schreiber

Time
Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith
Thursday, Aug. 23, 2007 By DAVID VAN BIE
On Dec. 11, 1979, Mother Teresa, the "Saint of the Gutters," went to Oslo.
Dressed in her signature blue-bordered sari and shod in sandals despite
below-zero temperatures, the former Agnes Bojaxhiu received that ultimate
worldly accolade, the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance lecture, Teresa,
whose Missionaries of Charity had grown from a one-woman folly in
Calcutta in 1948 into a global beacon of self-abnegating care, delivered the
kind of message the world had come to expect from her. "It is not enough for
us to say, 'I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,'" she said, since in
dying on the Cross, God had "[made] himself the hungry one — the naked
one — the homeless one." Jesus' hunger, she said, is what "you and I must
find" and alleviate. She condemned abortion and bemoaned youthful drug
addiction in the West. Finally, she suggested that the upcoming Christmas
holiday should remind the world "that radiating joy is real" because Christ is
everywhere — "Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the
smile we give and in the smile that we receive."

Yet less than three months earlier, in a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev.
Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote with
weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one. "Jesus has a very
special love for you," she assured Van der Peet. "[But] as for me, the silence
and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not
hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to
pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand."

The two statements, 11 weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first is
typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds as
though it had wandered in from some 1950s existentialist drama. Together
they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction — that one of the great
human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed
inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely
observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as
the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality
privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared.

Living Life as if It Mattered
September 23, 2007
By John Ashenhurst

Good morning! I appreciate the opportunity today to share with some
questions I’ve been thinking about for the last 50 or maybe even 60 years.
I’ll try not to talk too long so as to allow comments and questions after.
As you may suspect from hearing me talk in the past, the topic and text will
be serious. I can’t help myself. But this time, it’s worse than usual. I’ll be
talking about things like death and the meaning of life – topics covered in
college bull sessions and then given a rest by most people once they become
adults and deal with the “real world.” Perhaps I’ve never grown up. But I
continue wonder what the real world really is.

Maybe you’ve heard this one:
A woman goes into a fabric store and asks the clerk for some nice soft lacy
material for her wedding night nightie. The clerk says "About two yards
ought to do that!" and the woman says "Oh no, I will need about fifty
yards."" The clerk says "Fifty? But surely that is way too much?" The
woman says, "I know, but my fianc? is a Unitarian and he would rather seek
than find.”

Like you, I’ve been seeking for a long time. Today I’m going to talk about
my experiences and how I’ve tried to make sense of them. Then I’ll
generalize my experiences to the larger world in an attempt to shed some
light on the resurgence of aggressive, sometime violent, fundamentalist,
evangelical religion here and abroad.

All the world’s a stage

Though I only recently became aware of Shelly’s poem, “The Painted Veil,”
I’ve understood the concept at least since I was very young, perhaps five or
six. My sense was that I had come into the middle of a play. Instinctively
perhaps people understood what their role was and went about delivering
their lines but I suspected that most people didn’t realize they were in a play
at all.

This state of affairs didn’t bother me really. It was just the way things were.
Like Harold Bloom or William Wordsworth, I felt as if I had fallen into this
world from who knows where and had to make the best of it. My public task
was to assume a role and integrate into the ongoing play. But part of me
continued to observe, to see the play as fiction, and its existence arbitrary.
That is, it could have been a very different play. There was nothing given
about it. It was not reality.

But knowing (at least that’s the way it felt) that I was part of a play left me
wondering what was behind the play. What was real? What was life about?
Was there a point to being in the play? Was there something more
substantial, some ground beneath it?

My sense was that most people didn’t have the same obsession I had. They
found my questioning amusing at first but at bit tedious. I heard “lighten up”
or “quit being so serious” or “who cares” or “you give me the heebiejeebies”
or “love Jesus and you’ll be saved.” It was obvious to them, as
Wordsworth said, “life is real, life is earnest.” We weren’t living in a play,
this was real and to consider it made up was to be a little soft in the head.
But not everyone was bored or anxious about the questions I raised.
Sometimes I found people willing to talk about what I’m today calling the
Painted Veil and what might lie behind it; where we come from and why
we’re here, I enjoyed those conversations immensely. It seemed to me we
were talking about something important, something fundamental. No – not
just something important – the most important. But these conversations were
and continue to be few and far between. Perhaps this is familiar ground to
you.

A 15-minute attempt to create certainty

There are some inconveniences to having the ground (or perhaps the thin air)
you’re trying to walk on be perpetually unsettled. To paraphrase our
president, I was “Dead Uncertain” and a bit paralyzed. To paraphrase him
again, “It was hard work being an undecider.” So I decided to take a run at
deciding.

As long as I can remember, the concept that Jesus was divine made no sense
to me but I continued to harbor some vague sense that some kind of personal
God might lie behind things and that prayer could be appropriate – even if
strictly mechanical (though maybe that’s the best kind). But by the time I
was 10 or 12 that didn’t work either. If there was a god it clearly wasn’t at
all interested in our doings. Or it was a weak and ineffectual god. Or worse,
it was a god that enjoyed tormenting its creation.

So here comes my attempt to create certainty and discover what’s real and
move beyond just being in a play.

I was 18. It was late September and the afternoon sun was streaming into my
dorm room in Brown Hall. The huge oaks and maples outside were patches
of green, yellow, red, and orange. God was in his cerulean heaven; the
squirrels were chomping their acorns; all was right with the world. And I
had lots of homework. There couldn’t be a better time to do something
completely irrelevant. I decided then and there that I would take a leap of
faith, make the decision, and jump over to the side of the angels. All my
metaphysical problems would be solved and I could get on with what it
looked liked everyone else was doing – getting a life.

So I got started. I gritted my teeth. In my minds eye I tried to form a concept
of an omnipotent, omniscient, beneficent, personal god – who in some way
wrote the Bible and had something to do with Jesus. Sweat broke out on my
forehead. My brain felt like it was going to short-circuit. But I wouldn’t give
up. After all, this had to do with my soul, eternal life, and an entity to cajole
for various benefits. The struggle went on and on but after 15 minutes I cried
“uncle” and gave up. My brain just couldn’t move from continuous
questioning to one unbelievable answer, from skepticism to certainty, from
discomfort to bliss. So much for certainty, I thought.

Now comes the hard part

So far, everything I’ve talked about is probably familiar to you in one way or
another. And it’s easy to joke about it – just as it’s easy to make jokes about
Unitarians questioning everything and bumbling through life while those
enjoying certainty seem to glide along, getting rich and making wars,
But what comes next isn’t a laughing matter. And if you haven’t experienced
it I sincerely hope you never will.

The first time it happened was in my junior year in college. One morning
shaving. I looked into the mirror and really felt the feeling that I was mortal.
In the blink of history’s eye, the face looking back at me would be dust and
even more important the thoughts, the memories, the consciousness, the very
me behind those hazel brown eyes, would be annihilated.

The feeling was so intense, so horrifying, so shocking, and so definitive that
I almost fell over. I had been hit with an extreme version of existential angst.
Somehow, another layer of Shelly’s painted veil had been pulled back, and
what lay behind it was a living hell. It was the feeling behind Sartre’s play
“No Exit,” what St. John of the Cross called the dark night of the soul and
Mother Theresa god’s absence. I was staring into Kali’s all devouring
mouth. And I couldn’t stand it. I thought maybe I was going nuts.

For 15 years I had been a general skeptic. And that was fun for the most
part. Now I knew something– not as words only but with my whole being
and I couldn’t unknow it. I couldn’t doubt it as I had been able to doubt
everything else. I had come into contact with the truth that lies behind the
play we are in and the reason for everything. I had, rather than being born
again, been dead again. Against my will I became a true believer, not in god,
not in a philosophy, but in annihilation. When Descartes doubted everything
he found that the only thing he could be certain of was his existence. When I
doubted everything I ended up knowing for certain that soon I would not
exist.

Let me say at this point that what I experienced wasn’t an anxiety attack.
Later on I would have the pleasure of those experiences occasionally. At the
time one’s body feels like it’s going to drop dead. It’s awful but it’s
temporary and it’s physical not metaphysical. And I wasn’t having some
kind of near-death experience either. It was more like just the opposite, a
near-life experience. And it wasn’t a mystical experience of oneness. I’ve
had those too but they pale in comparison to an experience of noneness – the
reverse of merging with the universe.

About this time, my Swedish grandfather understood that I was studying
philosophy and he told me I needed to be careful. He had had a friend in
Sweden who read too many books and ended up killing himself. I wasn’t
worried about that happening. I wanted to be alive. That was the problem.

During this period I would watch Ingmar Bergman films and had a sense he
had similar experiences. Think of Wild Strawberries or Through a Glass
Darkly. I read existentialists like Camus and Sartre, Nietzsche and
Kierkegaard. I attended absurdist plays by Harold Pinter and Samuel
Beckett. I read and I came to understand the motto of 19th century romantics
who said it was best not to be born and second best to be already dead,
Worst was to be alive. It all made sense to me. And it made me wonder how
the great mass of humanity could get through each day. Not only were they
in a play, that is, something made up and not real, their time on the stage
would be incredibly brief and then they would be gone - from something to
nothing at all. And there was nothing they could do about it. It seemed to me
that we are all trapped in hell and can’t get out.

You won’t be surprised to learn that I read and thought about these issues
constantly and saw clues everywhere that we all tend to live in a dream
world, that the true horror of the human condition lies right below the
surface, and that we find various ways to screen it – with religion, art,
entertainment, violence, war, love, sex, progress, politics, beauty, money,
power, and so on. All these things seemed to me to function as distractions
from the unacceptable truth about what it means to be alive. The issues of
life were not, for me, practical, things I could do and change. That was the
easy part. The real issues were metaphysical. Things I couldn’t change.

How are you all doing? I think it’s time for a joke or two

How about:

A sign at a UU church read:
"Bible Study after service today. Bring your own bible and a pair of
scissors."

Or how about this:
What's the difference between an agnostic, an atheist, and a Unitarian?
I don't know, and I don't care one way or the other.

Or:
What is a Unitarian Universalist?
Someone who believes in life before death.

And now, back to my talk

When I left off my story, I was about 25 years old. Now I’m nearly 65. Over
the last 40 years my annihilation experiences have recurred, especially in
movie theaters or at 3 a.m. in bed. Familiar? But in the last ten years I’ve
been able to will them should they make an appearance and I’m enormously
grateful about that. And though I continue to feel I’m in a play I’ve become
committed to living life as if it mattered though neither my mind nor my
soul makes that very easy. There’s lots more to tell – as you would expect –
and a good deal that finds the story I’ve told so far na?ve and amusing.
Perhaps there will be another occasion to tell you about another way I also
look at things. But before I close I’d like to offer a suggestion about one way
to understand what’s going on with militant fundamentalists, suicide
bombers, creationists, and the other goofy people who are writing very
dangerous parts for themselves in our global play.

Explaining the unexplainable

In 1984 I became aware of a book by Earnest Becker, written in 1973, called
The Denial of Death, and led a group of UUs in Boulder to discuss it. Some
of you know the book. Like my talk today, it’s not very cheery but what
Becker had to say makes a great deal of sense to me. Becker’s view is that
much of what we do personally and as societies is done to deny the reality of
death. (We could talk about Freud and Jung on this point but not right now).
Though Becker won a Pulitzer Prize, posthumously in 1974 for his work, the
academic community mostly ignored it.

But a small group of psychologists decided to put his theories to the test. If
Becker was right, they reasoned, people should act differently when their
denial strategies are challenged and it should be possible to measure the
difference. And that’s what they found. I won’t go into the research but the
point is that they’ve taken Becker’s view from conjecture to testable theory
and found that it seems to hold up.

So what does this have to do with the growing influence, power, and
murderousness of some religious fanatics today? Simply that the modern
world – technology and liberalism – is shredding their painted veil and they
are trying with all their might to patch it back together – even if that requires
murder or even suicide, Better dead than face the reality of annihilation.
Remember the 19th century romantics.

In the U.S. religious fundamentalists would rather deny the results of
science, or their own eyes, or even common sense, than face the prospect of
living without their shield against psychic hell. It can’t. They are not being
irrational at all. They’re trying to survive.

Now we could talk about fundamentalists and their problems all morning but
I want to add one more observation that I think is very important. If
fundamentalists need psychic defenses against the experience of annihilation
knowledge, so do liberals. So one can ask what defense do liberals employ
and how is it holding up?

Here’s what I think. Liberalism is a methodology, a framework, a covenant
between people that makes no substantive claims about religion or anything
else. It is an arrangement of society that makes it possible for individual
people to find their own answers or at least try to find their own answers.
Because liberalism isn’t committed to any particular content or belief
system, it is very flexible and copes well with change. Think of free market
capitalism, modern science, pluralism, representative government and so on.
Liberals, I think, identify with the liberal world view in a way that it
functions for them as a psychic defense in the same way that identifying
with a fundamentalist world view can so function. And I think an underlying
assumption is that liberalism will lead to a kind of heaven on earth.
So how are liberals doing compared with fundamentalists? Some years back
the question wouldn’t even arise. It was obvious that liberalism, the
substitution for form over content would soon win the day. Today it’s not so
obvious.

I’ve wondered why liberals find the present political landscape so appalling.
I think it’s because Liberalism itself is being challenged everywhere – and
Kali is beginning to glow through the liberals’ painted veil. Liberalism is the
worldview that we should each be able to create our own roles and write our
own lines in the ongoing, open ended human drama. The conservative
worldview says that we should accept our assigned roles and read our
prescribed lines in a shared, limited script. Liberalism is a perspective of
skepticism, religious fundamentalism one of certainty. As a skeptic, it
matters to me that skepticism not certainty be the foundation stone of our
society. It’s what I identify with. It’s how, in part, I cope with existential
dread. It’s how I live life as if it mattered. Maybe you do too. Well, that’s
my story and I’m sticking to it. Thanks for listening. Any comments?