And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" And Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: 'Do not kill, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.'" And he said to him, "Teacher, all these I have observed from my youth." And Jesus looking upon him loved him, and said to him, "You lack one thing; go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me." At that saying his countenance fell, and he went away sorrowful; for he had great possessions. And Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, "How hard it will be for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God!" And the disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus said to them again, "Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

“Ozymandias,” Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,

And on the pedestal these words appear:

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

This past Wednesday morning I awoke at four o’clock and couldn’t get back to sleep. It happens enough that I am used to it, and it comes with age, but what struck me this time was what has struck in times past. My mind inventories its worries about the future, not its regrets about the past. I guess I save those for other momentary venues. But well before the sun rises I find myself anxious about our 22 year-old daughter’s future and our 16 year-old son’s high school experience. What can usher them safely through these turbulent years in a person’s life so that they arrive into full adulthood relatively unscathed? I think about my work, which is this church, and worry about its finances, a constant worry, and its future (where All Souls will worship come next year), and most of all whether together we are living the life of the free mind and the expansive heart that is our heritage. I worry about the economic situation in our city and the people who are working hard and just barely getting by. Of course I worried about the world’s situation and the anxiety after 9/11 that we now share with the rest of the world that has for a long time been experiencing terrorism more directly than we had previously. Philosopher William James called the gap between what is and what we yearn for and might be, the “pinch” between the real and the ideal. No wonder I couldn’t get back to sleep. I was being repeatedly pinched!

I am not the product of a churched or religious upbringing. I have been in the ministry since November of 1983, but spent my first 29 years in the secular world, and my formative years on the football field, basketball court, and baseball diamond instead of the sanctuary. Religion was not the arena of my youth, but as I later found out, spirituality is my true first language. It is my “native tongue,” because after growing up I realized I used its words, metaphors, and stories naturally to interpret human nature and existence. These past few weeks we have been discussing the possible meanings and experiences elicited using traditional religious words: God, repentance, evil, and grace. Today I’d like to talk about the good life, especially after that vivid Wednesday morning anxiety-fest!, in the way of our religious tradition, engaging spirituality as understood liberally.

Religion and spirituality understood liberally is not about liberal politics, political positions, or political ideology. The word “liberal” has an older history than the way we’ve bantered it about the past few decades. It is an old word, from the Latin, liberalis, meaning generous and free. It is to be broad-minded, and is what a liberal arts education is aimed at eliciting, the broadly educated mind. In this classical understanding, to be liberal is not to be bound by authoritarianism, orthodoxy, or traditional forms. Theologically it is to have a large understanding of God derived from the largest possible consideration of human nature. And it is to see freedom as the ideal condition of humanity and creation’s fulfillment.

That kind of understanding is to me religious and spiritual because it unlocks the deepest purposes of existence. We are created to become free. It is religious and spiritual because it circumscribes what is called human nature. We are created with capacities to form relationships that aim us towards becoming free. And it is religious and spiritual because when we see men and women acting freely in forming broad bonds of human affection, we see something true about all of existence. We love and are loved, and therefore can be seen to be created with a likeness to God, not a total dissimilarity. It’s what Jesus meant when he said to love God and your neighbor as yourself, and then told a story about one person loving another beyond the restrictions of culture or ethnicity or nation or historical hatreds! Liberalis, to be generous, broad-minded, and free towards all things human and divine, is my native tongue, an interpretation of human nature and existence yielded from reasoning about the significance of my experiences.

That’s why when religion and money are closely aligned, as they have been in history, as they are for this particular day in the life of this church, as they were in Jesus’ parable, as they were for the Egyptian Pharoah Ramses – commonly called “Ozymandias,” who used his riches to build monuments to himself - I think something deeper is at work. A church and a dollar bill, dogma and doctrine and the Federal Reserve, a belief and a financial exchange, have deeper meanings. I think when I wake up before sunrise with a laundry list of worries, there is something deeper going on than just the accumulation of those particular worries. This deeper meaning is what the spiritual is about.

When today we think about the good life what is often conjured up is an envied vision either of financial security or spiritual stability. The good life is having the money to retire to a beachfront cabin and travel wherever you want, like that guy or gal in that investment commercial I saw the other day. Or, the good life is having the security of the serenity of faith, like the Dalai Lama.

The pursuit of the good life has been a millennia long quest by humankind all over the world. Nearly three thousand years ago in Greece there appeared a response to human existence that is still gathering momentum today, when persons looked to reason and critical reflection, rather than blind acceptance of the ways of the ancestors, as a means to understand how to live. It is still best characterized by the counsel of Socrates to “Know Thyself,” and the “unexamined life is not worth living,” updated by our own 20^{th Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams, who added, “The unexamined faith is not worth having because it can be true only by accident.” There is, I think, an innate urge within human beings to see more, interpret more, long for more, to dive deep in search of deeper things. It is part of the nature we share. We are in pursuit of “the good life,” as different as it might mean to each of us, because it represents the “more” that our lives currently lack. I am not the only one that awakens at four in the morning and whose anxieties are the strange but deep expressions of this longing for something “more.”}

To the Greek philosopher Plato the good life was a kind of balance in the soul between all the conflicting parts that make it up. We are creatures of intellect, creatures of spirit, and creatures of physical desire, and the good life is realized when the aims of each of these are harmonized into a unity. “When this is accomplished, when the parts of the soul are fulfilling their natural functions well and, under the guidance of reason, are in harmony and balance with the others, then the soul is just, unified, good and happy.” (The Platonic Philosophy on the Good Life, by Spencer Paine, Swarthmore College)

To history’s other great ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, the good life was conceived of in a different way. The good life was in evidence whenever a thing fulfills its nature, becomes fully itself. “A good man,” he wrote, “is one who functions according to his nature, which is a rational nature.  Hence, a good man is one who reasons well and chooses well.” The quintessential activity expressing what the good life is, is a good conversation. Well reasoned, informed, exciting, a mini-pilgrimage of contemplation and discovery of self and other and world, conversations that engage us in the fullest and deepest ways take us out of time and out of self-consciousness. One Aristotle interpreter characterized it as “the flow,” when “You feel completely at home. Self-consciousness is blocked. You're one with the music…” (EUDAEMONIA, THE GOOD LIFE, Martin E. Seligman, Ph.D., Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.) or whatever it is with which you are engaged in a “conversation.” You are in the flow of existence. To be rational in this deeper way is for a human being to fulfill its nature as human, and, for Aristotle, was the good life.

While arguing and conversing about what the good life contains is part of philosophy, spirituality is something related but different. It is about the deeper reality of being pinched! We live in a time when the domain of spirituality and religion is so confusing amongst human beings that it adds to anxiety and itself becomes another pinch! Today science looks for the God gene while religion purports to describe how creation began! Talk about confusing! Politicians and political pollsters and partisan policies have captured spirituality, with many self-described religious persons putting the handcuffs on themselves! Talk about confusing! Religion is the major source of worldwide anxiety today because it is the driving force behind suicide bombings and the oppression, ostracizing, and excommunicating of any one group of people over another; and religion is supposed to be about love?

There is something deeper to spirituality than what is on display around us right now, just as surely as there is something deeper than the rancor even religion produces. It is revealed by our anxieties, that even if we realized the good life, would in a certain way not disappear. It is the pinch between the real and the ideal, and between our lives as they are and what we yearn and hope they might become. There is something deeper than our deepest anxieties, our deepest fears for the future of ourselves and our children, deeper than what is the origin of all that pinches us. Because the origin of all these pinches is the recognition that we do not and cannot know the future, that there is a significant part of our lives we do not and cannot control, and that even if all of what makes for the good life were realized, our reason still yields to self-consciousness, we awaken out of the flow and realize even the flow ends. We know who we are as limited creatures, born into life, and just as surely, fated to die. The pinch of all pinches: our mortality and living with our mortality. The ultimate pinch between the real and ideal.

Why is it easier for a camel to go through the opening and into a tent, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God? The answer is simple, although it comes from complex reasoning. First, camels can go through the opening in a tent (the “eye of the needle”) and be in the tent, but it is not easy and there is no use for it since it leaves no room for the people who are to occupy the tent. So, while it is possible, its accomplishment is fruitless. The kingdom of God is not heaven, and not the afterlife, but a new way of seeing things that sees into a deep reality through spiritual eyes. One dwells in the kingdom of God here and now, through living into a spirit that does not pass away. A rich man can do that, just as a camel can enter a tent, but it is well nigh impossible for the simply reason that anxiety multiplies as wealth multiplies, although we who are not wealthy imagine it otherwise. We can’t conceive of the wealthy being anything than less anxious, any more than the wealthy can conceive of giving up the possessions that cause so much more anxiety! It is the vicious circle that emanates from human mortality. We seek out things in this world that alleviate the anxiety arising from consciousness, the awareness we are going to die. And the more things we seek out to alleviate that anxiety, the more we accumulate and exacerbate the very anxiety we seek to relieve, and the more we doggedly pursue alleviation and relief. Much of traditional Western religion – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – depend upon this endless chain of chasing relief from anxiety, until all three wind up offering man’s helplessness in the face of his own anxiety, relief in God’s embrace, and reconciliation not here but in some after world after we die. But, of course, that really only compounds the anxiety by repressing it.

Jesus is not counseling the rich young man, whom Jesus loves, to give up his possessions. Jesus is counseling to give up his projections. Like any one, the rich young man does not want to confront the anxiety arising from his mortality, so he projects onto his possessions a security that he fools himself into thinking will relieve that anxiety! Thus, his possessions possess him, and they are his master, and he their servant. The more possessions he accumulates, in order to relieve more of his anxious insecurity about the fact he will die, the more anxiety is multiplied. He gets richer, but wakes up more and more in the middle of the night with more and more anxieties! But the spiritual impulse within isn’t fooled. Something as ephemeral, evanescent, momentary, passing, short-lived, temporary, and transient as possessions will not transcend the mortality that awaits us all.

Jesus loves the man because he is about to invite him down a different path, within the world of the living but taken by so few: The path of the spirit. The path of what lasts, even when physical life will not. The path that is deathless, even as it is in this mortal world that we pass through. But to start down this path one needs to give up being possessed and held captive by the little anxieties. To start down this path one needs to give up in succession deeper and more complex anxieties until one reaches the starting point of anxiety in human nature. We are conscious. So, we know we are alive. We are conscious. So, we know it will end. We wonder why and how we can live with that knowledge. To start down the path that is deathless one must pass this portal and walk beyond it.

For there is something larger than mortal human nature. There is something larger than the death of one any individual. There is something stronger than death, because it can exist even when we as individuals cannot. It does not remove the pinch but it is soothes any pinch, even the ultimate pinch. It is the foundation of the good life and shapes the ultimate spiritual quest. It is love.

One lives inside the kingdom of God when one loves. It fulfills human nature. It connects us to others. It transforms the world because it is of the spirit, especially when our love for one person multiplies into the demand to love more and more souls, unto all souls. One lives most fully inside that kingdom when one endeavors, aims, casts, directs, and aspires to a love for all souls. That aim is true religion, the beginning of the fulfillment of the human spiritual impulse. It is the fullest expression of the Spirit, and the foundation of the good life: to aspire to a love for all souls.

AMEN.