One of the traditional claims of religion is that it makes sense and order out of chaos.  In the creation stories, the God or gods are always finding Chaos and making something out of it.  If religion was not so traditionally masculine, God would be pictured as A Great Housewife in the Sky:  creating order in a messy world, cleaning up the dirty places, and decorating the ugly ones.  You could see Her in her home — arranging, cleaning, planting and cultivating her Great Garden .

             We create gods in our own image.  We are always trying to make order out of the world — particularly the uncontrollable parts of the world.  World events of recent years have brought home that we are vulnerable.  Terrorist attacks.  War.  Hurricanes.  Floods.  Private events, too — illness, the death of those we love.  Suddenly we face our vulnerability.  Our realization that we are not ultimately, in charge.  Contingency, as the theologians call it.  We face our dependence on others and on the natural forces beyond human control.  That phrase echoed for me. 

            Like most middle-class Americans, even more especially UU’s with our emphasis on individualism and human power to effect change, in my daily life and in my worldview, I often overestimate how much my good planning, my work, my intelligence, my creativity, and all the rest will bring about the wished-for results.  It is a scientific fact that the better our fortune in life the less we believe in luck and the more we believe that we create our individual reality.  And for many of us, misfortune beyond our control — illness, natural disaster, accidents, war and terrorism — don’t seem to put as big a dent in our illusions as it ought to.  Because events beyond our control shape every life — for good and for ill.

             I can cite you several stories of people I have known:

            John had planned to get married, get a graduate degree, and settle down in a small town, teach college and raise kids.  He was a pleasant, good-hearted, bright man, with only the normal amount of psychological trauma.  But he found he could not balance study and home life, so twice the women he married left and divorced him complaining of neglect.  Finally, at age 38, when his life seemed in order, a good job balanced with a good relationship and even a bit of time to think about having a child, his dreams seemed finally within his grasp a drunken driver crossed the road, hit his car, and killed him.

             Jeannie had married her childhood sweetheart, they had two kids, two dogs and a house in the suburbs, when her husband’s, John's, medical exam showed he had cancer.  Two years later, she was a young widow with two young children, and only a secretary's salary to support them.

             Sally had been a traditional homemaker.  She and her Presbyterian minister husband raised five kids to a pretty healthy adulthood.  She was admired in the community.  When her husband died in middle age she was sad but went on with her community work, her friends, her family connections, until she met Ursula — a younger, dynamic woman.  Sally and Ursula fell in love and for the first time in sixty years Sally came out.  She and Ursula made a life together, her grandchildren kept loving grandma, and Sally and Ursula became active in their local UU church.

             Robert, had decided to retire early, live on a houseboat and write, paint, and read, when something he had written for his church newsletter was picked up and printed all over the United States — in Ann Landers, in the Congressional Record, to name a few — and a woman asked him if he had any other writings she could look through for a possible book.  It became a best seller.  He became a millionaire and much in demand as a public speaker.

             All these people were worthy people who deserved a good life as much as anyone — bad luck killed two and gave the other two unexpected good fortune.

             Many years ago, David and I went to a play in which the British Prime Minister is ruminating on his fall from power and fall from grace due to a scandal he had nothing to do with.  I don’t remember much of the play, but I remember one line.  The Prime Minister, in a darkened room, is saying mournfully, “Do you know what makes God Laugh?  People making plans.”  A rueful remark by a man once the most powerful in the nation who loses it all because of something he had no hand in.

             I was struck by the line — partly, perhaps, because I grew up making all kinds of plans.  I was the kind of kid who was always organizing things:  games of hide-and-seek, Kool Aid stands, a backyard circus, theatrical productions, and the like.  Sometimes with great success, as when we won great acclaim from all our parents for our death-defying feats of somersaults, and walking across a balancing beam between two boxes, and dressing up as clowns.  Sometimes with miserable failures, as when my best friend quit the title role in my production of Cinderella because some more attractive opportunity offered itself at the last minute, or when a day-long stint at our Kool Aid stand didn't even make us enough money to recover our costs — putting me off entrepreneurship forever.  I had lots of long term plans as well — when I grew up, I planned to get married, have three kids, and be a children's librarian like my heroine, Sarah Carter.  By the time I hit college I was less certain about the future.  I had no idea exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I knew only that it would have nothing to do with the two subjects I hated most:  chemistry and religion. 

             My life fit the script — it developed quite differently than planned.  At times that has been a good thing — after all, my birth itself was an unplanned event, my parents had planned to wait for my father to finish school before their first child arrived, but I came anyway.  At times it has been a difficult thing, as when I took a job in a place I expected to stay a long time and found that it was not where I would be happy staying.

             The unpredictability of life is probably one reason so many people like to think that there is a God, a Providence , that directs every life toward some unseen plan.  That Great Housewife arranging lives.  But I have always found that kind of God no more believable than the Old White Guy with the White Beard.  But then what do we make of hurricanes, tornados, volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis?  What kind of ordering is that?

             I have often wondered at people who talk about how God saved them from the storm or from the bus that came hurtling along and just missed them.  How do they answer the question of why their God plucked them from the path of the oncoming bus, while that same bus hit the little child next to them, why the storm avoided them and devastated their neighbor?  Do they truly believe in a God that intervenes to save them and then stands by while thousands of others are killed?  Do they think they are especially deserving while babies and old ladies deserve ill fortune?  Or don’t they think about such things?  I believe in expressing gratitude to God, but not to a God who spares me only to cause suffering to others.  I don’t believe in Providence or Karma; as comforting as either idea might be, it is not one I accept.

             I have a friend who claims to be an agnostic.  Either, he says, there is no God — or there is a God and he's out to get me!  My friend tends to be a little paranoid.  But he has a right to be.  He has tried very hard to make a good life for himself — only to be foiled by an unavoidable illness and other bad luck.  He certainly could believe in a God that laughs at our attempts to plan ourselves a future — a malevolent God.

             What kind of a God would laugh at people making plans?  Certainly not the benevolent and loving God of the Universalists.  But I think of the laugh not as a gleeful laugh at human misfortune, but as a rueful laugh at the people you love who are deceiving themselves.  “Don't they see?” this God asks.  “Hasn't it sunk in yet that they are mortal, finite, limited, and that the future is never assured?”  “Don’t they know they can never gain enough power, accumulate enough things, or make so many friends that they can be assured of escaping the thousand natural shocks that flesh is err to?”

             We create gods in our own image.  We are always trying to make order out of the world — particularly the uncontrollable parts of the world.  But I believe that the truly spiritual people admit that they, that we are vulnerable, human, and not in control of nature, other people, or chance.  If this is true, our religion, our spirituality is not about controlling our lives and the lives of others; it is about responding to our lives and the people and the world around us.   

             On the practical level, there is plenty of room for responding to the givens in our world in ways that make a good outcome more likely.  We can plan roads that make accidents less likely.  We can build homes in places less vulnerable to storm or quakes.  We can enhance our health.  We can wear seatbelts.  Such things increase our statistical chances at health and good fortune.  But they can never give us certainty.  And no matter what we do, some times in our life we will suffer and ultimately we will die.  Those are givens.  Religion is our response to the givens, the things we cannot change.

             I don’t know about you, but the idea that there are things I cannot change goes against my grain.  I was always a planner.  I was a social activist.  I liked to see things change and get better.  There is nothing wrong with that.  Good qualities really.  Just bad when they give you an illusion of control.  Or if you take things to extremes.

             My mother always used to tell us stories about one of her college roommates who was the ultimate planner.  Every minute of her roommate’s week was mapped out.  She even had a particular time to wash her hair and would never go out with her friends or to a party if it happened to be her hair-washing day.  Mom claimed that her classmate was at the top of her class in college, but that she became a very boring person, who never did anything particularly fun or interesting with her life.  Her best opportunities probably came on her hair-washing days.  That kind of order and control may seem to be our need, but it masks our deeper need.  The man or woman who seems desperate to control life is usually fearful of that need, fearful that it is an endless emptiness inside.

            That deeper need is for the inner spiritual resources to respond to the unexpected and uncontrollable events in life with a certain grace, flexibility, strength, humor, and humanity.  I think I first learned this when a series of events left me without a job in a place where I was very much alone.  I would have expected to have felt terrified.  Instead, I found I had confidence, hope, and a sense of possibility.  Even though the situation was in some ways sad and discouraging, I was surprised to find an inner certainty that my own inner resources, my family and friends, and my spiritual strength would see me through to whatever came next.  I couldn’t control outer events, but I had that within and the love of others that I knew would see me through.  Spiritually, I felt not that God would smooth my way but that that holy spirit would be with me and give me strength to meet the days ahead.  Equally important to me were family, friends, and even sympathetic people who were near strangers who, though many were far away, let me know I was not alone, let me know I would never be abandoned. 

             It is sad to me to see the faces on TV so emblematic of an era in which more and more people are being abandoned.  When I was young, we had the feeling that we lived in a vast network of relationships:  neighborhoods, towns, extended families, churches, synagogues, civic groups, voluntary associations of all kinds.  We didn’t agree politically, but as a nation we did agree that our government was there to take care of things we couldn’t do alone and to take care of the least of these.  I don’t know that we did it, but we felt that we ought to.  But in my adult years I have seen the destruction of those relationships through suburban sprawl, technology, and a false ideology of extreme individualism that puts forth the idea that we each make it on our own and are not connected to nor responsible for one another. 

             For me, congregations ought to do what we can to be an antidote to the modern illusions of control and extreme individualism.  A healthy congregation should help cope with the messiness of life, the things beyond our control, in several ways.  First, it should help us learn, maintain, and sustain, our spiritual life, the resources and relationship with the spirit that give us strength in hard times.  Second, it should provide an opportunity to become a part of a community, a community of memory and hope where we are companions in life’s journey.  This is something that takes effort and mutuality and a sense of purpose on all our parts.  I have seen people walk into a church and expect instant community — as if the church were a store you could walk into and buy community.  But community is about making and maintaining relationships and mutuality — reaching out in hard times, celebrating in good ones. It doesn’t happen through e-mails; it happens face to face.  It also requires dealing with the messiness of other people.  I don’t know anyone who behaves well at all times.  There is no one I am close to that I haven’t felt a murderous impulse towards at some point.  Anyone I met who was too good to be real — wasn’t real.  So community requires dealing with each other and caring for people whose behavior we don’t always like.  Third, a healthy congregation is prophetic; it reaches beyond its walls to ease the suffering of the abandoned, the neglected, the oppressed.  It reaches out to the community beyond to cajole those who harm the greater community and to build up relationships and structures to nurture the well being of others.

            I believe that the truly spiritual people are those who think of religion not as a protection from things we cannot be protected from, but rather as something that strengthens us in meeting life’s challenges in the best possible way.  The theist in me feels that however alone I may feel, there is that great Love of God that holds me in its embrace not a God who fixes things but a God who loves us and gives us strength and courage.  The humanist in me remembers the words of a colleague who, in talking about the death of his son, said that in his sorrow there was no one and nothing that could help him, but of all the things that didn’t help, the one that helped the most was the presence of friends.

             In times when we face life’s unexpected challenges, at times when life is messy, these are the times when it is most important to have a spiritual life and a community of spirit.  Otherwise we can be swallowed up by despair, by anger, by depression, by fear.  If we can face life with the knowledge given us by our hard-won faith, we will remember that each one of us is precious, that we have resources and strength within, that we have companions on this journey, and that will be enough to pull us through this messy life — and, we hope, enough, to help us reach out to give others our hand.

Updated Jan 1, 2008 wfr