BOBVERBS:   SEVEN PROVERBS TO REMEMBER ME BY

A sermon by Robert M.Eddy, M.Div.

Delivered 19 June 2005

to the congregation of

The Unitarian Universalist Church of Pensacola

 Several years ago, I made  a rather rude response  to  a member of the First Unitarian Church of Denver.  .   At a Fellowship Dinner  she and I were talking- I don’t even remember the topic now  but  she said, “Well, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”   I responded, to my own surprise and her even greater surprise,  “Bullshit !”

I found that particular modern proverb not only nonsense but dangerous nonsense.  What I was responding to was her use of a “deadly dichotomy”,  where one’s choices are  reduced to  two and you must choose one or the other. No in betweens allowed.     I had another experience of that frustration the next year.  There, since I was among strangers I was more polite.

It was Martin Luther King’s Birthday. I was at a Black Church at what had been advertised as an interfaith service.  At the end of his excellent sermon, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion  preacher asked everyone to stand and turn to the person on his right and say “Are you saved?”   Fortunately, no one was on my right but the person on my left asked me “Are you saved?”  Again,  without thinking,  I responded.   “Enough”. What I was trying to say was, “ I don’t buy into your deadly ‘Saved or Damned’ dichotomy.  I’m saved enough for me.”   As too often happens, I had been thrust again into a deadly dichotomy and I wanted none of it!

Deadly dichotomies are but a subclass of Pernicious Proverbs,  those seductive sound bites that are passed on from generation to generation without thought; those “last words” that “settle it” and cut off all further discussion.   Pernicious Proverbs like “spare the rod and spoil the child.” Pernicious Proverbs like “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”,  or as I saw on a bumper sticker recently,  “God said it. I believe it.  that settles it!”

In this my last sermon as your settled minister I want to leave with you some non-pernicious proverbs.  Some “Bobverbs.”  There are eight of them.

There are many ancient collections of proverbs. The Book of Proverbs in the Bible is one of the oldest. In it you will find useful and pernicious proverbs in about equal measure.   No age has been without collections of proverbs.  They’re constantly being generated.  I find new collections in my email in box about twice a week.   During the sixties a prose poem “Desiderata” was popular.  Actually written by Indiana poet Max Ehrmann it became ubiquitous when falsely ascribed to an anonymous 17th century author.  It’s one of my favorite collections of useful proverbs. It begins,  “Walk placidly amid the noise.”  Good advice if you can do it. More recently a Unitarian minister named Robert Fulgum became a runaway best selling author on the basis of a piece he wrote for his congregation called,  “Everything I ever really needed to know I learned in Kindergarten.”

The great temptation of anyone trying to summarize a lifetime of advice giving is to haul out the well worn platitudes that fall from the memory banks onto the tongue without pausing a millisecond for cogitation.  I’ve tried to resist that temptation.  For this last sermon I’ve written down some of my favorite bits of “good advice” my favorite “bobverbs.”  Some original some not.  Analyzing them to see just how true or how false they are and I’ve discovered that something strange: Many proverbs  are both true and false,  depending on the situation.

How does one test one’s favorite proverbs?   Well, that’s another sermon – or perhaps a book – but  one thing is sure:  neither venerability  nor  novelty is a relevant test.   Jesus said,  “You have heard it said, …. but I say to you.”  The Buddha said, “Be ye lamps unto yourselves.”    It’s not always safe to challenge a so called  ancient “truth”  but it’s even more dangerous  to hang on to a principle – like ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ –  simply because it’s been around for four thousand years.   On the other hand Jesus’ alternative – the very opposite of the ancient proverb –   “Do good those who spitefully use you” –  it doesn’t make  sense in every situations either.

If I’ve learned anything in my 74 years of life and 50 plus years as a minister, it is this:   Avoid absolutes!  Distressing as it often seems everything  is relative.   Beware the terrible simplifiers!   The worst of the simplifiers are the chanters of “either/or  either/or  either/or”  You don’t have to be either a hammer or a nail, either “a sparrow or a snail”  There are few either or’s in life.  Most choices involve “both/and” or “none of the above.”  Even the most universal of the proverbs should be questioned.  Take the Golden Rule for example as I did a sermon I preached here some time ago titled,  “Confessions of a Reformed Altruist”.    In it I tired to find an alternative  to  Jesus’ passivism – yes passivism not pacifism – the passivism of Jesus which Isaac Asimov summarized in his Three Laws of Robots.  I came up with three laws for Humans who do not wish to be robots. First Law:   A Human shall be as harmless as possible.  Second Law:   A human shall be as happy as possible so long as he or she does not violate the first law.  Third law:  A Human being shall be as helpful as possible so long as he or she does not violate the second or  first laws.  Those three words: harmless, happy, and helpful in that order of priority have for years been  the dominant rule of my life.  I commend them to your consideration with one underlying zero law:  A Human being shall be as humble as possible.   No set of laws are worth anything without humility.

Despite my condemnation of deadly dichotomies I am often tempted to say, “There are Two Kinds of People:  The Fearful and the Hopeful; the pessimist and the optimist.   The first calls the second Pollyanna and the second calls the first Cassandra.”

Of course I know and you know that not everyone is either a Cassandra or a Pollyanna, either a Pessimist or an Optimist. What is true  is that people tend to be mostly Hopeful or mostly Fearful.   The popular way of describing it is to ask someone,  “Is the glass half full or half empty?”    Of course it’s both half full and  half empty. Pollyanna is always telling Cassandra, “cheer up things will get better. Have faith!”  In other words,  “Be like me.”  Cassandra is always telling Pollyanna, “Get real!  Take off those rose colored glasses.”  In other words, “be like me”

I’m an optimist, a Pollyanna  who always sings,  “look for the silver lining.” I hate to admit it but I often need a Cassandra to keep me from going off the deep end. I found one fifty one years ago. I know I need her, and I  maintain she needs my Pollyanna  to keep her from falling into a “slough of despond”.  I suppose the ideal is for everyone to carry both Pollyanna and Cassandra around inside .   I haven’t quite managed that yet but I’m working on it.  It takes both tendencies to live a balanced life.

So: I’ve suggest two “bobverbs” so far

First:  Live Humbly, Harmlessly, Happily and Helpfully in that order of priority.

Second: Be both Cassandra and Pllyanna.  Here are six  more “bobverbs” that continue to make sense to me.  A total of eight.

Here’s a third “bobverb:”   “Virtue” is its own punishment.”  None of us is thoroughly, consistently or always virtuous. This may be simply another way of saying what Jesus said  when he called the virtuous of his day, the Pharisees,  “whited sepulchers ” –  graves that were gleaming outside but filled with corruption within.   I know that I am at my worst when I think that I am superior to others.   Socrates taught that only he who knows his ignorance is truly wise.  Jesus taught that only he  who knows his own sin can claim any real virtue.  The greatest sinner is he who says,  “I thank thee Lord that I am not as other men.”   The fact of the matter is that at various points in my life I have been better than some.  At other times I have been worse than many but in essence I am not different from my forefathers – or my children or my sisters or brothers or friends or enemies.   Jesus taught,  “Judge not, that ye be not judged for with what judgment ye judge and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.”    A profound psychological insight.   Ehrmann said it in fewer words,  “Forbid that I should judge others lest I condemn myself.”   This is true at both a social and a societal level. The Rage to judge  is endemic to our society and it is as spiritually deadly  to the body politic as it is to the individual.  If we are gentle with others we will be gentle with ourselves, learning from our mistakes and always seeking to do better.  If we judge others we will in exact proportion condemn ourselves.    The only escape from the iron law of judgementalism is alienation or hypocrisy.  The “temptation to perfection” is a pathway to hell.   Humility is the beginning and prerequisite of virtue.   Without it virtue will be its own punishment.

A Fourth BobVerb.

The past and the future are equally opaque.

Mark Twain once remarked,  “It ain’t what you don’t know that will hurt you but what you think you know that ain’t so”    I’d like to use that pattern to say,  “It ain’t so much what you forget that will hurt you as what you remember that never happened.”   A recent book,   “The Myth of Repressed Memory” should be required reading for those who think that the intensity of a memory is an indication of its reliability.   Our brains are constantly confusing fantasy with memory as anyone who has been hypnotized can testify.   A great deal of harm has been done by persons who elicited from others supposed “memories” of child abuse that never happened. The tragedy is that when these false memories are discredited by objective evidence,  true reports of child abuse are likely to be ignored.  It’s the “boy who cried wolf” syndrome.

The past and the future are equally opaque.

It is difficult to live suspended over an abyss of unreliable memories  and an  unpredictable future – but that is the way life is.

Here’s fifth “bobverb”:  “reality is a useful fiction”.

The important question is this, “For what do you use your ‘reality’.

I believe it was Freeman Dyson who said,  “reality is not only stranger than we imagine,  it is stranger than we can imagine.”   We limited, mortal, human beings do not perceive reality.  We can’t.  Instead we maps, models and metaphors that help us make sense of the chaotic confusion our senses report; maps, models and metaphores that  mysteriously enable us to predict what is most likely coming next.   But the maps, models and metaphors are useful only to a point.   They all fail eventually as the Universe dishes up some new anomaly.   The three story universe falls to Copernicus. Aristotle;s final causes fall to Newtons laws or motion which in turn are superseded by Einstein’s equations which fall to quantum mechanics and string theory. And so it goes, ad infinitum.

We cannot know the future in any final sense.   We must live on faith that though disaster may wait round the corner,  the possibility of ecstasy and tranquility may also await.  We need to learn to live in faith that things can work out

A sixth BobVerb:

“ There is only one game and its name is “mine is bigger than yours.”  This is not original by any means.   It’s from the book “I’m O.K., You’re O.K.” one of many built on Eric Bern’s best seller,  “Games People Play.” .  Games are ‘crooked’ transactions between persons in which each attempts to get more strokes than he or she gives.  For a long time I resisted Berne’s psychology  which he called Transactional Analysis but eventually I found it the best model for counseling and for understanding.    In fact, one of my early UU sermons was titled,  “Games People Play while Waiting for Godot.”     Games are played  with all kinds of counters by different groups:  cars, computers, books read,  sermons written, size of congregation  – whatever.

We spend a good part of our lives playing games or learning how to play them better.  But the greatest happiness and fulfillment does not come from playing games.  The greatest happiness and fulfillment comes from  intimacy.  To disclose to another what you are in your deepest being and to be accepted and cherished and helped in your struggle to grow  into more than you now are.

Intimacy is the ‘pearl of great price.’   But to open oneself  to intimacy is terrifying.   What if one is rejected?   Many persons never achieve intimacy:   the kind of intimacy the old Hymn described “Just as I am, without one plea….I come, I come.”  Many believe that only an omniscient  and all loving God is capable of  such intimacy.  I don’t believe that.  I believe that all human beings have the capacity for intimacy.

A seventh BobVerb.

“Even this shall pass away.”

This too is unoriginal.   It is the saying a group of wise men came up with three thousand years ago when asked by their king to find a proverb  for all occasions.   It is true and whether we surrender the things that inevitably pass away or try to hold on to them all things will pass away.   The mountains erode into plains; continents descend into the fiery mantle to be recycled;  stars and galaxies are born and die on scales billions of times greater than those we can experience.    Why then should we think we can defy such a ubiquitous process – and why should we protest? –   Everything is recycled.  It is the Everest of hubris to demand that my soul – by which I mean my consciousness –  should survive the dissolution of my body.   I do not agree with Dylan Thomas who says “Go not easy into that dark night:  Rage, Rage the ending of the light”  or words to that effect.    I try to live as humbly, as harmlessly, as happily and as helpfully as possible and when I no can longer live I will die content.

And now the final, the eighth “Bobverb:”  the saying that keeps coming back to me, like a chorus, the words of the ancient preacher of Israel.  The words which I hope will be said with my very last breath: “To everything there is a season.  A time to be born; a time to die; a time to build a time to tear down; a time to laugh ; a time to weep ….A time for every purpose under heaven.”     And you will agree that there is a time to preach and a time to desist from preaching.  That time has come.