I am not constitutionally or by inclination an optimist. I believe that suffering is always going to be part of the human condition and that for the vast, vast majority of humanity (and living beings on the planet) the net amount of suffering vastly outweighs the net amount of happiness – not to speak of peace and contentment. I believe that the religious impulse in humans stems from this basic material fact. In Christianity and Islam this fact give rise to a desperate belief in a utopic afterlife; in Buddhism it leads to the Four Noble Truths and the idea that only with a cessation of desire comes the cessation of suffering... and yet, of course, we are desiring creatures.
One of the things that humans perpetually seem to desire is an answer to life, the universe and everything... an answer to the question, what's it all about? This question suggests that meaningfulness is encoded into the universe. Our former reverend Lewis Connolly used to think very highly of the Jungian psychologist Jordan Peterson. Personally I disagree with Peterson on most topics, especially in his belief in the necessity of dominance hierarchies and his obsessive conflation of man with order and women with chaos... however, where I do agree with him is in his view of humans as meaning- and myth-making creatures. Peterson has often been mocked for his unwillingness to offer a concrete answer to the question of whether he believes in God... and I have some sympathy for this too since I also often don't know exactly what people mean when they ask that question. Though Unitarians often speak the same ethical language, I think we are often referring to different things when we individually speak of God. Something that marks me out from some of my fellow Unitarians is that, personally speaking, I absolutely do not believe in an interventionalist God and I do not believe in a God that cares about humans – and certainly not in a God that would care about humans any more than any other living creature. I do believe that we are all made of the same stuff and that we are an expression of the universe speaking to itself. I think consciousness is a bit of a weird freak of evolution, but I am also sympathetic to the concept in transcendental meditation of the unified field. If one wants to call this unified field God or one wants to call it Brahman seems less important to me than how one chooses to live in relation to this fact. To use a verb that would probably work better in German, Being (with a capital 'B') beings. Talking about it can end up being, like Greta Thunberg said of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, so much “blah blah blah”.
25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31 So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Matthew 6 (25-34) is one of the most profoundly beautiful verses in the Bible and yet, to quote Richard Herring playing Matthew in a comedy sketch with Stewart Lee, “The reason a lily doesn't need to go out to work is that it just gets food and nutrients from the soil from photosynthesis, but I can't do that, can I, I haven't got any roots, I haven't got any chlorophyll in me. I'm a man not a plant”. Allegorical literalness aside, I do need to work and in my job I'm a teacher. The passage from The Hitchhiker's Guide that Antonia kindly read earlier was one that I read to my students a week or two ago. After this I asked the students to write down what they thought the meaning of life is. While several of them put down that they did not know and one scientifically minded student wrote 'to survive', the majority of the students wrote that the meaning of life is to be happy. I think there is a certain Zen wisdom in that, as long as the pursuit of your happiness doesn't involve diminishing the happiness of others. Sadly, as energy-consuming creatures living in a largely oil-fuelled resource extractivist consumer-capitalist culture, this is hard to avoid. Getting into the teaching profession was partly motivated by the idea articulated by Simone de Beauvoir on the front of your order of service “One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others”. It's a lovely sentiment, but I'm also scared that it turns life into a kind of Ponzi scheme... everyone providing others with acts of service just to cover up the howling void of a lack of existential meaning behind it all. This pessimistic perspective is articulated memorably by cosmic horror writer Thomas Ligotti in his non-fiction work of philosophy Conspiracy Against the Human Race as follows: “An afterlife of eternal bliss is not and cannot be absolutely useful simply because you need it to be. It is part of a relative framework and nothing beyond that, just as a potato masher is only part of a relative framework and is useful only if you need to mash potatoes. Once you had made it through this life to an afterlife of eternal bliss, you would have no use for that afterlife. Its job would be done, and all you would have is an afterlife of eternal bliss—a paradise for reverent hedonists and pious libertines. What is the use in that? You might as well not exist at all, either in this life or in an afterlife of eternal bliss. Any kind of existence is useless. Nothing is self-justifying. Everything is justified only in a relativistic potato-masher sense”. This probably explains why Jordan Peterson gets so angsty about post-modernism.
Clearly I couldn't end a sermon during the Christmas season on such a dour note. I desperately started trying to think of the message of Christmas films to restore some optimistic and Christmas cheer to this service... but the messages largely seemed terrible. Antonia has pointed out that the message of the Home Alone films, especially Home Alone 2, is largely consumerist – that Christmas really is about buying stuff. The message of my favourite Christmas film, Gremlins, seems even more dubiously to be about the danger of buying Chinese consumer goods. I love the message of The Muppets Christmas Carol (and, indeed, A Christmas Carol) that we should hold the spirit of Christmas in our hearts all year long, but it's hard. With a job that involves teaching Year 9s it's doubly hard. However, ultimately I think the message of It's A Wonderful Life is a sound one – that we never really know the good we can do others. It's worth sticking around because it really could be worse without us. One of my students, who struggle a lot with attendance, gave me a really touching Christmas card about how she feels safe and valued in my English lessons and how much she appreciates this. That was enough to justify my entire term's teaching frankly. We will end now on my favourite hymn which we also sang during my last service and which never fails to lift my spirits, 'One More Step Along the World I Go', no. 125 in your purple hymn books.