Sermons by Rev. Don W. Vaughn -Foerster
Prometheus-in-us
Rev. Don W. Vaughn -Foerster
Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, FL
October 22, 2006
The image of Prometheus is as important to many religious liberals as that of Jesus is to Christians. Prometheus represents indomitability of the human spirit. He stole fire from the gods in order to give it to the human race. For his effort Zeus chained him to a rock with an eagle (or a buzzard) eternally pecking at his liver. One version of the myth has Prometheus chained to the rock for eternity; another has him rescued by Hercules. Regardless of how long he was there, he still maintained his dedication to the deed for good he had done for humanity. Although, I've often wondered how Prometheus would react to Emily Dickinson's poem "Hope Is a Thing with Feathers."
The image of Prometheus is one of hope and optimism in spite of difficulty and pain - and, as religious liberals, we tend to claim it for ourselves. There is, however, an incongruity that bothers me. Increasingly, under all our talk about staking our religion or our faith on reason, under our claims of being tolerant, under our pursuit of diversity (which often is limited to only the diversity with which we are comfortable) - under all these, lying barely skin deep, is pessimism. At a certain level we are just waiting to see the worst in people who differ from us, or the worst in ourselves when the going gets tough, or the worst in life itself when the negatives pyramid and the positives seem few and far between. In much of our affairs, sometimes it seems as if the old joke is too close for comfort: "What is the difference between a man or a woman and a battery? A battery has a positive side."
But, all this means is that, although we might like to think otherwise, we are not unique. Nobody - neither Protestant, nor Catholic, nor Humanist, nor Buddhist, nor Moslem, nor Jew -- nobody is immune to despairing of life. All of these groups, also, make hopeful assertions about life. No, we are not unique. It's just that, perhaps more than most other groups, we tend to drive our negatives more deeply underground than do those who have less ideological (as over against natural) confidence in themselves. Others tend to speak more directly and easily about evil and sin and such. The birds that tear at our liver (and our heart) may be less obvious, but they are there nonetheless.
Obviously, we don't lose hope intentionally. Rather, we do so because of some misperceptions that we, and most people, have about hope. When what we take to be hope turns out not to be hope at all, this is bound to make dealing with disappointment and despair even more difficult.
What gets us off track? Primarily, I believe we miss that dimension of depth that is part of authentic hoping. By authentic hoping I mean that kind of hoping which infuses us with deep and unswerving faith in life as valid and worthful. Ordinarily, we take the whole thing too superficially. Hope seems to be such a simple thing. Either you have it or you don't. After all, the dictionary says hope is just "a feeling that what one desires will happen." Obviously, when that feeling is present, hope is present; when that feeling is absent, hope is absent, too. So, what's the big deal? Isn't to hope merely to wish, to expect, to desire, or to trust and feel that these wishes, expectations, desires, and trust will come about? Isn't it at root the sentiment in the wag of a dog's tail when he is waiting for a bone? - as one wag put it once.
Well, on some levels, hope is not such a big deal. I hope I can catch the right bus, or get tickets to the theater, or breakfast will be on time, or our latitude will shift and it will snow. This "hoping" can be a transitory, short-time thing. However, on some other levels, it is a very big deal, indeed. On these levels, hoping is itself the key to fulfillment even more than the thing hoped for. Thus, it is that the hopes we have for one another (the hoping we have in one another) are of the essence of our relationships. For how can I mean much to you, or you mean much to me, or we all mean much to one another, if we do not have hopes for one another? - if we do not hope in one another? And, regarding life itself, if we cease to expect life to expect anything from us, is not the full living of life soon lost to us? If we don't think life has hope in us, what's the point in living? The reading from Viktor Frankl suggests that some people do stop living at this point.
Hope must have deep roots within us if it is to inspire us to our most genuine existence. However, we tend to live our lives on the superficial level of hope. We mistake illusions of hope for the profound hope we need. We mistake our instinctive drive for self preservation for hope. It is this drive, and not hope, that you see in the baby fighting off a serious infection or in a swimmer struggling mightily against an undertow. This drive to sustain life comes with our equipment. However, if the deeper dimension of hope is never reached, even this instinct to live slows down, oftentimes succumbing to the despair of tension-ridden families, of abandonment in old folks homes, of suicides.
Something else we mistake for hope is a thin desire that we like to call optimism but which, more accurately put, is either an educated guess based on past experience or the heady anticipation with which we set about to satisfy our appetites. As a guess, this sham hope can be no more than a rosy glow that we put on what we think may happen to us. As an anticipation, it is hardly more than the sensation of a hunger we think we can satisfy. A fuller optimism, deeply rooted in a positive belief in life, is necessary to living life to its fullest, but too often we settle for only a Pollyanna belief created out of wishes instead of fact. Sometimes our hopes are no more realistic than the guy who said, "I hope to live forever. So far my plan is working perfectly."
Another thing we may mistake for hope is the stoical attitude - something important to the independent minded and self sufficient among us. The melodramatic picture of the stoic facing both good times and bad times with the same equanimity may lead us to think that facing life in this way involves the highest hopes possible in a world that seems not at all interested in us personally. At root this is not hope; it is resignation. And, resignation is a first step toward despair. It's the mindset that, when things are bad and look as if they will get worse, moves a storekeeper to have a pre-fire sale just to be prepared.
Our survival instinct, our optimism, and our stoicism (and other day-to-day strategies you may think of) are not the hope we need to be our fully human selves. They will not sustain us when our politicians seem bent on depriving us of our value as citizens or when our religious group seems bent on foundering in interpersonal or ideological controversy. Rather, at root, these illusions of hope are attempts to avoid despair - to dodge the flying buzzards pecking at our livers. They are our hunger for hope become defense systems - illusions that we are confident of our future and our total meaning when in fact we are half scared to death.
Real hope far outstrips these things. It is of an amazing paradoxical nature inasmuch as it is something to strive for but is best found in the striving itself. For real hope is at once a profound combination of the anticipation of the coming thrill of living well (and better) and the present confidence in living now. It is more than wish and expectation and desire. Hope (and this is my own definition) is that sense of awe and wonder which we feel when we believe that the coming moments, days, and years will be worth our effort. They may not be easy or even "good" in the sense of pleasure and success; but they will be worth our effort. The paradox is: what is to come is already known and tasted in this moment. Somehow now we "know"; and this knowledge is our hope.
Hope exists in the most basic level of our being. It springs up where our spirit has its first thoughts of whether to be or not to be. Hope to us is somewhat like the first chapter of Genesis is to the Bible. There, the creator looks on creation for the first time and says "It is good." To call something "good" is to have confidence in both its present substance and its destiny. It is to see it as worth the effort. It is to invest hope in it.
When we, at the most basic level of our minds and hearts, look on our country or our family or our religious group -- on the world we must live in -- and say, "It is worth it," (which is another way of saying "It is good") then hope is a reality for us. Again, hope is like the feeling Prometheus had when he looked on human beings, loved them, and vowed to do them a "good." Fully knowing the consequences of his actions, he stole the fire of the gods and gave it to humanity, saying, to himself, "It is worth it!"
When we do not say this, then buzzards begin to tear at our insides and, in figurative Biblical terms, chaos returns to us and our death and dissolution are only a matter of time. Then, unlike Prometheus, we may hang on for a time but the fire of expectant involvement will have gone out.
It is one thing to describe and define hope; it is quite another to say how it can be found if it seems absent. We come to religious services like this, participate in liturgies, listen to sermons, socialize with strangers and, sometimes, pick up unsought responsibilities, largely because we want to be reinfused with a reason to live. We want to find hope. When we are together -- honestly, openly, caringly -- we, often, do remind one another that living is worth our effort.
Even so, at the deepest level, this may not be enough. If the chaos and despair of too much frustration and failure have truly overtaken us, we may not be enough for one another even when we say nice and supportive things. Sometimes, the problem is one for which no one else can offer much help.
If that happens to us, it may do no good to look to others for reason or inspiration to live. Nor may it do much good to look to the cosmos nor to what many call "God." The cosmos at such times may seem even more impersonal and unconcerned - and hopeless - than ever. And "God" may appear to be that very judgmental force which has condemned us to despair -- and "hell" - in the first place. To me a great tragedy of the religious right is the way it makes God's judgment the cause of despair.
At such times, I would suggest that we look to our own memory of what and whom we have been, to those moments in which life has seemed intrinsically good to us - to those moments when other people and the world promised "good," to those moments when hope was real and alive in us. For all of us there have been times when we wanted tomorrow to come because its foretaste in today was so promising.
When all else seems to fail us - our friends, our philosophy of life, the outward forms of our religion - I believe there is still the hidden, inner resource of being from which we have sprung that gives new hope when we acknowledge it. To support this, I have no proof. I only know that there have been at least two times in my own life that, had I not made such an acknowledgment that released a new surge of hope, I probably would not be here today.
What I am saying is that we are born to hope. It starts in us; we start in it. Our very humanness is fired by the essence of hope. When we lose one, we lose the other. When we find one, we find the other. And, ultimately, when we seem to lose hope, it is, actually, from our own remembered hopes that we restore it. Others may remind us that hope exists. Only we can remember it and know it. Only we can remember what it is that we first realized life expected us to be. And, the remarkable thing is that, when we remember our own hope, others see that hope in us -- even as we see it in them when they remember theirs.
We are living in times when despair is being imposed on us by forces outside ourselves. The media, the government, the economy seem bent on pursuing interests so alien to our personal welfare that it seems we are valueless to them. From time to time, even our own effort to be a religious, inclusive organization may seem to impose as much disappointment as hope. If we look only to such forces outside ourselves, it is difficult to find cause for hope. But if we look to ourselves and our memories of the "good" in our lives -- and in each other -- we can live far above the plane of mere survival, or Pollyanna optimism, or stoicism. We can live with confidence in the future because we understand that any confidence, which the future holds, comes from us anyway. It comes from individual persons who feel it and show it in such strength that others look for it in themselves.
For me, as for many others, all of this was summed up long ago in the "myth of Prometheus". In the unconscious depths of the human mind and heart, Prometheus was not just an ancient Greek demigod. He is a symbol of an ever-present aspect of the human spirit, that part of our nature which, in the last moments of despair, refuses to be thwarted either by the gods or the eagles playing the part of buzzards tearing at us. He persists even though Hercules may never come. He represents that part of us that believes in the worth of tomorrow whatever the cost of today.
Speaking metaphorically, "Prometheus-in-us" is hope, the hope that never fully leaves us if we accept that risk, which acting on it always entails, and if we will not content ourselves with lesser, illusory hopes which may serve a while but ultimately fail. It is of the grace of our human condition that hope can be aroused within us, and can be shared, whenever we truly acknowledge that life is worthwhile. When we cannot make such an acknowledgment is when the eagles start tearing at our insides.