http://www.firstchurchboston.org/eeuploads/sermons/Microsoft_Word_-_Secret_of_Life_Part_III.pdf
Well, the “Secret of Life Part III.”
Boy I’ve really dragged this out. You know at the beginning of the year we had Part I, and right before Thanksgiving, Part II. I know, it’s been a little cruel, stretching this out, but now I’m going to put you all out of your misery. The Secret of Life… This is it. You don’t have to wait any more. It’s all about… Time.
Now you all remember this all started with, actually, the oddity of me talking about Albert Einstein. When he came up with the equation E=MC2, it was basically a unified theory of reality-- that time and space were one. And he did it through thought experiments. As a young child, he imagined: what it would be like if he could ride on a light beam? What would it be like to move at the actual speed of light? And from this vision as a young child came all his work, all of his insight that literally changed the world.
And in that first sermon about the Secret of Life, I talked about how, for Einstein, (and I think for all of us) he ended up feeling that imagination was more important than knowledge. Imagination—step number one—more important than knowledge.
And the second—to be a rebel. To be an iconoclast. Take nothing for granted. Take nothing as received. Think it through, like he did as that young boy. You can create a revolution if you just think free. If you realize, as he said, how important it is to foster individuality. For only the individual creates new ideas.
And third—he had an inner reverence for beauty, and simplicity, and elegance. He looked for these things. He felt that at the very heart of nature and reality there was a deep simplicity. Don’t go for chaos; don’t go for anything other. Physicists nowadays talk about – “Wouldn’t it be great if we could find out about the entire meaning of life, and put it in an equation on a t-shirt?” That’s their goal. But for Einstein, it wasn’t about the equations. In fact, he was pretty poor at math, which I appreciate. He was riding the light beam. It was in his thought experiments that he showed his free nature.
Ok, so where are we? Be a rebel. Think it through. Get an image in your head and heart and mind, and follow it. Follow it all the way through. Pay attention to simplicity, and beauty, wherever you can find it. But there’s more, because the fourth step for Einstein was an instinctive feeling toward this reality we all share, of a reverence that he called awe. The intermingling fields of energy, time, space, matter, and consciousness. All of us here, sitting in the pews today-- Now we’re not Einsteins, we know that-- But we too may ride the light beam. We can carry this deep sense of awe, a childlike wonder, into the mystery into which we have been born.
And fifth, he decided as a very young child that the Bible stories he had been given as a young Jew were not true. They didn’t make sense. They were not logical to him. But he didn’t leave behind this sense of awe leading into a mystery which bordered on worship; because he also remembered as a young boy being given a gift-- a compass. And as he looked at it, he realized, no matter where it stood, it always pointed north. He realized that the world was filled with fields of influence that could not be seen. And yet they influenced every aspect of life.
And from that compass he realized that there are fields of influence invisible to our eye, and yet magnificent in their constancy. He decided to delve into this mystery. And he thought to himself that whatever reality and truth could be, it was in the end not only beautiful, but knowable. And he called his vision of God ‘the Old One.’ It was not a personal God; he did not believe in that biblical God. But he most certainly had a sense that there was a constancy-- a deep, undergirding, elegant, simple explanation for all that is, and all that will be.
He was, yes, suspicious of all religious orthodoxies. But he was a man of faith. This deeply mysterious universe in which we live, that Einstien called ‘the secrets of the Old One.’ They lead us into the secrets of life. We don’t expect to ever completely understand these secrets. We dwell in them. We are influenced by them. They move through us and beyond us.
And in the end Einstein concluded that life was for its own sake. He said striving for justice—not knowledge—striving for justice was in fact the most valuable way that you can employ your time upon this earth. It’s staring us in the face with its simplicity. And if you did the thought experiment, if you could ride the light beam to its conclusion. In the end, when asked about his life, he said “I simply enjoy giving more than receiving, in every respect.” In the last year of his life he said, “I am a deeply religious non-believer.”
What’s the secret of life? Giving more than receiving in every respect. How simple and how beautiful. Einstein said, “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”
Well that’s where all this began. I thought in elucidating those ideas from that very first sermon, (in case you weren’t making notes back last September) is to realize that the greatest mystery there is, is time. If time and space are truly one, guess what? Time and you are very intimate. The medium in which you move-- Each day. Each moment. Each year. It’s time. How did the great religions begin? My friend Forrest Church says, “Because we have this dual sense of being alive in this moment, and being the only creature of consciousness which knows that it will die.” And then you put these two seemingly disparate and contradictory ideas together, and you get the richness, and the excitement of faith. Because you’re holding these two ideas at one.
Time. And birth. And death. And the consciousness of who you are. Time has always been a mystery. Once Augustine was asked, “What was God doing before he created time?” Augustine answered: “Inventing Hell for people who ask questions like this.” On the surface, it all seems very, very simple. Here on Father’s day, a child is in our arms. We live a brief period. We die. It seems straightforward. A biological process shared with all creatures. No great mystery to it. But there’s always been a deep sense of mystery about all this. The ancient Greeks said there was such a thing as ‘chronos.’ Chronos is this. It’s the clock. It tells you the seconds, and the minutes, and where you stand in the deep history of time. Chronos tells you where you are in the river in which you find yourself. The river of time. But they said there was another kind of time. It’s called ‘Kyros.’ Kyros is deep time. Time that contains eternity.
I was talking to a young man who’s in the physics department at Harvard, and he was talking about the new String theory, and he said, “Stephen, do you realize that there’s a theory that there are 17 dimensions wrapped up inside every string, every connection? Including time itself.” If you can wrap up and curl together 17 dimensions, I think the lives that you and I lead contain many many more than that.
The real way that this sermon began wasn’t Albert Einstein. It was actually James Taylor, and his great song “The Secret of Life:”
The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.
Any fool can do it.
There ain’t nothing to it
No one knows how we got to the top of the hill,
but now we’re on the way down
we might as well enjoy the ride.
There’s another poet, Anna gave me this poem earlier in the week, when she was showing me the mysteries of the Mac laptop. The poem is by W.S. Merwin; “Unknown Age.”
[…] it is a moment of air
held between the hands, like a stunned bird
[…] no knowledge of what happened to the reflections
on a pond’s surface that never were seen again
the bird lies still while the light goes on flying
Just like that image of the young Einstien, riding the light beam. It’s flying alright. Life seems so short! Our days upon this earth so quick, so effervescent. That’s part of the mystery too.
A fundamentalist minister one day got up and said, “You need to be thinking about your time here on earth, and I brought in someone who’s going to tell you how not to live your life.” And a little wizened old man came in with a cane, deep wrinkles, no teeth, hair just wisps of gray. And he said, “I have smoked, and I have dranken, chased women and ponies; I’ve done everything wrong.” And the minister said, “And how do you feel about it?” And he looked up and he said “Well Preacher, I have to say, I enjoyed all 28 years of it.”
We don’t really understand time. It’s our intimate friend, and occasionally we perceive it as our enemy. But we don’t understand it. It’s flying, moving through us. The cells of our body being replaced, except for a few nerve cells, every 7 years. And yet our identity goes on. And yet our memories are harbored-- of one Christmas after another, one New Year’s Day after another, one birthday piled upon another. You might even say that the essence and reality of churches and synagogues and temples all around the world were established to try to deal with the quandary, the conundrum of time. To teach us how to live. To recognize the mystery of birth and the power of death. Time. Time held and curled tightly within itself. One memory upon memory. Each deepening. Each making every year richer.
(Sung) The Secret of Love is in opening up your heart.
It’s OK to feel afraid. But don’t let it stand in your way.
‘Cause everyone knows that love is the only road.
And since we’re only here for a while.
We might as well show some style.
Isn’t it a lovely ride?
Sliding down. Gliding down.
Try not to try too hard.
It’s just a lovely ride.
And time is our essence, though we never really come to terms with it. Aging, it seems simple enough. Our forebears considered a long life to be 32, and the elders in their 50s. And now life is longer, but we don’t understand it any more than we did then. But we know… we know that something else is going on.
George Spencer, on September 11, 2001, left a note for his wife on the kitchen counter before he went in to Manhattan. Just another day. Just another blue, beautiful, fall day. And on the counter he left for his wife these words: “Stop being critical of yourself. Enjoy life. Today is another day. It is a chance to live a little.”
Our friend Forrest Church says eternity is not a length of time. It is depth in time. And it most certainly is.
Rebekah, we acknowledge you as our outgoing intern, and Tim as one coming in. And Forrest Church, our minister at All Souls Church in New York City was an intern and assistant minister here. In fact he probably would not have entered the ministry if not for the wiley machinations and love and affection of Rhys Williams. And Forrest… He too is facing these quandaries and these mysteries, as we all do. He’s dealing with his own inoperable cancer. When he was first diagnosed with esophageal cancer and took the treatment, he prepared to die. But he was given a reprieve and it was a good reprieve. It was a good long year of health and vitality. He preached these words literally days before he was told that the cancer had returned…
“In each of our lives, not only will some rain fall; fires will burn. The ground will shake. And one day life itself will be exacted in payment for this gift of life bestowed. And by wanting what we have and doing what we can and being who we are, our cup will be forever half full, not half empty. Do some things with reverence, humbled by awe, and your cup runneth over. The alternative- to long for what we lack, for things that we have lost or shall likely never find—offers little, save the sour pleasures of regret. Fantasy is no better. Wishful thinking is both sloppy and sentimental. We should think to wish instead for things a little closer at hand—the courage to bear up under pain, the grace to take our successes lightly, the liberation that comes through forgiveness, the energy to address tasks which await our doing, the meaning to be found in giving ourselves to others, the patience to surmount things dragging us down and the joy to be gained in even the smallest endeavor. And most of all the wonder that lies between the sacred moments.” Forrest added “I call this thoughtful wishing. Wishing for what is ours, here and now. To have, do, and be.”
Chronos, Kyros. Deep time. It’s where love and memory and compassion all reside. Where life is lived beyond the stolid forward march from one day to another. To a far distant moment. Or maybe it isn’t far distant. We don’t know. That too is part of the mystery, where even glimpses of a lived truth hovers like a stunned bird in our hand.
What is this mystery? We know, we know something else is going on, something odd about the passage of time lived each within our hearts. The secret of life… enjoying that passage of time. It’s what we do. Your job is really simple. It’s to live a life. To embrace it. To savor it. Every day. Every moment. By living one moment and one day and one year.
It is that dual reality of being alive and knowing that one day, one day, it won’t be ours. And since our brains aren’t really equipped to envision such a thing as death… there comes that vividness of faith again. The passage of time. One moment to another. Forward movement. And yet, you know, life doesn’t always feel that way.
If you do the mathematical equations, did you know, that in the creation of sub-atomic particles, time moves forward as well as backwards and backwards is as easily read as forwards? And if it is true that the entire universe itself is this cosmic, inexplicable movement out of chaos and nothing into the splendor of this world, in its vitality and its beauty and its elegance. Yes, something deeply mysterious is going on, and we are not wrong to believe deep in our hearts that the passage of time, while a mystery, is in fact a liberation. Time is more flexible than we know.
(Sung) Now the thing about time
is that time isn’t really real.
Its just your point of view.
How does it feel for you?
Einstein said he could never understand it all
Planets spinning through space
The smile upon your face
Now the secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.
To all of you: Happy 378th year of this congregation of men and women and children who have entered this sanctuary. Like a ship loaded over and over again, we come together to dream, and to work, and to hold aloft a vision of a better world. While the light goes flying by, may we ride that light beam, and our hearts uprise.
Amen. It’s been a good year.
