Sermon: The Virtue of Commitment

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The Virtue of Commitment

By Charles Rush

January 11, 2004

is week I heard both Dave Letterman and Al Franken talking about visiting the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both of them have made professional reputations for being irreverent, somewhat aloof, Letterman particularly long cultivated the public persona of the perpetual bachelor, sardonic, goofing on everybody and everything. They did not disappoint overseas. Letterman did a show at one of Saddam's palaces and threw footballs into his former pools. Al Franken complained about Army food. He said he'd had 5 MRE's- meals ready to eat- and as far as he could tell, not one of them had an exit strategy. He did another schtick as Saddam. When the interviewer asked him where he'd been, Saddam explained that his family was grown and he decided that now was the time to downsize from his many palaces to a hole in the ground. Al Franken had the Washington Redskin cheerleaders dressed up in Burkha's in Afghanistan. After teasing the G.I's for a time, they finally tore off the Burkha's and all the guys erupted, just like they did.

Terry Gross asked Al Franken why he did the U.S.O. tour since he was opposed to the war and he opposed the Bush administration. His answer was basically the same one that Dave gave. They said that it didn't matter what you thought at the outset fo the conflict, that we are there now and we have to stabilize the situation and support our troops.

They were both visibly moved by our women and men in uniform. Dave said he ran into one G.I. that said he had seen him in Afghanistan. Dave said, "Man the government is getting their work out of you." The soldier said, "Sir someone has to do it." Over and over they heard that devotion to country and to duty. Over and over they ate with ordinary young men and women with an extraordinary integrity and commitment. The young G.I.'s would come up to them and say it is an honor to meet you. Over and over they would respond, "no it is an honor to meet you… believe me." It was the character of service and sacrifice, the real spirit of giving that made the Christmas season for them.

Recently, I said that Socrates wasn't quite right when he used to say that "the unexamined life is not worth living". That is true but it is not the fullest truth. We need philosophical reflection. But, spiritually speaking, reflection is not enough. Finally, we must say that it is the uncommitted life that is not worth living.

For the past 40 years, us men have grown up with cultural images of masculinity that celebrate aloofness and steer clear of intimate commitment, principally to women, but it is more even than relationships.

We got a colorful introduction to this manner of being 35 years ago in the figure of Jack Nicholson, riding on the back of a Harley Davidson motorcycle behind Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider. Remember that ridiculous football helmet he wore? Jack was on the road, along for the ride. The only thing he was sure about was that he grew up in a hick town, full of red neck prejudice, going nowhere, and he was ready to do something. He had no relationship, no one to tie him down, he was just wide open for whatever came next. Clueless but endearing, particularly to the vast majority of American teenagers who were united in feeling stifled by the mores and culture of what Richard Nixon used to call 'the Silent Majority'. They weren't sure what they wanted, just sure of what wasn't working.

That same character developed an edge of moral critique when he returned in another avatar in Five Easy Pieces. Nicholson is introduced as a laborer on an oil rig in his early twenties, obviously over-educated for his station in life. He dismisses the simple middle-class dreams of his buddies who drive their delapitated cars back and forth from the trailer to the oil rig, hoping to one day own a home. "You keep talking about the good life" he says waving his arm towards the trailer, "the good life sucks."

He hits the road, tossing aside the simple girls that he meets at the bowling alley, delivering a very funny, sardonic critique of the middle class. His odyssey takes him back to his upper-middle class home, where we learn that he was earlier alienated from the emotional frigidity of his WASP family and their overbearing concern with propriety. Torn between a woman from his upper-middle class childhood that he wants to romance but can't because he rejects all the values he associates with her decorum, and a puppy dog working class girl that he has a steamy sexual relationship but holds in contempt, he contemplates his bleak options at the end of the movie, filling up with gas at a station. Impulsively, he jumps in a tractor-trailer truck and just bolts from both of them.

Jump forward a decade, and he returns in a mid-life avatar in Terms of Endearment as the professional bachelor that lives next door to the shrew Shirley MacLaine. He is an astronaut, recently retired, who has never tired of a belly full of booze and fast cars. In the signature scene from the movie, he takes the shrew Shirley MacLaine out on their first, sort of date, and ends up drunk, driving down the beach in his Corvette convertible, sitting up on the top of his car, steering with his feet, the shrew squabbling at him all the while that he is howling until he hits the surf, car does a 180 and he flips out the side, into the water.

Here Jack is 50, never been married, never stopped being the lounge lizard, overweight, vituperative, still frisky and socially clueless as to how regularly he offends people, ever playful, never serious, the master of banter and repartee and suddenly mute when faced with serious tragedy like the imminent death of someone dying too young. He has this crashing realization that his emotional and spiritual deck are short a whole suit of cards and through facing this crisis, he begins to find redemption unto a modicum of intimacy through the joy of orphaned grandchildren. He grows up a bit by becoming childlike with them rather than childish as he had been as a bachelor.

Finally, we get the early 60's look at the same character in his most recent movie Something's Gotta Give. By this age, a life time of studied distance and aloofness, he has become cartoonish. Go see the movie, it is very funny and endearing. But, Jack's character is stuck at a certain Studio 54 sexuality, so at 60 he is still only chasing 30 year old girls and trying to bed people that he hardly knows with all of the warts and ungainliness that undisciplined wealthy indulgence buys a man after 6 decades of excess. Now he is a cartoon that has not one but two heart attacks brought on from a combination of Viagra, alcohol, and waning lust. When he finally meets his match in Diane Keaton, an actual life partner, an equal, approximately his age- witty, successful, cute- he doesn't even recognize what love really is and he is actually incapable of keeping himself from running or jettisoning the relationship, intimacy is that fearful. I won't give the movie away, but Diane Keaton works her magic and grows him up. It is cute, but my God, about time.

I'm sorry to go off on Jack but he is so convenient and so well captures the model for us men that we should stay 'free from'. Spiritually and emotionally, this character is atrophied, truncated, without skill or resources. Surely you are saying, 'but it is only a movie.' I agree. And that is what I say to friends and colleagues when their actual lives begin to approximate this persona, that character is only for the movies, not for real life. People will respond, 'yes, but he is so successful.' As though career success or financial success should somehow excuse or compensate for spiritual fearfulness and emotional shallowness. At a minimum, I think we want both career success and spiritual depth.

And if this character used to be predominately male, it hasn't been exclusively so for a couple decades, at least in metropolitan New York. We have his female equivalent in various women on various episodes of Sex and the City or on the PG-13 counterpart for prime time, Friends. We have all these women that want to have companionship, want to have partnership and intimacy, want to have fidelity and trust, but it is too complicated and difficult- and the men immediately around them do not appear up to it, so they settle for available, quick, lusty trysts and get their comradeship needs met through their friends and many more acquaintances which adds up to their 'so called life'. All of them are witty, skilled at repartee, and deeply fearful that if they really let someone in their soul, somehow they will be ruined. Safer to be calculated and distant, keeping your options open, drenched in material perquisites.

These are the cultural icons that float around on the screen in the back drop of our lives. And that is one of the reasons that people who drink deeply from these images and live out of them, get especially misty around our regular soldiers. By comparison, our soldiers are men and women who deeply committed and idealistic. They live for something beyond themselves. They work as a team. They are self-sacrificial. They share deep tragedy and burdens. They are real comrades. There is a moral and spiritual gravitas to their character, one that you only get from time together and serious commitment to a big cause. They answered President Kennedy's call, "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." A great and noble venture.

Spiritual and emotional depth, spiritual and emotional maturity require commitment. Depth and maturity are what happens to you when you are working a project through, dealing with set back and frustration. Depth and maturity are what happen when you are open and honest, when you learn to give of yourself deeply, when you are confident enough- and usually it is just enough- to really risk yourself in something. Depth and maturity are what happen when you lose some one precious to you, important to you, and they are precious because you have opened yourself and let them in and invested yourself in them. Even that great, deep sadness is part of what it means to be spiritually alive.

Spiritual depth has a moral dimension to it. It is finding something to live for that is bigger than yourself, something that is noble, something that so moves you in a fundamental way that you do it because it is the right thing to do. It is intrinsically worthwhile. It makes you live out of your higher self. It enables you to make sacrifices to achieve it.

I think of M.L. King, whose birthday we celebrate next week. He was not a perfect man, just a man growing in faith as he got more involved in the worthy cause of Civil Rights. His house was shot at, he was stabbed by someone who was mentally unstable. He got threats on his phone. In the last speech before he was shot in Memphis, someone asked him how he dealt with the fear that comes from being attacked. And towards the end of that speech he could finally say, with genuine spiritual gravitas, "I'm not afraid anymore…I'm not worried about that… I'm not fearing any man. For I have been to the mountain top… and God has allowed me to look out over the Promised Land… And I have seen the Promised Land… Now I just want to do God's will. I may not get there with you… but I am here to tell you tonite, that we as a people will get to the Promised Land." There is a spiritual equanimity in the face of persecution when you know you are being persecuted for righteousness sake, as Jesus used to say. Jesus was imprisoned, tortured, ridiculed and killed, but he could endure it all because he had the 'peace that passes understanding' that comes from doing something intrinsically worthwhile, something good, something that God wants you to do.

You may wish that you could see the Promised Land, that it were so simple to figure out what the right thing to do really is. Few of us get a clear vision of that when we are in the midst of history, in the midst of argument, controversy, in the midst of the ambiguity. But that is the challenge for your life.

I want you to know that God has a purpose for your life. I'm not talking about some script that was written for you 100 million years ago before the species of humans was ever invented. I'm not talking about some pre-destined role you have been assigned to play and you don't even know it.

It is more complicated than that. But there is an intersection between the skills and talents that define who you are after 20,000 generations of genetic wheeling and dealing. There is an intersection between your talents, the needs of the quadrant of world history that you were born into, the needs that have arisen in the community you share as neighbors, and what God intends for us, what God wants for us, our telos, the goal that God would have us aim towards that Jesus called the Kingdom of God. There is something you need to heal, something new that you need to start, something creative that needs you to be the spark that jumps the gap.

You have to figure out what that is and do it. You have to commit yourself to that and fill your life with meaning. Do not delay for time is short.

In the story that is told of Jesus, he commits himself to God in baptism when he is just a young man. He commits himself more deeply when he decides to preach in his hometown and that doesn't go over so well. He commits himself again, when he gathers disciples around him. He develops a movement. He feeds them. He heals them. He teaches them. The movement grows. And in the going, after a while, he figures out where God wants him to go. There is that ominous line towards the end of the gospels that says, 'he set his face towards Jerusalem.' He had to confront the political and religious leaders of his day. That was his challenge in his place and time. And his life was all over by the time he was 33. And that was about average for that day and time too.

Fortunately, we have a bit longer life and a wider plan, sometimes with several chapters to it. We have one thing for this phase of life and another for a later phase of life. What a privileged adventure because there is that possibility that we might get it better the second of third phase of life and we might actually heal a few things.

There is a bug that lives on the lakes in the deep South that lives it's entire life cycle in 24 hours. In the morning it hatches and zooms through all the wonder of youth in the morning. By noon, it begins courting and in the late afternoon there are a swarm of these bugs that rise over the lake like funnels because the females will only mate with the guys that can fly high, so up they go. By sunset, the casualties of age are beginning to take their toll on some of them but the swarm continues through the evening. In the early hours of the dawn the next day, there are only a very few of them left and by the time the sun is in the sky the whole generation has passed. I have a good friend who toasts them on the deck as the sun is going down, yelling all the way across the lake "Carpe Diem". That tribute has changed. It was one thing when we were 20 and another as we are closing in on 50. Seize the Day.

Do something significant with your life. The problem with staying uncommitted, aloof, keeping all your options open, is that finally you don't achieve anything of significance, anything of meaning. At the end of your life, you don't want people fumbling for something to say about why you were here and what you did. You want to hear something more than the beginning of every discussion of nearly every person at almost every bank during bonus cutting time, when the boss says, "Chuck… he's a great guy." We are all great guys, women too. So now find what you are meant to do and do it.

I close with a poem

Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

From House of Light (1990)

What will you do with your one wild and precious life