Sermon: The Power of Focused Commitment

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The Power of Focused Commitment

By Charles Rush

January 9, 2005

used to have two cartoons from the New Yorker on my door about commitment. It pictures a guy on his knees at a dinner table in a fashionable restaurant with his girlfriends hand in his. He says, "Look, I'm not talking about a life time commitment… I'm just asking your hand in marriage." The state of marriage today…

My generation and those running into their early 60's at this point were rather late in discovering the virtues of commitment. This was the generation that when they were teenagers touted 'free love' and revolted against 'the system'. This generation put the bumper sticker 'Question Authority' on the back of their Volkswagen's and like Dewey Finn, the erstwhile teacher in the Cult movie "School of Rock" taught each other to stand up to "The Man". I still can't figure out who "The Man" is? Even if we couldn't go all the way with the mad professor from Harvard, Timothy Leary, who enjoined the whole generation to 'tune in, turn on, and drop out'- and many of us did have a several year career right out of college just vegging out until we attained the full state of "mellow".

And then something changed, right around the time Woody Allen came out with his movie "Annie Hall". In that movie he has the memorable line. "I don't do mellow well… I tend to overrippen and… rot." Most of us realized that we were rotting- broke, could no longer live off our parents, without vision, and even vaguely bored with mind altering substances. Most of us here, did the intelligent thing, and went to business school or law school, embraced the system and the Man, and started figuring out how we could position ourselves to be the authority. We did very well thank you.

And now we have a whole different approach to the rising generation. I had a conversation this week that is indicative of this change, with a brand of humor only parents of three and four teenagers have. My fourth child through high school played a song for me that she had recently discovered from the Steve Miller Band. I nodded with interest and said, "I first saw them at the Beacon Theater when I was about your age." I say this only to provoke because with great indignation she says, "This is what is not fair, you got to go to concerts in 9th grade but you won't let me go." I knew she would say this. So with absolute calm I responded.

"That is because I started shooting heroin at that concert and that is not good for you… But it was fun." I can't help myself in jest on this subject occasionally. My generation has discovered the virtue of structured time for the next generation. The assumption seems to be that if we just define for them a completely full program to get into the best colleges in the country, aimlessness and self-destructive behaviors never have a chance to take root. Of course, it is partially correct.

I was watching a rerun of the T.V. show 'Everwood' that is rather indicative of this generation. In that show, the two high school kids were both being grilled by their parents, one to get into Princeton, the other to play piano at Julliard. The father, Treat Williams, was pleading with his son Efram to forgo a number of frivolous pursuits and really buckle down to playing a couple hours each and every day, working harder with his teachers, so that he could get into a top-flight program that would put him in world class league, one in a hundred, and do something with that talent.

I'm watching this, remembering that the T.V. show from the parents' generation would have been "All in the Family" with the twenty-something kid "Meathead" arguing with his father-in-law about the futility of engaging in any business enterprise because they were all so morally compromised.

No, we have discovered the virtue of commitment and structure, particularly for the next generation, and in the process the young Abbie Hoffmans morphed slowly into older Benito Mussolinis, without, I might add, a hint of irony. And now, we have always been this way.

Ours will not be a failure of means so much as a shallowness of ends. We need to raise our sights toward a commitment of more elevated profundity. When I was interviewed on the ESPN morning talk show "Cold Pizza" about sports on Sundays, I was surprised by how many people on the set, commentators, producers, and crew all wanted to tell their story about how shuttling their kids to sports on the weekends had literally taken over their lives. It is a fitting metaphor for this generation, as it turns out, across the nation. We are the shuttling generation, the cheering generation.

For this generation, there is no religious or moral commitment in our country that even comes close to the dedication and singular focus commanded by… hockey. Where else could you get parents and teenagers to awaken at 3:30 in the morning, or practice from 10:30-12:00 a.m. on a school night because we have ice? I grew up playing hockey in Chicago and South Bend but this is different. And it would make an interesting case study in why we are willing to invest so much money, time, and make so many sacrifices for this one sport. Why is it that this is so integral to our understanding of success? And what does it say about us?

I'm not talking about hockey as such, of course… Spirituality is not defined in apposition to hockey or sports. No, it lifts our focus through all these intermediary good ends. It inspires us and provokes us to think in more transcendent manner. Important as structured athletic activity has become, we all hope that this generations memory of us will be not be exhausted by our role as their personal organizer, their trainer, agent, coach, the advice given in the Suburban on the way to the game about career advancement.

The bible teaches us that our spiritual quest lifts us through our intermediary good ends, and that we keep reflecting because we are on a search that is not satiated until we have discovered Ultimate Being. We are on a quest to find our ultimate purpose, our ultimate passion.

In his novel Siddhartha, Herman Hesse describes this quest through our life cycle in its many different faces, many different avatars. As a young man Siddhartha tried to become a great athlete and then a great lover. He learned many things, and understood that competition and the sensual life was part of the spiritual quest but ultimately there was more. As a young man, he pursued career success and he developed an outstanding reputation and amassed a fortune that he could not spend in his life time and was able to become a philanthropist and help other people. He learned even more things and character and material power were part of the spiritual quest but ultimately there was more. As an older man, he had the means and the time to pursue thing intellectual and he read and sought out the fellowship of scholars and immersed himself in philosophical reflection. He learned still more things and the life of contemplation was part of the spiritual quest but ultimately there was more. Finally, at the end of his life, he developed failing health and the loss of loved ones and friends. He experienced suffering. Again, he learned even more still that was part of the spiritual quest but ultimately there was more. He saw the great cycle of existence, in the Eastern Hindi way… It points to the way that spiritual quest for ultimate being takes on many different concrete forms at different times in our life. All are valid and none are complete in themselves.

We are searching for Ultimate Being. We are searching for Ultimate passion. We are searching for an end worthy to commit our life to. It is one of the most intriguing and beguiling aspects of Jesus as non-believers even regularly attest. Here is somebody who was sure that He was in the will of God. He had a deep and immediate sense that he was doing what God wanted him to do. He had found his Ultimate purpose and was living out of it. He exemplified the extraordinary power of a committed life of spiritual gravitas.

Not many of us get to experience this in anything like its potential fullness but when it happens, extraordinary things open up. It is one of the greatest blessings of this life. As Coach Lombardi used to say, "Once you have made a commitment to a way of life, you put the greatest strength in the world behind you. It's something we call heart power. Once you have made this commitment, nothing will stop you short of success."

That doesn't mean you won't have frustrations, set backs, profound failures. You will. But as M. L. King once put it, "We can incorporate finite set backs because we have an infinite hope."

Great commitments are like that. I have a therapist colleague that tells a story about a couple he was seeing for marriage counseling that were wading through a mélange of alienation and difficulty after 16 years of inattentiveness. He had two fact-finding sessions and in the middle of their third session, during a particularly feisty exchange, the therapist made a comment to the effect that separation should be an option put on the table. That drew conversation to an immediate halt, followed by a long deafening silence. Finally, the wife, from Texas said, "I'm not going anywhere". Turning to her husband she said, "And you aren't going anywhere either." And turning to the therapist, she said, "And we aren't leaving until we get this straightened out." Almost with his hands up in the air, the therapist looked at the husband for confirmation, and the husband nodded in assent. Now that is very different… to work it out, come what may. And it takes you to a whole deeper level as well, almost every time because there are parts of ourselves that we won't confront if there is any other way around it. FYI- they didn't work it out in just one session but getting that corner turned opened up a whole different future.

Profound commitment opens us to a whole deeper level of challenge and spiritual growth. It is one of the noble dimensions of the earliest settlers that came to our country. Those early Pilgrims were persecuted in England, persecuted even in Holland. Their life was no longer tenable. And they decided to set out for a new world together. They sold their possessions, pooled their resources, came up with a boat, a few provisions for it, a map, and a hope. Looking out over that immense cold Atlantic ocean, with just that little boat and their map in 1620, they were rightly awed by the size of the challenges that lay before them, and they made a profound spiritual move, they pledged themselves to God and to each other… in the moving words of the Mayflower Compact to "combine ourselves together in a civil body"…"for our better ordering and preservation… to enact such just and equal laws…for the good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience." Quite in spite of the moral ambiguity that would involve them in the New World, there was something very noble, something spiritually powerful about forming a Covenant with each other in advance of the troubles that would surely lie ahead. Indeed, putting those little boats out on that cold, wide sea could not be done unless you had a sacred bond on which you could rely, come what may.

There is a similar line in the Declaration of Independence that says, "We pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." Great things can come from that kind of commitment. That is the way that commitment becomes freedom. There is a spiritual profundity to it. Emerson once said, "Great men are they who see that the spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world." He almost got that right. What he should have said is that "Covenants rule the world", promises made, commitments kept. The spiritual power to see things through that is unleashed changes the world and truly new doors are opened before us.

We get to that sense, several times in our lives usually. Couples seek the blessing of the Church because they have that sense. They may be compatible, they may have great feelings of affection for each other, they may share values and family connections, but they have a sense that in order to make it, come what may- and they have a sense that the biggest challenge that they will face, they cannot even see from here, that they will need a deeper, more profound commitment, to bigger ends than they can even really articulate starting out… Commitment is like that.

When parents stand before us at the Church, they really have a sense about this, that whatever skills they might have for parenting and they know they don't have enough, that this challenge is much bigger than what they had anticipated and has already challenged them and they know is going to stretch them way beyond their comfort zone, and they are going to need a deeper commitment, a wider support from all of us, and from family, because come what may, this is it…

There is an intrinsic spiritual power in focused commitment. Use it for profound ends. Open yourself to more and more ultimate goals and aims until you are gripped by something you can't let go of and you have to live out of.

Jesus said, "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and all these other things will follow after. Seek your Ultimate passion for this chapter of your life; don't settle for less; Get hold of your ultimate purpose for this phase that you are living through. Keep after it and invest in it wholly. Amen.