Desert Theory

The inauguration has happened -- happened on Martin Luther King day -- and we are now into this President’s new term. From what we’ve seen so far, it doesn’t look great. What is ours to do is to keep living by our values, keep living into this mission that we share: to love radically, to grow ethically and spiritually, and serve justly.

Every act of caring about someone or something other than yourself and your narrowly conceived self-interests is an act of resistance. Every time you acknowledge that you don’t know something, but are interested in learning more about it, even if the truth is uncomfortable, that’s an act of resistance. Every time you accept responsibility when something goes wrong, that’s an act of resistance. Every time you give credit to others when something goes right, that’s an act of resistance. Every time you thoughtfully examine an issue rather than grasping at quick fixes or dismissals, that is an act of resistance.

We sang in our opening hymn:

Come spirit come, our hearts control.
Our spirits long to be made whole.
Let inward love guide every deed.
By this we worship and are freed.

And our spirits do long to be made whole. Even when we understand that we are whole, the world leaves us often feeling that we aren’t. We don’t feel connected with our neighbors. The fragmentation in the nation’s public political sphere produces a fragmentation in our psyches. We need to feel part of something we’re all in together.

There are a number of conditions that have contributed to our current predicament. Social media enable instantaneous spread of false information – and that’s certainly a factor. Today, though, I want to look at meritocracy.

The rise of meritocracy, which has been going on for decades, by its nature and design, left many behind. Maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised at the intensity of resentment about that which erupted in the 2016 election, simmered through the 2020 election, and grew stronger yet in the 2024 election.

Meritocracy is based on the idea that people get positions of power and authority – and wealth – by deserving to have those positions. So meritocracy depends upon some implicit or explicit desert theory. Desert theory is not a theory about why people like to have something sugary at the end of a meal. Nor is desert theory about why people desert or abandon other people, or areas. It’s spelled like “desert” but desert theory is also not about why some regions become dry and arid. Desert theory tries to offer an account of what constitutes deservingness.

It’s in our mission to grow ethically and spiritually, and the role of your conception of desert in your ways of thinking is a part of your ethical reasoning. So let’s think about that conception – and see if we find some avenues for growing ethically – because growing is an act of resistance.

We very commonly talk and think in terms of who deserves what.

“We say that a hard-working student who produces work of high quality deserves a high grade; that a vicious criminal deserves a harsh penalty; that someone who has suffered a series of misfortunes deserves some good luck for a change” ("Desert," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

An athlete might deserve a prize in virtue of having excelled in a competition. A researcher might deserve our gratitude for having perfected a vaccine against a disease. Someone who acts without any regard for the welfare of others may deserve our contempt. The victim of an industrial accident may deserve compensation from her negligent employer. An employee may deserve a promotion in virtue of evident talent, hard work, and years of valuable service.

Desert – deservingness – is a kind of fiction, a social imaginary, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have real potency to make big differences in our lives. After all, money is a fiction, a social imaginary, and it certainly makes a big difference. It used to be a shiny yellowish metal that was too soft to be useful, but an implicit agreement arose to regard it as valuable, and so it was. Then it was just slips of paper, and now it’s even more imaginary – but since we have agreed to share this imagination, we have developed clear procedures for when you have it, and how much. The electrons inside of bank computers keep track of each person’s amount. Desert is this kind of fiction. How deserving you are, and of what, is not nearly as precisely determined as how much money you have. Yet notions of desert do shape our lives and the ways we treat each other.

Sometimes we say a person deserves something if they are entitled to it. We might say a customer deserves a refund from a merchant if the customer purchased a product that was sold with a guarantee and then the product turned out to be defective. Being entitled to something is one way to deserve it, but that’s not the only way. Entitled means there are rules in place that say what you are to get, but sometimes our sense of what is deserved doesn’t match up with what the rules say. Suppose a wealthy old man dies, leaving behind two grandsons – one of whom is vicious and never treated his grandfather with respect and one was virtuous and always respectful and caring. We would feel that the virtuous grandson deserved to inherit more of the fortune, but the vicious one would nevertheless be entitled to the greater share if that was what the will stipulated. So you can be entitled to some reward even if you don’t deserve it, and you can deserve something without being entitled to it.

Some things, we say, everyone deserves. Everyone deserves fairness, justice, human rights. Then there are other cases where only one or a few people will get the job, or the promotion, or the win, and we might talk about which person deserves it, or deserves it most.

I think a lot of our desert theory is mostly absorbed from the discourse around us. We hear people talk about what so-and-so deserves, and over time we internalize ways of applying the sentiment. But sometimes we do reason with each other about deservingness. It’s not always just an intuition. It can be reasoned about. This is easiest to see when it comes to what we think everyone deserves, just in virtue of being a person.

So we come to the argument for meritocracy: that positions of greatest power and prestige should be open to everyone on the basis of merit. The US never had an official aristocracy, but it certainly had an unofficial one: the old-money families got in to the best schools and went out to the best paying and most powerful positions in society. The argument for meritocracy was an argument that people of merit deserved those positions, not people of breeding. So meritocracy seemed like a great step forward for justice and fairness.

Ivy league institutions, from their founding up until about 1960, admitted only white, Christian men, and within this group selected students for breeding. These were schools for the sons of well-established families. Then in the middle of the 20th century, Harvard President James Bryant Conant and slightly later Yale President Kingman Brewster, choose to abandon their historic role as finishing schools for America’s aristocracy. Daniel Markovits writes:

“Alumni had long believed that their sons had a birthright to follow them to Yale; now prospective students would gain admission based on achievement rather than breeding. Meritocracy — for a time — replaced complacent insiders with talented and hardworking outsiders.”

Surely, a very positive move, right? People with merit deserved to get admitted. People of aristocratic breeding had no special deservingness. By 1970 a fierce merit-based competition had completely replaced the old cordial alliance between the universities and old-money established families.

Today, however, it is past time to reconsider our judgments of deservingness based on merit. We tend to think that merit is the product of two factors: talent and effort. But it’s actually a product of three factors. We often overlook the importance of the third factor: quality training: teachers, tutors, coaches, good equipment and other resources. Excellence at basketball or ballet, at chess or computer programming, at piano or painting or composing poetry, or at any academic subject is not just a matter of native ability combined with dedication and determination.

Whether you spend 4 hours a week or 40 hours a week practicing at a skill, you won’t make as much progress as you will if you also have a skilled and attentive coach guiding your practice. Further, when it comes to competitive college or professional sports programs, it takes more than A good coach. It takes platoons of coaches AND lots of expensive equipment. When I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia in the late 1980s, it seemed all wrong to me that the University was then in the midst of spending $50 million to build a shiny new athletic training facility. In fact, though, a school can’t be competitive at division I football without such resources. Resources make a difference.

Because quality training is so crucial, it means that a big part of what admissions departments regard as merit can be bought. So what started out as a move to open up elite institutions to deserving students from the middle- and lower classes now entrenches the advantages of wealth.

Expensive private schools pay off. A typical public high school spends 15 thousand dollars per child per year. Some poorer public high schools spend 8 thousand to 10 thousand dollars per child per year. But the top 20 private schools (as measured by Forbes) average 75 thousand dollars per child per year. This buys results: it buys training, it buys smaller class size and more teacher attention, it buys more talented teachers, it buys careful educational programs.

The result is that, while the average middle-class kid’s SAT is 125 points higher than the average score of kids in poverty, the average score of kids whose parents earn more than 200 thousand dollars a year is 250 points greater than the average middle-class kid. Yes, the gap between rich and middle-class is twice the size of the gap between middle-class and poor.

What does your desert theory say about whether the wealthier kids deserve those higher scores, and the benefits they get as a result of those scores?

Discounting the few who outright cheated, we can say, yes, they had talent and worked hard. On the other hand, they also had a lot of quality training that wasn’t available to middle- and lower-class kids. The result is that at Ivy league and what are called “Ivy League Plus” schools (the "plus" includes such schools as Stanford, MIT, University of Chicago, Duke, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, and Caltech) the proportion of students who come from the top 1% of household incomes is greater than the proportion that come from the entire bottom 50% of household incomes. This comes as the upshot of meritocratic admissions policies that were originally supposed to reverse that very disparity.

Further, what students get when they arrive on campus is more quality training -- much greater resources being spent on them. And the students and their families don’t even have to pay for most of what they get. There’s an enormous public subsidy that results from universities being taxed as charities, with alumni donations being tax deductible and endowments able to grow without being taxed. Princeton’s tax exemption amounts to a public subsidy of $100,000 per student per year. Rutgers’ public subsidy is less than $13,000 per student per year. Nearby Essex Community College has a public subsidy of $2,500 per student per year. We’re pouring vast public resources into further advantaging the already advantaged. What does your desert theory say about that?

And just as the resources expended at elite high schools matter for preparing the students to get into and succeed at elite universities, the resources expended at elite universities matter for preparing students to get into and succeed at the highest-paying jobs. Many of the top law firms and financial institutions will only recruit at a few elite universities – and rarely hire graduates of an average state school. So that’s one thing for us to think about: that our intuitions about the deservingness of merit often overlook the vastly unequal distribution of quality training.

Now let’s look at another factor. Our desert theory tends to say that working hard increases deservingness. But don’t we also recognize that there’s such a thing as working too hard? After all, it’s not that the children of the elites aren’t working hard for what they get. In fact, overall, they are working too hard. The pressure on the elite kids to do well is inordinate. As Daniel Markovits writes:

“Elite middle and high schools now commonly require three to five hours of homework a night; epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have warned of schoolwork-induced sleep deprivation. Wealthy students show higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse than poor students do. They also suffer depression and anxiety at rates as much as triple those of their age peers throughout the country. A recent study of a Silicon Valley high school found that 54 percent of students displayed moderate to severe symptoms of depression and 80 percent displayed moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety.”

So what does your desert theory say about whether someone deserves what they’re working for if what they’re working for is a sleep deprived, depressed, anxious, unhappy life? And it’s only getting worse, as the competition is getting more and more intense, and exclusive institutions are getting more and more exclusive. As recently as 1995, the University of Chicago admitted 71 percent of its applicants. In 2019, it admitted less than 6 percent. It’s getting worse.

Then, notes Markovits,

“the contest intensifies when meritocrats enter the workplace, where elite opportunity is exceeded only by the competitive effort required to grasp it. A person whose wealth and status depend on her human capital simply cannot afford to consult her own interests or passions in choosing her job. Instead, she must approach work as an opportunity to extract value from her human capital, especially if she wants an income sufficient to buy her children the type of schooling that secured her own eliteness. She must devote herself to a narrowly restricted class of high-paying jobs, concentrated in finance, management, law, and medicine. Whereas aristocrats once considered themselves a leisure class, meritocrats work with unprecedented intensity.”

It used to be the poor that worked long hours and the rich were the leisure class. Not that that was a good system, but it’s striking that now it’s more often the rich who are working 70, 80 hours a week. And many of them are working at jobs they aren’t particularly happy at. One might be tempted to say that this is getting what they deserve -- in the sense that it is the punishment they deserve.

Markovits goes on to say:

“Elite workers find it harder and harder to pursue genuine passions or gain meaning through their work. Meritocracy traps entire generations inside demeaning fears and inauthentic ambitions: always hungry but never finding, or even knowing, the right food.”

Moreover, doesn’t your desert theory suggest that there should be some connection between the income that a given job deserves and its actual contribution to society? Yet that connection has been getting weaker and weaker.

Don’t both the losers and the winners of the Meritocratic rat race deserve better than they are getting? The basic conceit of Meritocracy is that those who succeed deserve to. So those in less prestigious positions in society internalize the message that it’s their own fault that they are less-than. They grow resentful of the elite, and, yes, start voting for populist demagogues who articulate resentment against elites. As Markovits notes:

“demagogues and charlatans monopolize and exploit meritocracy’s discontents. Meritocratic inequality therefore induces not only deep discontent but also widespread pessimism, verging on despair.”

So: we think people deserve what they merit. But meritocracy has these two problems. First is the fairness problem. There’s unequal access to quality training – and this inequality is so great that meritocracy today is really aristocracy by another name.

Second, even if it were all perfectly fair and equitable, there’s more to life than merit. Sure, merit matters in a lot of ways, but merit has become tyrannical. We shouldn’t have to work that hard – shouldn’t have work 60 hours a week to deserve the concern and respect of our compatriots. Don’t we all “deserve” better? Or, rather, can we give ourselves a break from the very idea of desert, of merit, of the constant pressure to deserve, to earn everything?

We could build a society with dramatically expanded access to quality training. We could build a society where we all have a chance to contribute meaningfully to the overall social good – and where a person’s income bears some relationship to their real contribution to society. But even more importantly: we could build a society that affords everyone enough rest and leisure for physical and psychological health.

May all that be so. Amen,

Acceptance and Resistance

Acceptance. This is a central spiritual quality. Yet we might also feel that evil cannot be accepted. Oppression, racism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia are surely unacceptable, right?

Martin Luther King, Jr combined spirituality with activism – so on this weekend when we are celebrating King’s birthday and honoring his legacy, I wanted to look at this apparent tension. For instance, in September 1967, King addressed the annual conference of the American Psychological Association, an organization for helping people be well-adjusted, and he said:

“There are some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we should never be adjusted. . . We must never adjust ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few”

How do we combine inner peace with social agitation? How do we cultivate both acceptance and resistance to injustice? Martin Luther King Day is tomorrow, on the same day that the 47th president of the United States is to be inaugurated – which does bring a particular context to these questions.

There are injustices and harms – some of them, perhaps, may soon be worsening – and we are called to resist what is wrong, to not simply go along with it, not simply adjust to it. Acceptance doesn’t mean nonresponsive. It means recognizing reality – and responding with compassion to make things right where we can.

For Unitarian Universalists, the issue is encapsulated in the third of our historic principles: Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth. But, wait. If we truly accept one another exactly as we are, then how come we’re also encouraging each other to change?

Parents negotiate this question from the moment of their first child’s birth. New parents holding their newborn for the first time are very apt to say, “She’s perfect” – or “he’s perfect.” They are, of course, right. That newborn IS perfect. Yet at the same time, the parents expect and hope their child will grow and change over the years ahead. But if that baby is perfect, why would they want it to change? They don’t want it to be any different from what it is right now – but eventually they expect growth, and they will teach their child and encourage it along a path of growth. The child’s current perfection lies in part in the perfection of that present moment – the timeless quality of the love that wraps around parent and child – the eternal now the parent may feel. The child’s current perfection also lies in the fact that this timeless present eternal now includes the baby’s potential – its as-yet-unknown trajectory of growing up.

Indeed, our capacity throughout life to learn and grow and change is a key element in what makes us perfect right now. Like a stone thrown in the air, our lives arc in a perfect parabola, whatever the angle, direction, or force. Perfection is dynamic – an ongoing, unfolding process rather than a static thing. Acceptance is the capacity to recognize this inherent perfection.

Psychologist Robert Cloninger developed a Temperament and Character Index that measures, among other things a person’s spirituality. On this measure, it’s the sum of three sub-scales. First, self-forgetfulness. This has to do with experiences of “flow” – with being immersed in an activity, being “in the zone”, and you’re

“performing at peak efficiency while having no sense of boundary between yourself and others. Most people have had this type of experience at least a few times in their lives. Spiritual people tend to have them more frequently.... People often experience flashes of insight or understanding when they are in this frame of mind. Creativity is maximized, originality is fostered. Even the most ordinary things seem fresh and new.”

Second, transpersonal identification.

“The hallmark of this trait is a feeling of connectedness to the universe and everything in it – animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman, anything and everything that can be seen, heard, smelled, or otherwise sensed. People who score high for transpersonal identification . . . sometimes feel that everything is part of one living organism.... Love of nature is a recurring theme in spirituality, from the beginnings of civilization up to the present.”

Third, acceptance. This measure has to do with the sense that underneath, or behind, or in the midst of all the pain, and the tragedy, the suffering and the anguish, there is a fundamental joy of being.

In the 90s, I was a professor at predominantly African-American Fisk University, and later, I was a divinity student for a couple terms at a predominantly African-American divinity school, so I’ve had repeated exposure to Black Church worship and culture. One of the things I often heard, like a mantra of affirmation and hope, was: “God is good all the time; all the time god is good.” These were people that were not oblivious to, nor in denial about the very real pain, suffering, injustice and oppression in life. They or their families had often directly seen and felt the worst effects of prejudice and bigotry. They were not retreating into escapism from that reality, nor were they complacent about the need for the very hard ongoing work for social justice. When they greeted each other, and me, with a bounce in their step, a broad smile on their face, and an outstretched hand if not two outstretched arms, and the buoyant words, “God is good all the time; all the time, God is good,” they were expressing a deep sense of the joy of possibility and hope back behind or underneath the tragedy -- of which they were keenly aware. It wasn’t about whether there was anything in this wide reality that can appropriately be called “God.” It was about the felt sense, more than words can say, that the tragedy and unfairness and pain exists always within a wider context, a context deeply affirmable. Indeed, only within a context that ultimately felt holy, sacred, could tragedy be fully seen as tragedy instead of random pain.

From this kind of acceptance comes equanimity but not complacency. And without the calm, abiding equanimity to leaven the energy of anger that so often arises when working for social justice, activists burn out.

Acceptance means not hating. It doesn’t mean we don’t resist injustice, but we resist without hating. Martin Luther King urged us to not be adjusted to injustice, but he was clear that this didn’t mean hating anybody. He followed Jesus’ teaching to love your enemies. As he said,

“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.”

King goes on to add:

“hate scars the soul and distorts the personality.... hate divides the personality -- and love, in an amazing and inexorable way, unites it.”

King then adds:

“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend. We never get rid of an enemy by meeting hate with hate. We get rid of an enemy by getting rid of enmity. By its very nature, hate destroys and tears down; by its very nature, love creates and builds up. Love transforms with redemptive power.”

Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation or complacency. It means we act out of compassion more than anger. And even where we do have some anger, we can be at peace with our own anger. We don’t have to be upset by injustice – we just calmly do everything we can stop it.

There are two sorts of pain and suffering. The first kind is what the world -- reality -- throws at us – sickness, old age, death -- the facts of injustice and everything else we don’t like. The second kind is our own reactivity against the first kind. We make our suffering so much worse be refusing to accept it, by getting upset about things. In the Buddhist scriptures there’s a text called the Sallatha Sutra, where the Buddha says:

“When touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, & laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical and mental. Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and, right afterward, were to shoot him with another one, so that he would feel the pains of two arrows; in the same way, when touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, and laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical and mental.”

Spiritual maturity, spiritual development doesn’t prevent the first arrow, doesn’t generate immunity to it. But spiritual maturity does prevent that second arrow: which is our reactivity, our upset about the first arrow.

“Happiness can exist only in acceptance.” Said George Orwell, of all people. Acceptance is crucial for our well-being. And acceptance, as I said, does not mean resignation or complacency. Acceptance opens up the possibility of enjoyment. Without acceptance, there can be no equanimity, no peace – only a shifting kaleidoscope of anger, resentment, sadness, and fear.

Activism on behalf of changing things can be vigorous and energetic yet also grounded in a calm and peaceful equanimity. How does that work? Let me turn to some words of Ruben Habito. I’ve been a Zen practitioner for almost 23 years, during which time I’ve been a formal student of four Zen teachers. My first and longest-lasting was with Ruben Habito. Ruben is a slight Filipino man – in his 60s when I was studying with him. As a young man, he became a Jesuit priest, got stationed in Japan, and found himself practicing Zen at a monastery there for 16 years before coming to the states and taking a faculty position at SMU’s Perkins Theological School in Dallas. In one of his books, Healing Breath: Zen Spirituality for a Wounded Earth, Ruben wrote:

“To see the natural world as one’s own body radically changes our attitude to everything in it. The pain of Earth at the violence being wrought upon it ceases to be something out there, but comes to be our very own pain, crying out for redress and healing. In Zen sitting, breathing in and breathing out, we are disposed to listen to the sounds of Earth from the depths of our being. The lament of the forests turning into barren desert, the plaint of the oceans continually being violated with toxic matter that poisons the life nurtured therein, the cry of the dolphins and the fish, come to be our very own pain, our own cry, from the depths of our very being.”

With deep acceptance of our world and of our selves comes a seeing through of the artificial boundary between what is me and what is other. Cultivating a love for what is turns out to also cultivate awareness that what is -- is me. “Mountains and rivers and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars” – they are all me. The earth’s forests, deserts, oceans are my own body.

When I stop believing those thoughts that judge everything in light of my own separated, isolated interests, then I start recognizing that I’m not separated or isolated. Loving the world and loving myself become the same thing. And when that happens, I naturally reach out to soothe suffering.

Resistance to social injustice, to the despoiling of our planet, doesn’t so much feel like resistance anymore. It feels like simply being carried in the flow of love for what is. To put it in one word, the force which brings acceptance and resistance to pull in the same direction rather than in opposite directions is this: compassion.

Of course, there is a great deal of resistance in this world that isn’t grounded in compassion. Perhaps we can work on letting go of that kind of resistance. Resistance grounded in compassion rather than in the illusion of a separate self: that’s the kind of resistance that is also known as love -- and justice, as as been noted before, is what love looks like in public.

Social activism fueled predominantly by anger, by resentment, by condemnation of the evil other will burn out. It will also be counterproductive. It will fail us. Activism fueled predominantly by acceptance, by compassion, by loving all that is and therefore naturally moving to care for all that is – social activism that, while attentive to effective strategy, is not attached to results – that is what will save us.

The Satyana Institute, a nonprofit service and training organization has developed a set of principles for spiritual activism. Here’s their first principle:

“Transformation of motivation from anger/fear/despair to compassion/love/purpose. This is a vital challenge for today’s social change movement. This is not to deny the noble emotion of appropriate anger or outrage in the face of social injustice. Rather, this entails a crucial shift from fighting against evil to working for love, and the long-term results are very different, even if the outer activities appear virtually identical. Action follows Being, as the Sufi saying goes. Thus 'a positive future cannot emerge from the mind of anger and despair' [says the] Dalai Lama”

And here’s their second principle:

“Non-attachment to outcome. This is difficult to put into practice, yet to the extent that we are attached to the results of our work, we rise and fall with our successes and failures—a sure path to burnout. Hold a clear intention, and let go of the outcome—recognizing that a larger wisdom is always operating. As Gandhi said, “the victory is in the doing,” not the results.”

Being upset doesn’t help. In the long run, equanimity is more effective for resisting the wrongs we are called to resist.

Marin Luther King embodied a path of loving enemies – that is, opponents, the people who vote differently from you – while at the same time never being adjusted to injustice. He said:

“I believe we will have to find the militant middle between riots on the one hand and weak and timid supplication for justice on the other hand.”

For King, that middle ground was civil disobedience, which he argued could “be aggressive but nonviolent” with the power to “dislocate but not destroy.” It’s acceptance and resistance.

May we go and do likewise.

Freedom

FIRST READING: Genesis 4:1-16, New JPS (1985)

Vow

Happy New Year! It's a time of starting fresh -- a time of making resolutions for the new year. New Year's resolutions are famously short-lived. I want to suggest something different: not a resolution, not a specific goal, but a vow. Not a destination, but a direction in which we point our lives. Our resolution, then, every day, is to go as far in that direction as we can.

I want to begin this exposition on life vows with some thoughts about hope. I have wrestled with the question of what hope is. Is it just wishful thinking? In common usage, that's all it is. But if hope is wishful thinking, then I don't see how that would count as a significant spiritual quality.

Yet hope often is so counted. Hope is listed with faith and love as the three theological virtues, as Paul says in 1st Corinthians: “And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love.” In the Christmas season, see we often see peace and joy added to make five: peace, hope, faith, joy, love. Those five words are emblazoned on many a Christmas card. What is hope doing on this august list?

The 17th-century Dutch-Portugese-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza said that “Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.” I think he meant that hoping things get better involves fearing that they might not – and fearing things will get worse involves hoping they won’t. It’s basically the same feeling. It’s worrying about the future. Whether we call it hope or fear, it’s a function of living in the future instead of living in the present, and also entails a certain judgmentalism: things SHOULD be this way, and SHOULD not be that way.

In Buddhist teachings, it’s called attachment if we want it and aversion if we don’t want it, and spiritual practice helps loosen the grip of both attachment and aversion. So aren’t hope and fear just other names for attachment and aversion -- forms of nonacceptance? If hope is no more than wishful thinking – simply a wish for something to happen in the future – then how does that warrant being in there with peace, love, and joy? And if hope is more than wishful thinking, what more is it?

Then about 10 years ago, I came across this passage from the Czech writer and statesman, Vaclav Havel. It gave me a way to understand hope as more than mere wishful thinking and as something spiritually valuable. Havel said:

“HOPE in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy that things are going well or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not because it stands a chance to succeed. HOPE is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.”

I like that. Hope is understanding that things make sense – this life, this existence, this earth and cosmos. It all has a sense to it – it is not meaningless. In support of this interpretation of hope, one might point to the fact that the opposite of hope, despair, does seem connected with a pervading feeling of meaninglessness.

So for a number of years I have been preaching Vaclav Havel’s line, whenever the topic came up, that hope is the “certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.” This Christmas season, however, I find myself lighting more on something Havel said a couple sentences earlier – that bit about

“an ability to work for something because it is good, not because it stands a chance to succeed.”

To work for something because it is good – not because it stands a chance to succeed. Ah!

So last month, as I reflected with you on the Advent candle of Hope, I said: “Hope is the energy that allows us to make commitments, to engage in projects that bring love and justice into fuller flower. The voice of hope tells us that there is a place in this world for our intentions. There is no certainty – no guarantees. Our passions and efforts may never yield the results we pursue, but we and our pursuits belong, whatever they may yield. Hope is the assurance that trying matters, our intentions and efforts belong -- whether we accomplish our aim or not. Hope, then, is the assurance that engagement in life matters – it makes a difference, whether or not it makes the difference we intended. Our energies are worth it – though perhaps in ways we cannot foresee. Even if it doesn’t matter in quite the ways that we intended, it matters that we did intend something, and we did act on that intent. This is hope."

And there we have our introduction to our January theme: Vow. It matters that we intend something, and act on that intent. Hence our question: what do you intend?

In the middle of winter, let us recall the closing lines of Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Summer Day.”

“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?”

What is your vow?

“Vow” is our word. “Goal” is not quite the right word for what we’re talking about. It’s fine to have goals, and in some areas of life you need them. The thing is, when you select a goal, you need to have an eye on what you have a chance to succeed at. But a vow is a commitment to work for something because it is good, not because it stands a chance to succeed. It is the direction in which you point your life – not a destination. A goal may have a time frame: expand the business X percent in 2025, or lose Y pounds, or bench press Z pounds by the end of this year. A vow is the never-completable work of your life.

Goals can suck you into always working for the next accomplishment – as if the purpose of life were to accomplish things. We are human beings, not human doings. We need time to just be, to appreciate the wonder of this moment, to drink in the joy we are always submerged in if we only notice that we are. Remember that before it asks its concluding question, “what are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?” Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Summer Day,” begins with other questions:

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?”

These are not the thoughts of someone goal-driven – but they are joyful and deeply wise. We need sometimes to stroll idly and blessedly through fields all day, for this is how we connect with our inherent wholeness and completeness, how we release the demons that tell us we are never enough, never sufficient.

And at the same time, there needs to be a rhythm in our lives. We then bring that grounding back from the field into our daily work. Mary Oliver’s work was being a poet – bringing to the world the insight and the joy that poems can bring. Her idle stroll was the grounding for her to give the world this poem – one of her most beloved. So from the grounding in your human being, what sort of human doing particularly calls to you? What will you vow?

You must know that you are enough – that you are whole and you are perfect, just the way you are. And that is not easy to know. Our culture is so oriented toward accomplishment. We are bombarded with the constant message to do more and get more. To undertake to really know the truth that you are whole, complete, and perfect exactly as you are is deeply subversive and countercultural. And if you do glimpse this truth for a moment, the insight quickly slips away again. Re-remembering it is the ongoing work of the rest of your life. You need to know that you are enough.

And, second, you need to serve – serve something higher or wider -- bigger -- than yourself. But since serving is also a path to remembering your inherent wholeness and sufficiency, let us say that the rhythm is one of inner work and outward manifestation. There needs to be that rhythm in our lives. We cannot bring the wholeness of our self forward to bless the world unless we are engaged also in growing deeply familiar with who we are.

The great Christian theologian Howard Thurman, born in 1899, advised:

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

What I’m saying is that the ongoing process of coming alive has a rhythm: the inner work, which might look like meditation, or might look like idling in a field all day just noticing stuff, and the outward manifestation which looks like some form of service.

Finding your rhythm might not be easy. Another writer, coincidentally born the same year as Howard Thurman, E.B. White, commented on this difficulty.

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

The rhythm of savoring the world and saving the world can be challenging – but keep at it, and you’ll get the hang of it.

A little over a year ago, in December 2023, I gave a sermon here called, “What is your great vow?” Some of you might remember. I talked about the wisdom of recognizing that you’re not in control. I mentioned Benjamin Libet’s experiments in the mid-1980s that showed that the motor signal is headed to the muscle several hundred milliseconds before we become conscious of it. We have already begun the action before the apparatus of conscious decision-making comes on line. For most of day-to-day life, consciousness isn’t deciding what to do. Rather, consciousness’s job is to come along after the fact, notice what we’re doing, and make up a story about how what we’re doing is what we meant to do. All day long, it’s going: "I meant to do that. Oh, yeah, I meant to do that, too." But the meaning-to-do-it trails behind the beginning of doing it.

Our brains create a running commentary on what it notices we are doing, even though the interpreter module has no access to the real causes or motives of our behavior. It seems to you that your intentions precede and determine your actions, but that is an illusion.

Why, then, did evolution bother to give us consciousness at all? One plausible suggestion, offered by Janet Kwasniak, is that

“the conscious feeling of intent is simply a marker indicating that we own the action....This marker is very important so that our episodic memory shows whether actions were 'ours' or just happened.”

The memory of an event that came from me influences my neurons for the future -- we do learn from our actions and their results. If I get a pain from something I did, my neural wiring makes me less likely to do that again. But if the pain “just happened” – if it was apparently not a result of some particular behavior of mine -- the effects on my wiring are different. What we call “volition” is not a generator of behavior but only a perception that a behavior is ours. This illusion that intentions precede and determine action, then, arose as a by-product of the way the brain learns from experience.

Conscious brain has no idea what’s going on in the subconscious, so conscious brain just makes up a story. And yet, the subconscious is listening to that story – and starts taking it into account. It listens with a skeptical ear at first, but if the story is referenced repeatedly, the subconscious wiring adjusts.

Say one time you did a favor for someone. Maybe you did it for purely self-interested reasons. But you happen to have been asked why you did it, and you fabricated a story – not from any intent to deceive, but because it’s the job of conscious brain to invent rationalizations – and say your story was that you care about the well-being of others. Sub-conscious brain was listening to that story. It was not entirely sure whether to believe what it heard, but it made a note – a sort of little, “huh!” If it so happens that you have other occasions to tell that story about yourself, then the story gets reinforced a little more. What began, as all our explanations of our own behavior do, as an after-the-fact rationalization, can eventually become an authentic driving force.

And, get this: you can give thought beforehand to the sort of story you want to tell. So what is your vow – the mission of your life? This is the story you can train yourself to follow -- the story you can build into an unconscious habit of action.

The first task to discern your vow. Take your time, reflect on it. Zen teacher Jan Chozen Bays writes that

“You cannot discover your vows by thinking. Your vow lies within you.”

It lies within you. How can you bring it out, articulate it, and make it conscious? You can’t just think it out, Chozen is saying.

There are some exercises included in this month’s “Vow” packet. These are exercises I’ve selected and adapted from Chozen Bays’ book, The Vow-Powered Life: A Simple Method for Living with Purpose. These are exercises for exploring your self – your background. What sort of sense of the purpose of a life to you pick up from significant adults in your life as you were growing up? What strong reactions against the behaviors of significant adults helped form you? What tragedies or injustices made a powerful early impression on you? Who were your heroes in childhood, in youth, in young adulthood? What were the values they represented? How would you want to commit to serving the world if you knew you had exactly and only five years to live? Thinking about the mission statements of businesses, what mission statement might you make for the business of you?

Exploring these questions, what overarching primary vow emerges for you? These exercises are in the packet. Each of them asks you to do some writing. I recommend handwriting it – in your journal, or on a legal pad or notebook paper. There’s something a little more potent about seeing it there on the physical page in your unique handwriting that came from your unique body. It’ll also help to share the process with others. You’ll have a chance to do that in your Connection Circle this month – and it’s not too late to sign up to be in a Connection Circle. If you’re not in one, or don’t make it to your Connection Circle this month, find others to share it with. When you articulate what feels like the Great Vow of your life, repeat it to yourself every day. For instance:

I am here to love and understand this world and the beings in it, that thereby they might be helped to grow in understanding and love.

That’s mine. Whatever yours turns out to be, once you have it, use it. Repeat it to yourself, and use it to explain to yourself why you did certain things you did. Let it be the compass needle that points your way. Sub-conscious brain will be listening to that story. I wrote this sermon, and have now delivered it, because I am here to love and understand this world and the beings in it, that thereby they might be helped to grow in understanding and love.

What starts as after-the-fact rationalization can gradually become an authentic habit of action. And you, and the world (as if there were a difference), will be better for this. May it be so.