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?What is your vow?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
“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?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.
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?”
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.
