If you're a fan of the sermons posted here, you might also like to check out Reverend Seligman's new book:
Opening the Window: Sabbath Meditations
(Bauhan Publishing)
by Leaf Seligman
Why do we do what we do? What happens as a result? How do we make sense of, and find meaning in, our lives and in the world that contains us? How do we render wholeness out of brokenness, creating mosaics of beauty and functionality from the rent pieces of our lives? This collection of Sabbath meditations invites readers to inhabit the questions with intention and joy. With a pastor’s sensibility, a writer’s lyricism, and a generous heart, Leaf Seligman invokes poetry, thinking from diverse spiritual traditions, and stories from her own walk through life to grapple with enduring religious themes and contemporary challenges. It is the preacher’s responsibility to be of use, to choose words with great care, and open the window so spirit can move in and out, she writes in her afterword. Indeed, these meditations the words themselves and their call to a more fully understood, more deeply felt life resonate long after the bookmark is tucked into place and the covers closed. Read them slowly and deliberately. Let them be your company as you journey through the Sabbath and into the week.
Friday, October 21, 2011
The Given Life
Much has been written and reported the last couple of weeks on the legacy of Steve Jobs as an innovator and entrepreneur. He’s been compared to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford and no doubt will take his place in history as one of the great creative minds in business. But there is more to Steve Jobs than Apple and Pixar, iPods and iTunes, iPhones and iPads. In his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford, Jobs offered three stories from his life: a distillation of lessons he presented with the simple elegant beauty of a Mac.[1]
Because we are Unitarian Universalists who draw inspiration from many sources, today I turn to the spiritual message embedded in a secular address. “Sometimes,” Jobs said, “Life hits you with a brick. Don’t lose faith.”
Like Job, Steve Jobs experienced the unexpected in acutely painful ways. Being fired at thirty from the company he co-founded at twenty, was in Jobs’ words, “Awful-tasting medicine.” Being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer on the cusp of fifty was a profoundly sobering fate. Yet Jobs told his audience at Stanford in 2005, “it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
I imagine some us here know the heft of success. I grew up hearing my mother tell me “the higher you climb, the farther you fall.” Though I experienced nothing like Steve Jobs’ incredible journey from a Reed College Harvard Divinity School
I ignored the mumbling and pressed ahead. As Mr. Jobs so eloquently noted in his speech, when we ignore the internal rumbles of the psyche: the patterns that won’t go away, that nagging sense of something just beyond view that doesn’t disappear—the rumbles will dislodge a brick and send it hurtling down. Furiously trying to drown out the doubts and deep-seated exhaustion, I acted rashly and didn’t ask for help. Embarrassed by my lapse in judgment I ignored it. By the time the ministers returned and I revealed my mistakes, I had lost the opportunity to fit the brick back into the wall. Like Steve Jobs, I found myself suddenly unemployed, which felt like a colossal failure. I withdrew from my first call to a settled ministry, finally conscious something in me wasn’t ready though I did not yet know what or why. I hunkered down in a house next to a mountain, returned to therapy and volunteered as a chaplain at the county jail.
In the five years after Steve Jobs got fired from Apple, he founded NeXT then Pixar, which made “Toy Story,” the first computer-animated film—not only top grossing at the box-office but the movie that changed film animation forever. Then Apple acquired NeXT and Steve got his job back—and he met and married his wife.
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward,” Jobs told the Stanford grads; “You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
Though nothing quite so successful happened for me that next year, I gradually began to discern the mumbling inside. I believed the dots would connect someday because trusting that was the only way to get there. Like Steve Jobs, I swallowed some pretty bitter medicine but I did not lose faith. I felt sad and empty and confused—and in the midst of it realized the universe held me. It sent a herd of deer that winter to feed at woods’ edge. It gave me the chance to sit with people whose medicine was far more acrid than mine. The universe gave me the hush I needed to hear the whisper; and the mountain stood as a testament to the beauty of what rises out of tumultuous change.
I didn’t start any companies that transformed multiple industries but I did get called to another congregation. I held onto the wisdom Jobs offered the graduates: “You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”
But as we all know, it is never quite that simple. I departed for Canada
Jobs told the audience at Stanford,
I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
I recall my mother’s response when I suddenly announced my desire to change plans upon graduating from college. She took me out on the front stoop and instructed me to look at the clouds moving swiftly overhead. “How often does the wind change direction?” She asked. “All the time,” I answered. To which she said, “Does it ever change the beauty of the night sky?”
When I knew it was time to go, I re-entered the search process only to find it did not yield the right match. I followed my heart back to New Hampshire
Had I not faltered in that sabbatical ministry enough to dislodge myself from a pedestal I did not wish to be on, and from my own expectations foolishly wrought; had I not experienced the clarity of too many days that would not have sufficed as my last one, I would not be here. As Jobs says, “As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it.”
He reminds us in his premature death as much as his words:
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
The wise Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister writes,
The sense of competence that comes with being in a position we want and work we can do is the fuel of energy. It gives a person a reason to strive, to achieve, to become co-creators of a better life for everyone. It gives both purpose and meaning to life. Then, no matter who applauds us, we are satisfied with ourselves. We’re giving everything we’ve got and doing everything we can to make this world a better place than it was when we got here. Then we know that we are on the verge of becoming everything we were ever meant to be. Then we know what it is to be happy.[2]
We all know something of life’s ups and downs, its falling bricks and bitter medicine. We know something of our own frailty and hopefully, our own inner-knowing. The pace and pressures of life rarely occasion the quietude we need to hear the psyche’s whisper or the soul’s calling. We hear the allure of success and its accolades. We hear the din of expectation. We taste disappointment and reach for something sweeter to swallow. But inside each of us is a voice making its way to the peak of our consciousness telling us every step that the dots will connect if we keep going, if we remain true to who and what we love, if we honor what we yearn for and keep the faith—especially when we falter.
The year I lived beside the mountain and marked the days by counting deer and sitting with prisoners, I learned about the freedom that comes in constraint. Without the distraction of the employment I had labored so hard to get, without the buzz of activity or even the hum of certainty or its illusion, I had time and stillness. Without that, the only dots I could have connected would have been bricks falling in a row.
The poet David Whyte writes, “What you can plan is too small for you to live.” Wendell Berry puts it this way: “We live the given life, not the planned.”
Accepting that is the only route to serenity I’ve found.
In the thick of my troubles, one of the ministers who returned from sabbatical said, “Five years from now all this might be the best thing that could happen.” I remember thinking that was the single most unpastoral, unhelpful comment I had ever heard. The timing was astoundingly insensitive. Five years later, I wasn’t ready to proclaim as Steve Jobs did, that the best thing that could have happened had; but I recognized the gifts that emerged as a result. Looking back the dots have led me here. And I am grateful.
The day Steve Jobs delivered his Stanford address, he hoped to live for decades. Sadly, he did not. But he left behind more than several transformed industries. He left us with the sage advice to live each day in such a way—be it somewhere in the middle or the last—that we can say thank you, dayenu, amen.
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