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The Good Life in Light of 9/11/01
September 15, 2002
"The good life may well be the life lived in constant search of the good life. . . ."The week just past brought us not only the terrible anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001. It should also have caused us to look more deeply into our own lives and into the way they have been affected by those awful events. As the anniversary approached I had cause to wonder in what ways September 11, 2001 has changed me--and changed us. I wondered if our view of life, and of what constitutes a "good" life, had changed.--Peter Gomes
We have been told over and over again that the world is changed since that day, and that it will never be the same. Perhaps, but I have my doubts that the world is much different than it was before. If my reading of history is correct, atrocities such as we experienced here in the United States on September 11, 2001 are the rule, and not the exception. This is not the first time that innocents have been slain, and I am certain that it will not be the last. The horrifying circumstances, and the fact that it happened to us, and not to someone else, may make it feel different, but the persistence of evil seems pretty constant across the ages.
The more important question, for me, is whether we have been changed by the events of 9/11/01. Recently, I was approached by a colleague who asked me to share some thoughts about "spiritual trends" since the terrorist attacks for an article that was being written for the anniversary of 9/11.
Wanting to be truthful, I said that I thought in the immediate aftermath people had turned to religion for answers and comfort, but that in the months that followed things on the spiritual front pretty much returned to the status quo. I said that while people sought and found comfort in the various houses of worship, there didn't seem to be much increased interest in doing the difficult, mundane, costly, and on-going work of building religious community. It was nice that the church was there when folks needed it, but I wondered if they would stay once the shock wore off, and the reality set in.
As to the question of whether people were more "spiritual" (whatever that means) than before I couldn't say for certain, but it is more my hope than my sure conviction.
On the more positive side, I did say that I thought the mainline clergy (that is, excluding the likes of Jerry Falwell)--Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and even Muslim--had come out of the 9/11 aftermath looking better than they had looked before. I thought that mainline religion got a much needed boost over the fundamentalism which has dominated the religious scene in recent years. I said I thought that we mainline clergy had garnered some increased respect in the community at large because of the way we responded to that awful day, and because we mostly had avoided simplistic answers to impossible questions. I said that even I had a new appreciation for my religious colleagues. But I wasn't at all sure that this increased respect translated into some new or renewed interest in organized religion, or even in spirituality. Certainly, I saw no "trend" in this direction.
My thoughts were rejected as too negative for the article in question. The author wanted only "positive" stories which would, I suppose, support her thesis that we have somehow become more religious or "spiritual" since 9/11.
This question does not seem nearly so important to me, however, as the one about how those events have altered our perception of life: specifically, of what has traditionally been known as the "good" life. It would be great if more people came to church, but I'm much more interested in the question of whether they are living their lives differently--more intentionally, with more thought to what they are doing with the lives they have been so miraculously given. I'd like to think that they are, but other than those most immediately affected I am not at all certain that this is the case.
I suppose that a person in my position should know, or at least have an opinion, about what constitutes a good life, and I suppose I do have an opinion. Nevertheless, I was happy to have Peter Gomes' recent book, The Good Life: Truths That Last in Times of Need, to assist me in my thinking about this subject. It would be difficult to summarize the book because of the complexity of the subjects it covers: the nature of happiness; success and failure; freedom and discipline and virtue; faith, hope and love. And I should forewarn you that Gomes' answer to the question "How can I live a good life?" might not work for you. But a few things about the book stand out, and give cause for hope.
First of all, Gomes is convinced from his work as minister of the Memorial Church at Harvard that most young people today are very serious about this question of the good life. He believes that young people want to do something meaningful with their lives, something that contributes to the common good. The problem is that they have no idea how one goes about it; and many have no context--specifically no religious context--in which even to ask the question.
And to this, I would add, perhaps they have never been invited. One of the great lost opportunities of the post 9/11 period is that most of us, and most young people, have simply returned to life as usual. With the exception of some in our armed forces, nothing special, no sacrifice, has been asked of our youth--not to mention of us--in the terrorist attack's aftermath.
Another thing Gomes reminds us about is that there is a long tradition in the West of response, beginning in classical times and extending through the history of Judaisim and Christianity, to this question about what constitutes the good life. It's not as if no one has ever asked it before! Or--and this is the even better news--as if no one has ever discovered at least a partial answer.
Gomes' book made me aware of just how dependent I am on my Unitarian (and later Unitarian Universalist) religious upbringing for posing the question to me at an early enough age that I took it seriously and even considered it when the time came to choose a career. Would I have done so without the, in my own case, liberal Christian and humanistic context in which I was raised?
His book also made me realize how fortunate I was in role models for the good life, both within my own family and without. Because if the good life is in some significant degree a life "lived for others"--as Gomes, based on much evidence, is convinced, and as I have believed at least since Sunday School and Martin Luther King, Jr--my own family offered the examples of a doctor, a nurse, and a whole slew of teachers. I remember at a tender age being especially impressed that part of our young minister's duties included visiting the sick people in the hospital, and that this seemed like a very good thing to do, something worthy of emulation.
These early role models were obviously important, but where, precisely, did I pick up the familiar idea that "from those to whom much is given, much is required"? I don't remember anyone ever saying it to me, but I suspect that it was part of my Sunday School education, picked up perhaps only through osmosis.
Gomes' book makes it clear that the pursuit of the good life is not easy. It makes great demands on us. It requires that unpopular concept "discipline"--that is, practice--and it requires the proper use of freedom. The old question I used to ask my college freshman English composition students to ponder and write about, "Is freedom simply the ability to do what we want, or is it the demand to do what we ought?" is relevant here.
The good life requires a pattern of behavior which includes civility, forgiveness, and kindness--not just getting one's own way. More important than success is the ability to overcome failure, which, as Gomes points out, is much more common than its more alluring opposite.
Interestingly, and I think this is where the events of 9/11/01 are most relevant to this discussion, it seems that in order to live a good life we must constantly keep the brevity of life in focus. Death is a tremendous incentive to getting on with a good life. It is the one thing which poses the question of life's meaning in all of its complexity and intensity. Because when we realize or confront the fact that life is finite, then it becomes vitally important how we are going to spend the limited time we are given--or have left.
It has been my experience that most dying people are more interested in what their lives have meant than in what the afterlife looks like. It's sad when this question is only asked at the end of life, when there is no time left to do anything about it. Of course, that is where acceptance comes in, but this is a sermon about how we should live our lives, not about how we should come to terms with our deaths.
I believe that most people who deal with death on a regular basis--clergy, health workers, police and firefighters, funeral directors--have plenty of opportunity to ask these questions. But I think that the horror of the events of September 11, 2001 caused many who had not given their own mortality much thought reason to pause and consider. If life can be snuffed out so quickly and brutally and unexpectedly, what do I need to do and to say on this day to my loved ones and friends? (Remember the rescued coal miner who had forgotten to kiss his wife goodbye the morning of the mining accident this summer in Pennsylvania?) How should I act toward all those I meet? What should I do with the rest of my life, now that I have been given this unexpected reprieve? And isn't every new day an unexpected reprieve and a new opportunity to make changes in our lives? To be better people, and perhaps even to make a difference in our own little corner of the world, if nowhere else?
Some aboard the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania last September decided to use their last moments to save the lives of others on the ground. So perhaps it truly is "never too late."
I am not claiming that this is easy to keep in focus and I often fail, in spite of all my knowledge and awareness and first hand experience, to do so myself. But fortunately we are surrounded by "a mighty cloud of witnesses" who remind us, in the way they have lived and died, of what a good life looks like.
Not all of us can be heroes, but even heroes are sometimes incredibly ordinary. It is what they do and not who they are that counts. One of the stories that has stuck with me since my sabbatical reading is that of Hans and Sophie Scholl, whose lives for me capture the true essence of what it means to live a good life. Claudio Magris tells their story in his wonderful travel book, Danube:
In [the city of] Ulm there bloomed a great flower of German inwardness. Hans and Sophie Scholl, the brother and sister arrested, condemned and executed for their activities against Hitler's regime, were from Ulm, and today a university there bears their names. Their story is an example of the absolute resistence which Ethos opposes to Kratos; they succeeded in rebelling against what almost everybody regarded as an obvious and inevitable acceptance of evil. As Golo Mann wrote, they fought with theirbare hands the vast power of the Third Reich, and confronted the poltical and military apparatus of the Nazi state armed with nothing but their cyclostyle, from which they distributed manifestos against Hitler. They were young, they didn't want to die, and it was painful to them to forgo the enticements of such a glorious day, as Sophie said calmly on the day of their execution; but they knew that life is not the supreme value, and that it becomes more lovable and enjoyable only when put at the service of something more than itself, which lights and warms it like a sun. Therefore they went serenely to their deaths, without a tremor, knowing that the prince of this world is judged.Few of us will find ourselves in such an extreme situation as the Scholls, although one thing we learned from September 11, 2001 is that it is not as uncommon as we thought for ordinary people to find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. The poignance of Sophie Scholl's final words and Magris's "they were young, they didn't want to die," move and inspire me and remind me that most of us still know a good life when we see it, even if we lack the courage to emulate it.
I don't think that what constitutes the good life has changed in light of 9/11/01. It is the same as it has always been, and if we had forgotten, we were reminded of it by that awful day. The real question remains: have we changed? Will we take the call to live a good life more seriously than before? Will we encourage our young people to pursue a life lived for others, rather than a life lived only for themselves, and for their own self-aggrandizement? Will we consider the purpose of our own lives anew? It is not too late.
And what if happiness, too often pursued as an end in itself, were really a result of something else, a consequence of unselfishness, for example? Did Hans and Sophie Scholl die happy? Shall we? The answers to these questions, I believe, lie within us all, and are worthy of our most earnest consideration. More important, our fate and that of our children rests with them. May we strive toward the good life in all we do, for ourselves and for our children, and may we be the better people we long to be. In this way, perhaps, we can ultimately redeem the terrible day we have just remembered. I pray that it shall be so. Amen.
The Rev. Harold E. Babcock
