The Price of Life

March 24, 1968
Plainfield

The Price of Life

The price of life is death. In my view, that six-word statement is not a morose warning of inevitable extinction, but rather a superior achievement of human expectation. As I attempt to explain this proposition, please remember that I am not arguing that the human self is extinguished at death like a small candle-flame in a strong draught. I do not know what there is, or is not, in the future of the self, the soul, following the experience of death. But here on this earth in these measurements of space and time, in our present existence, the price of life is death. Does that bother you? In Edith Bagnold’s play, THE CHALK GARDEN, Mrs. St. Maugham cries, “Oh, when things are killed in my garden it upsets me – as when I read in the newspapers that my friends die.” Laurel, her granddaughter, says, “I should have thought as one gets older one found death more natural.”

Mrs. St. Maugham: “Natural! Its as though the Gods went rock-shooting when one was walking confident in the park of the world. And there are pangs and shots, and one may be for me.”

Madrigal, “That is why a garden is such a good lesson. So much dies in it – so often.”

Mrs. St. Maugham: “It’s not a lesson I look for.”

We don’t ordinarily look for that lesson, do we? Death is formidable. In our culture, many people attempt to disguise the fact of death through all the contrived superficialities of most American funerals. Death is not mentioned – one “passes away.” There are elaborate cosmetic attempts to cover up the fact that the life-spirit has left the body and that when the life-spirit is gone, the body decays swiftly.

Death is the price of life because only consciousness of life provides the experience of shock and grief when life ends here. If there had been no meaning to life, if there had been no growth of self, death would not be painful for it would not be experienced as the terminal point in this world. If there had been no growth of self, if there never had been the growth of the feeling that one had some choices in life, death would not be a price at all, for there would have no real consciousness of life. No consciousness of life; no grievous shock at death.

In a rather remarkable book, THE EMPTY FORTRESS, Bruno Bettleheim considers this matter of the cost of the conscious self in detailed case-studies of disturbed children who had failed to relate to this world of human experience. These children withdrew to such inner remoteness that the sense of self regressed almost to extinction. They experienced no joy or sorrow; they refused to accept control by others; they refused to take upon themselves the beginnings of autonomy; they would seemingly make no choices. They were unable to relate to human beings, because they were not wanted (an oversimplification). The point relating to today’s subject is that to become a growing self, one must begin to freely choose – perhaps to give pleasure or comfort to others or withhold, but developing the autonomous self which makes the more fully-developed person. To become human, in Bettleheim’s view, through choices one must acquire a consciousness of self. This growing awareness is achieved through the experience that one’s chosen actions can affect one’s relations with other persons. As Bettleheim wrote, “I believe it to be a distinctly human experience to feel with conviction: I did it, and my doing made a difference.”

But when one relates to other persons, decisions never end. When one chooses, there is something or someone not chosen. The self grows by feeling the particular direction of experiences created by different choices. Sorrow can be felt because we have known joy; victory can be sweeter when we have known the bitterness of defeat; the self is an achievement, invariably carrying a cargo of mixed feelings. But the alternative to this self of churning emotions caused by difficult choices is non-self, not to be a self. Even those who may have known disorder and early sorrow would not have chosen never to have been. “Cursed be the day I was born,” said Job. But only a self which had known the self-growth as a consequence could ever pronounce such a curse.

A follower of one of the new religions of Japan wrote about superb Mt. Fuji; how for centuries this magnificent mountain has been revered, worshiped by the Japanese people. But also, Mt. Fuji was the guide for American bombing airplanes during World War II. The object of worship was also a guidepost to disaster.

Another Asian insight is the age-old Yang-Yin symbol of Chinese religion, one of those illustrated in the large memorial window. The divided circle symbolizes that neither light nor shadow could be seen without the other; that good registers as a value because evil is real and present; that positive is measured by contrast with negative; male and female are different though complimentary; that night and day are known only by each other; that hope for gain is usually disciplined by fear of loss.

You probably know the old story of the editor of a small-town newspaper who showed little concern when a tipster phoned in an accident. It was about a truck that rolled downhill and smashed into a private house. “Not interested,” said the editor. “This kind of thing happens all the time.” “Well, I’m glad you’re taking it so calmly,” came the rejoinder, “it’s your house.”

So it is with both happiness and hurt in living. The more developed our sensitivities of self, the more easily we can laugh and the more readily we will weep. The price of a capacity for joy is an openness to grief. To savor the one, there must be a readiness for the other. It was said of the notorious censor, Anthony Comstock, that he sought out all varieties of pornographic literature, reading enormous quantities so as to be able to suppress such stuff and prevent others from reading it. His biographer said of him that “out of all the world he could have his cake and suppress it too.” Well, that’s not the way life is. You cannot have a capacity for feeling responsive when things go well and at the same time maintain a wall that will keep out the feelings of hurt and despair when things go wrong. And many times things do go wrong; many times one cannot be true to the self he has developed and remain at ease enjoying the roses without thorns.

This is the human meaning of sacrifice. This is the Lenten season for many. The churches celebrate solemn days which have their climax early next month. Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Easter will be days of pious pageant. The Christian belief pivots on the conviction that Jesus died a sacrificial, atoning death in order to save all man. Those of us in churches such as this who no longer hold with Christian dogmatic particularities should not let narrow Christian theology interfere with understanding that which may be true in all human experience. Sacrifice is one of the universalities of human experience, central to the price of life. The necessity of sacrifice seems to have been accepted everywhere. In every culture, one way or another, “the belief prevails that sacrificial death promotes life; that the highest sacrifice that man can offer to his god (or to his most valued belief) is his own self.” (See Spinks, PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION, p. 150).

The atonement or sacrifice in our religious roots pre-dates Christianity, of course, although the Jewish calendar marks atonement in the Autumn. The Day of Atonement climaxes the New Year period when the believer seeks to reconcile himself inwardly and outwardly, to God and his fellow-man. To worship rightly, he must repent of his misdeeds, he must persist steadfastly in prayer, and he must commit himself to righteousness of conduct.

In teachings about sacrifice and atonement, there is a significant difference in the teachings of Christianity when contrasted with Judaism.

Jewish beliefs hold that man needs no mediator between himself and God. By prayer, repentance, new pledges and acts of righteousness, man can atone for his own sins and the sins of others. In spite of the later meanings attached to the word, sin did not in pre-Christian days refer to congenital moral defect. Sin was not the taint that all men inherited from Adam. Rather, to sin was to miss the mark.

The Christian (basically this represents the viewpoint of an overwhelming majority of Christians) believes that man by nature is depraved morally, that he does not deserve to be saved, that he must have a superhuman mediator who will intercede with God to save mankind from a hopeless condition of sin.

Paul taught this doctrine and persuaded most of the new Christian movements to accept this as necessary dogma. Paul writes to his friends at Phillippi (2/9 ff) [that] Jesus alone was Lord "for he had a name which is above every name; to him every knee must bow, every tongue confess Jesus is Lord."

The author of the Gospel of John, a half-century later testifies this savior will atone for mankind’s depraved moral state (1/29): "Behold the the lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world." I guess the basic foundation belief in Christian theology is also found in John’s gospel, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life."

One can summarize the Christian doctrine of atonement as requiring that a person believe Jesus was God – supernatural – the only being capable of saving man from man's inevitable sinning character and ways. Thus the death of Jesus is the most important event to Christians. That is what their Easter celebrations are all about. But that was not the important event to Jesus. What was important to Jesus is insufficiently considered. That is next week's topic!

Unitarians do not accept the Christian dogma of atonement. We believe Jesus was human – he was a man, not a god. We cannot affirm Jesus is God not only because we are a non-creedal church, but also because the overwhelming percentage of Unitarian Universalists see no real evidence that Jesus was God. Furthermore, we believe that man bears responsibility for human transactions, that that is the price of life. We do miss the marks we have set for ourselves individually and corporately. We fail to measure up to our best. But the human self has caught glimpses of better things and when we miss the mark in attempting to make the ideal real, we feel pain, or shame, or anger, or inadequacy, or failure. But that is the price of life, and when all is said and done, who would have it any other way?

In the more primitive days of our religious tradition, the scapegoat ritual was a way of ridding the people of sin, A goat, chosen by lot, was burdened with the sins of the people who wiped their hands on his hide. Then the goat was led to a cliff and pushed to his death, thus expiating the sins of the people. The Christian atonement is a refined version of the same principle of passing the buck (or pushing the goat). But the price of life is that we cannot thus slough off the penalties (costs) of awareness, of consciousness, of idealism.

In the 17th century, there was a fervent preacher, the Rev. Thos. Prince, who on the Sunday following a severe earthquake told his congregation that the people themselves were responsible for the disaster. He blamed them for putting up lightning rods, thus attracting the wrath of God from the heavens above to the earth beneath (see Journal of World History, X2 1967, p. 402). Although theologically and scientifically absurd, there is a certain seed of symbolic truth. Human catastrophes have human origins and human responsibility must deal with them. That is the price of life.

Most of [us] do not deny the need or reality of atonement. But atonement is not a trick of supernatural magic but an arduous human endeavor of moral necessity.

There can be little disagreement with the human conditions of perplexity, anxiety, guilt, inertia. We are victims of frustrations and fears that seem to surround both our lives and hopes. The mistakes and selfish foibles of human beings create grief and suffering. Good intentions frequently fade and die; such a tendency cannot be ignored. But we are aware of such ignorance, wrong, and retreat because we have acquired visions of knowledge, righteousness, and advance. When we do acquire such better visions, our less-than-perfect achievements will dismay us frequently. But that is the price of human life and hope.

Furthermore, there is the universal condition of human existence which supplies considerable evidence, when we are honest with ourselves, that many times we receive more than we earn. Life has brought us nurture, protection, forgiveness and opportunities to repay and restore.

Can not each of us ask himself, "have I not been brought to this hour of my existence because there have been sacrifices, atoning acts, to preserve me physically, educate me mentally, strengthen me emotionally, fulfill me spiritually?" Parents, teachers, friends, physicians have all combined to bring to us humanity’s growing heritage. This is human life: to be aware of what price has been paid, and what we must pay for living.

As you know, many cultures and religions have had the myth of the dying-rising Savior Gods. Not only the religions of the Near East and Asia have cherished this myth, but in addition, ancient religions of the Americas found comfort in believing they were saved by a god who died for them. Among the Iroquois, Algonquins, Sioux, Pawnees and others a belief prevailed that a god was slain to create the earth – the body of the god "became the source of life of the vegetable and animal life, and thus of man himself." Man is created, nourished and survives because of the God who willingly died.

Almost everywhere among so-called primitives the belief comes to be that the gods die and become part of the earth and are reborn when vegetation springs again from the Earth.

In my view, Jesus did not teach a super-human god-magic atonement. Rather, to teach a human, natural atonement he took the familiar, but mysterious example of the seed, which by its fall and death created new fruit in its season. But human beings pay for my errors and yours by what they live for, not by what they die for, although many times they must die because of what they live for.

It's a noble event when human beings consciously participate in the miseries and troubles of others and carry more than one share. When one considers the famous or the unknowns, we are aware that there is no equality of sacrifice. Perhaps no man can work redemption for his fellows except by entering into their condition, accepting responsibilities [that] others, if they had been more strong or determined, might have carried.

As one sees, hears, and smells the message of Spring – rebirth, new life, more light, there can be also a consciousness of the price of life. Union is joyous because parting is sad. Excitement thrills us because we have known the drag of boring hours, Life is great because we know that on this earth, at least, our unique, individual self is always under sentence of death, even though few will know much in advance whether our days will be long or short in this present existence.