What More Could You Ask For?

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Patrick T. O’Neill delivered February 3, 2008 at the First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn, NY.Four simple yes-or-no questions, right at the beginning this morning, will help us all gain a little perspective on today’s topic. These questions are personal, so don’t raise your hands, but simply answer yes or no in your own mind. Ready?

1. Do you have more than one pair of shoes?
2. Do you have more than one choice of food at each meal?
3. Do you have access to your own means of transportation?
4. Do you have more than one set of underwear?

Now, here’s perspective for you: Do you know that only 10% of all the people who have ever lived on earth can answer “yes” to three or more of these questions! (quoted from Raising Self-Reliant Children in a Self-Indulgent World, by H. Stephen Glenn and Jane Nelsen, Ed.D., Chinaberry Books, 1994.)Amazing to think about, isn’t it? I know that most of us are aware of how lucky we are, how blessed, to be among the most affluent percentile of all the people who were ever born on this planet. What’s really amazing, though, is to realize just how little it takes to qualify us as being “privileged” in this life. Shoes, a choice of food, transportation, underwear. Imagine. Doesn’t seem like a very exotic list - and it isn’t.We know that such a basic list doesn’t scratch the surface of the material riches and comforts that most middle-class Americans take for granted on a typical day.Most of us have reason to be thankful for homes that are safe and sanitary and secure, heated in winter, cooled in summer. We have available to us the blessings of modern medicines, public education, free access to libraries and information of every sort, unprecedented opportunities for learning and culture and recreation and travel.We have telephones everywhere, and television and radio and newspapers and instant communication to any place in the world. We have personal computers, many of us now, imagine! And fax machines and cellular car phones. We have cars, often more than one per household, and the oil and gasoline to run them. Our homes are powered by electricity that comes from nuclear power plants. We have washing machines - for our clothes and for our dishes.Now remember: shoes, choice of food, access to transportation, and a change of underwear already put you in the top 10% of all the people who ever lived! Where do you suppose all these other riches and comforts and services and conveniences land you on the list? Surely, whatever else we may say about our culture, we are materially the most fortunate people on earth, there simply is no doubt about it.And yet, a curious thing about our culture - maybe it’s a direct result of our abundance or our materialism, I don’t know - but it seems to me that despite all that we have, despite all the blessings we enjoy in this most fortunate percentile that we occupy in history, it just seems to me that contentment is relatively rare among us as a people. Does it seem that way to you?It just seems to me that we are on this constant quest to get more out of life. Not just material things, though God knows we spend far too much of our precious life energy chasing after them. But “more” of everything: more happiness, more knowledge, more time, more power, more status, more money, more peace of mind, more love - the list of things that people want “more” of in our culture is endless. It makes one wonder, is anybody ever contented anymore?My mother used to use an expression that you hardly ever hear these days. “What more could you ask for?” she’d say. She worked hard all her life, and she certainly never experienced much in the way of abundance in material things. But she was a woman who found much contentment in her life. She was appreciative of her life, and she knew how to count her blessings.”What more could you ask for?” she’d say. It was her standard compliment back to God for every happy occasion in her life. If her family was happy and healthy, or if her children made her proud, or if the sun was shining on her way out to work. “What more could you ask for?” she’d say.Near the end of her life, on their forty-fifth wedding anniversary, we threw a party for my parents. It was a great occasion, in the middle of which someone asked my mother what she was thinking about. She said, “I was just thinking as I looked at everyone here, What More Could Anyone Ask For?”It’s the expression of one who blesses her life for what it is, and is not tied up in chasing after some mythical “more” that might never arrive. You don’t hear the expression very often these days, and you don’t seem to meet many people who could say it with conviction.There are those who claim that our quest for “more” out of life is the natural impulse of living. But I wonder. Is there never a point at which we ought be satisfied with our lot in life? At what point do we reach “enough”? How much material goods is enough? How much income is enough? How much accumulated power and status is enough? How long does the resume have to be before we stop running after more accomplishments? How high do we have to climb before we can feel that we’ve arrived?What is a “successful” life, anyway?The dictionary says that the word, “succeed” comes from the Latin “sub cedere” meaning “to go after, to go toward.” Success means the achievement of certain goals. A successful farmer has the goal of raising good crops. A successful teacher achieves the goal of imparting knowledge to students. A successful surgeon achieves the goal of healing patients through the art of surgery.Yet, the farmer knows that not every season will be a success. Too much rain or too much cold or too much heat in a given season can wipe out a year’s work. Perhaps the following year will be a bumper crop and over time it may even out. To be a successful farmer requires the long view of things, the willingness to hang in there and see it through.And even the most successful surgeon knows that regardless of his or her skill, not every patient will be healed, not every patient will survive. In the long view of things, the surgeon must look to the hundreds of people who are healed by his or her skill as a measure of success.And the career teacher knows full well the limitations of her difficult and often thankless profession. She know that some students will not blossom under her best efforts, however skilled and magical and diligent she may be in the classroom. Over a career of many years, however, that teacher eventually counts hundreds of students who learned and grew a little in her classroom. Success. The goal achieved over time.The farmer suffers through the occasional failed season; the surgeon loses some battles to death; the teacher fails to touch and inspire certain students. But with luck and diligence and hard work and with skill, over time each comes to know success in their field.Success doesn’t always look the way we expect it to look, and sometimes life has a way of forcing us to redefine our expectations to fit with reality. Parenthood is one such humbling re-definer, if ever there was one. Here too, I make bold to suggest, taking the long view of things is very important.I think back to a woman who came to see me years ago in my early ministry. She was in deep distress. Her daughter, the pride and joy of her life, a Merit Scholar in her second year at Harvard, had left school to join an ashram in Oregon. And this wonderful mother, who for twenty years had bestowed all the love and caring and nurturing she could on her daughter, sat in tears in my office, convinced that she was an abject failure as a parent. Why? Because her daughter was choosing a path that did not fit with her mother’s goal for her. Instead of having a Harvard attorney in the family, they now had a Hare Krishna.In fact, the daughter had found in that ashram a measure of peace and self-fulfillment, a life that was happy for her. And the quality of love between mother and daughter was such that it had, in truth, helped to form a character of integrity and honor and brightness. True, it had not produced an Ivy League lawyer - and if that alone were the pinnacle of maternal achievement, then this result was somewhat off-center.But as I said in my sermon last week, if our children take the values and the paltry wisdom that we have imparted, and the lessons we have taught them, and then fashion for themselves lives of honesty and empathy and goodness - then what does it matter, really, where or how they choose to live that life?I suggested to that mother that it was probably time for her to claim her diploma and take a bow, and to bless her daughter on her journey. I told her success was hers and all the privileges thereof. It took her a while, I know, to adjust to her daughter’s choices. But she did eventually, and mother and daughter maintained a loving relationship.Then there is the question of what constitutes a successful marital partnership. Is it just that two people manage to live together for a lifetime? What about two people who manage to be miserable together for forty years?Obviously, success in our unions has to include something more than longevity alone. We would have to account for a certain quality of love and caring and mutual support, the ability of a couple to maintain mutual growth and fulfillment. Our partnerships too know their seasons of drought and seasons of plenty. In the long view, so long as the partnership remains productive of self-respect and mutual esteem and walking together towards each others dreams, so long does a partnership remain successful by any reasonable definition.As for material success, at what point do we ever feel we have truly received our fair share of life’s bounties? Materialism’s most insidious effect may be the distorted notion that we somehow have a right always to expect more from life.Someone recently described the stages in life this way: “as children we notice that big people collect things; as teenagers we decide what we are going to collect; as young adults we start collecting the things we want to collect; in early middle-age we wonder why we collect so much; and in late middle-age we take steps to separate our lives from our collections.” (quoted from a sermon by Rev. Wyman Rousseau)It’s a major learning in life to realize that we can improve our lives as much by subtraction as by addition. There comes a time when the most effective question to ask ourselves is “What Could Our Lives Do With Less of?” Who among us would not find their life improved with less tension, less clutter, less hurry, less aggravation, less weight, less crabgrass, less gossip, less anger, less impatience?Maybe the old dichotomy between “More” and “Less” is not really the right question.Maybe the most effective question we ask ourselves at any point in our lives is, “How should I attempt to grow as a person from this place in my life? With full appreciation for all the blessings I enjoy, with full acknowledgment of my limitations, with a heart that is grateful for what has been and hopeful for what may be - how can I live so that my life is a celebration of the best that is in me?”So what’s a successful life? We can certainly agree, I hope, that it isn’t measured by the size of our house or the accumulation of material goods. At least, I hope we can agree on that. If that’s really your idea of prosperity then my guess is you’ve already found another church to bless that quest.I would suggest that a successful life is one based on Integrity, first of all, or perhaps more accurately, the integration of values and lifestyle. A successful life seems to me to exhibit a kind of unity, a kind of underlying harmony that pervades one’s actions in the world. In the West we are given to talking about the “pursuit of happiness” as a goal. The Eastern concept of achieving serenity seems more encompassing to me. Living at peace with oneself and at peace with the world is what most of us would consider the prime measure of successful living.Rabbi Harold Kushner, in his book which I commend to you all entitled, When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough, (Summit Books, NY, 1986) offers this observation:

“I was sitting on a beach one summer day. watching two children, a boy and a girl, playing in the sand. They were hard at work building an elaborate sand castle by the water’s edge, with gates and towers and moats and internal passages. Just when they had nearly finished their project, a big wave came along and knocked it down, reducing it to a heap of wet sand.I expected the children to burst into tears, devastated by what had happened to all their hard work. But they surprised me. Instead they ran up the shore away from the water, laughing and holding hands, and sat down to build another castle. I realized that they had taught me an important lesson.”

All the things in our lives, all the complicated structures we spend so much time and energy creating, are built on sand. Only our relationships to other people endure. Sooner or later, the wave will come along and knock down what we have worked on so hard to build up. When that happens, only the person who has somebody’s hand to hold will be able to laugh.Does it make a difference how I live? Does it make a difference if I am a good, honest, faithful, compassionate person? It does not seem to make a difference to my bank account, or my chances for fame and fortune. But sooner or later, we learn as Ecclesiastes learned that those are not the things that really matter.It matters if we are true to ourselves, to our innate human nature that requires things like honesty and kindness and grows distorted if we neglect them. It matters if we learn how to share our lives with others, making them and their world different, rather than try to hoard life to ourselves. It matters if we learn to recognize the pleasures of every day, food and work and love and friendship, as encounters with the divine, encounters that teach us not only that God is real but that we are real too. Those things make all the difference.”The poet, Marya Mannes, offers these words on our endless quest for More. They seem a good way to end our sermon today. She writes, “The Good Life exists when you stop wanting a better one. It is the condition of savoring what is - rather than longing for what might be. Our hunger for “more” drains the soul of contentment….There is a point at which salvation lies in stepping off the escalator, saying ‘Enough! What I have will do. What more could I ask for?”