An Anchor of Hope
Randall Hoedeman, Ph.D.
Sunnyhill Church
September 1, 2002
Reading
This reading is from a book entitled When You Feel Insecure. The author is John Reed, a pastoral counseling colleague of mine who lives and works in Louisville, KY. This passage is a poignant reflection on our common human lotparticularly, the unavoidable pathos and anxiety of modern-day existence. It will help to set the stage experientially for the topic we will be discussing this morning.
Think of the world as a great theater. You share the stage with humanity. You and I and all the rest of us are making up the script as we go along, or so it seems. I prompt you. You prompt me. I help you develop your character and you help me develop mine. We do our best to create a sensible, humane plot. We realize, however, that we share the stage at a challenging time in human history, when nothing seems nailed down. The stage floor is shaky and worn, and we trip over one another from our poor choreography. Our voices echo through a hollow theater of endless space. We hear no evidence of an audience, no laughter, no applause. If youre a woman, your role keeps changing. If youre a man you have to adapt to ever-changing cues for your part. No really heroic or distinguishing roles are left. Most parts call for mass-mindedness, greediness, arrogance, and tough-guy hardness. We keep repeating the same tired lines in a meandering plot.
A mushroom cloud has been part of the set since you and I appeared on stage. We were there when the music died. Weve witnessed assassinations, atrocities, famine, a televised war, and a zillion commercials. Weve been repeatedly betrayed. Worse, we have betrayed others and ourselves. "Out, damned spot!" we cry, but the spot remains.
Although there have been some funny scenes, we realize we are not acting in a comedy. This is a tragedy were in. We tremble through many scenes, huddled close to our fellow actors, flubbing our lines, having no idea what will come next. Some of us withdraw to some dim corner of the stage, where we can be found crouching, sucking our thumb or crying in our beer, covering our eyes to keep from seeing an unknown future. Most of us are afflicted with stage fright from our first scene to our final bow. Somebody next to us dies and we all gape and forget our lines. Filled with constant foreboding, we wonder who is responsible for this melodrama. "Author! Author! We cry, but the playwright never seems to appear. For many of us, this is the theater of the absurd, and we must endure its insanity without losing our own sanity. If we could look back over the entire drama we would see a great crimson river of humanity, ebbing and flowing in great waves across the stage of history. Who are you in all this (pp. 125-126)?
Message
- Let me begin with a brief word of introduction about "who I am in all this." My name is Randy Hoedeman. For the past eight years, which is length of time my family and I have been in Pittsburgh, I have directed the counseling and psychotherapy program at the Pittsburgh Pastoral Institute. The Institute is an ecumenically-based counseling and psychotherapy center that has been around for about 35 years. Our main office is in Shadyside, with several branch-offices located in area churches throughout Allegheny County, and also in Butler, Lawrence, and Westmoreland counties. In addition, the Institute offers accredited training and education programs for mental-health professionals who are interested in the integration of spirituality and psychotherapy.
- The material I will present this morning is from a semester-long Psychology of Religion seminar that I teach at the Institute. Although I recently have presented it as a shorter 12-hour continuing-education seminar, this will be my first attempt at a Sunday-morning presentation. How much time do we have?
- The highly selective theme on which I will focus is from a section of the seminar entitled "An Anchor of Hope." It responds, somewhat poetically, to Sigmund Freuds list of basic psychological and existential needs that any religion worth its salt tries to address in one form or another. In relaying the title of this theme to Louise for the bulletin and the sign out front, I neglected to mention that it actually should include a question mark, which would be more apropos to the nature of the material and to the true spirit of Unitarian Univ
- Freud, in his psychology of religion classic, The Future of an Illusion, notes three fundamental issues that, in his opinion, religious beliefs and practices seek to address.
- a. Religion seeks to exorcise, or at least tame, the terrors of nature.
- b. Religion must, in some measure, compensate us for the sufferings and privations imposed upon us by civilization.
- c. Religion seeks to compensate us for to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death.
Our focus this morning will be on the last of these three: Religion as "compensation for the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death."
- The work of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker is profoundly instructive in this regard. Beckers Pulitzer winning book, The Denial of Death, offers an unflinching, yet compassionate, analysis of that which he considers to be the inescapable source of our greatest anxiety: the fact that we are born to die, and are "condemned," as it were, to an awareness of this fact. According to Becker, each of these fundamental human realitiesthat of birth, that of death, and that of self-awarenesscarries with it a corresponding fear: the fear of life, the fear of death, and the fear of knowledge. Together, these fears comprise a perpetual forge of anxiety, dread, and terroron both conscious and unconscious levels.
I would like to comment briefly on each of these fears, pause for a bit of discussion, and then consider some religious responses. In the process, the discussion will become rather grim before it becomes more "hopeful." So, fasten your existential seatbelts and let's see where we end up going. . . .
- We are born . . .
- a. In exploring the fear of life, Becker draws on one of Freud's early followers, Otto Rank, and his concept of a universal "birth trauma"that "shock of being" that unceremoniously, and without our informed consent, pushes and pulls us (perhaps with forceps) through an all too narrow birth canal and then thrusts us out (perhaps with a slap on the bottom) into what aptly has been called "one big, blooming, buzzing confusion" of a worldand then requires us to grow, develop, and make our way in it to the best of our courage, luck, and ability.
- b. Becker expands this concept of a literal birth-trauma to refer symbolically to all of the ways in which the anxiety infused into us at birth can repeat itself at each new juncture in our lives that calls for the emergence of something newbe it new growth, new awareness, a new life-direction or transition, or a new life-skill. Such developmentally necessary passages beckon us from our comfort zonesfrom our familiar "wombs"into strange and uncharted territory. Becker describes this territory at it's worst. He writes:
"We are understandably reluctant to move out into the overwhelmingness of this world, and it's very real dangers; we shrink back from losing ourselves in the all-consuming appetites of others, from spinning out of control in the clutches and clawings of men, beasts and machines. . . . Life can suck us up, sap our energies, submerge us, take away our self-control, give so much new experience so quickly that we feel we will burst; make us stick out among others, emerge onto dangerous ground, load us up with new responsibilities which need great strength to bear, expose us to new contingencies, new chances. Above all, there is the danger of a slip-up, an accident, a chance disease, and of course death, the final sucking up, the total submergence and negation (pp. 53-54).
- And, we could add today, the ever-present danger of another September 11th.
- Which leads to the second great existential realiltynamely that we are born to die, and that we know it.
- a. This, in Beckers words, is the terror of death: "To have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self expressionand with all this yet to die" (p. 87).
- b. Death, of course, is a fate we share with all earthly life. More so than any other species, however, our conscious awareness forces us to stare this reality in the faceor at least to know that it always stares at usand to live with the ominous and ever lengthening shadow it casts over all of our days, despite our sunshiny efforts to dispel it. As William James, in his typically memorable way, puts it: "Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet" (p. 158).
- c. Alongside our uniquely human ability to know our mortality, stands our inability to stare it in the face fully, or for very long, let alone to grin back. The psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden, in his book Subjects of Analysis, stresses that we are
- incapable of both maintaining our sanity and genuinely experiencing our own mortality. Regardless of the enormity of the effort that we might make, we involuntarily avert our gaze at the last moment. In that instant of turning away, we (in fantasy) become immortal and omnipotent and to that degree become less fully alive in the unbearable intensity and immediacy of the present moment (p. 18).
- d. Yet to be as fully human and as fully alive as possible is to try to muster and sustain as much consciousness and self-awareness as possible, including the awareness of the finite and tragic aspects of our earthly existence, without becoming psychotically stunned by the awareness (or at least not psychotically stunned all day long!).
- Hence the need for an Anchor of Hope in the midst of what often feels like life's immense, shoreless, storm-tossed sea of anxiety that tosses us about between the crashing waves of:
- our developmental obligation to be born, to be alive, to grow, and (sooner or later) to die;
- our related "birth traumas" and dread of death; and
- the mind-boggling awareness of it all.
Let's pause for here for discussion, while I ask my favorite psychoanalytic question:
"What comes to mind?"
|