I want to share some thoughts tonight about the shape, the nature, and the nurture of our active lives, our lives in the world of action. I want to define "the active life" very broadly. It might be a life we live downtown in an office, to which we take a train every day. It might be a life lived at home, raising children. It might be a life of citizenship in the larger society. The active life might be lived within the walls of this church or some other voluntary association. Or it might be a life of gardening or artistic creativity.

   There is in our active lives a great deal of creativity and of joy. There is a sense of humanness about them which we treasure, and without which we would die. But there is also, for many people, a lot of struggle and a lot of pain in the active life. When I talk to people about their active lives, certain words keep coming through, words like stress, like exhaustion, like burnout; and then if you listen carefully enough, deeper words come through. Words like failure, words like loss of a dream, or loss of a sense of purpose, or loss of a sense of self-worth. It’s a difficult world, the world of action, and every day in lots of ways, we who raise children or go to work in offices or act as citizens are tested and stretched. We feel measured. We feel defeated. We feel judged.

   It is in the context of our active lives that two of our very deepest questions come up, questions that many of us spend our whole lives trying to answer. The one question is, Who am I? And the other is, Whose am I? The one question asks, "What are my gifts and why am here and what do I have to bring to this world?" Another question asks, "Where do I belong, who are my people, what is my community, how am I connected to all of this?" These are spiritual questions, and the fact that the active life in our time has become an arena of stress and struggle helps us understand why there has been a revival of spirituality in the last 30 or 40 years, a revival of the literature of contemplation, a revival of the question of faith versus frenzy. I’d like to try to put that revival in a bit of an historical context. The history of the relation of the active life to the spiritual life is an important one for us to know something about. If we don’t know that history, we tend to recycle its struggles in our own lives, and I, for one, have found a little historical perspective to be helpful.

   Let me start with the ancient world, with the Greek and Christian roots of our Western civilization. If you look at the relation of the active and the contemplative life back then, one thing is very clear: The contemplative life was valued much more highly than the active life. This is an ancient bias that we continue to carry over in our own hearts to this very day. In ancient times, active life was merely the life of getting bread on the table, a roof over your head, clothes on your back. It was the life lived (and I choose these words advisedly) by women, children and slaves. It was a life of drudgery. It was a life that you simply had to live because you had the misfortune to be born into a fleshly body on a muddy earth, and somebody had to do the work of feeding the flesh and cleaning off the mud. Does that sound a bit like the same bias that we bring to our active lives today? It’s a bias sunk very deep in the roots of Western culture, the bias that our active lives are just necessary drudgery.

   But back then, in the ancient origins of our civilization, the contemplative life, ah, that was the thing! Contemplation was the life to live. That was how you transcended your circumstances. That was how you got out of the mud. That was how you removed yourself from the flesh. Do you know how many images we have of spirituality that are about "up, up and away"? That’s what contemplation promised: escape from the bonds of earth, escape from the tugs of the flesh. It’s no accident that the church and the university became the preeminent institutions of Western civilizations, because it was in those institutions that men (and I use the word advisedly) had an opportunity to live a life of contemplation, through prayer or through thought, that would not only help them escape the bonds of earth, but would draw them closer to God. The active life had nothing to do with God—prayer and contemplation were the pathway to the Divine.

   That was the subtext of Western civilization for a long time. But something funny happened on the way to the Enlightenment, to the rise of science and technology. What happened was that the value of these two modes of life got reversed. The active life became a life of immense power. Given the tools of science and technology, we can do anything we want. Don’t like that mountain there? Take it down. Don’t like that desert? Put the mountain in its place. Don’t like which way the river flows? Reverse it. We did it in Chicago, and we could do it anywhere! Science and technology give us the tools for what? Hear this: They give us the tools to "be God." Who needs to pray now to get close to God? We can be God. We can reorganize nature and human nature to suit our design. If you don’t like the way something was created, alter the creation. The tools of science and technology gave us immense leverage over the face of the earth, and with that leverage, action became a new way of "sanctifying" our lives, while the value of contemplation started to fade away.

   And then, in the last 30 or 40 years, the poles have once again been reversed, at least for some of us. I think the reason is very simple. Across our society, thoughtful people have realized that we don’t do a very good job playing God, that our efforts to remake the face of the natural world have resulted in ecological catastrophe and that our efforts to remake the face of the social world have resulted in human catastrophe. And so a new spirituality has arisen trying to reclaim the values of contemplation, to reclaim a quiet and prayerful quest for divinity.

   What I’m trying to portray here is a Western history in which contemplation and action have been the poles of a constant tug-of-war. First this side wins, then that side wins, then the other side wins. The problem is that’s not the right relation of contemplation and action in a healthy life, though they do relate that way in our own frenzied lives. We tend to plunge ourselves into 11 months of exhaustion, and then take a one-month vacation. That’s the old model of the tug-of-war. We rest up so that we can get exhausted again. Maybe we go on a weekend retreat so that we can replenish the spirit in order to destroy our egos one more time. Tug-of-war, back and forth, first this side and then that. We repeat the history of the culture in our own cycling in and out of exhaustion and rest, exhaustion and rest.

   But it is of the very nature of contemplation and action that they are not opposite poles. They are, instead two halves of a paradox. They belong together, like breathing in and breathing out, like light and dark, like sun and moon, like yin and yang.

   The great Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, had a statement about paradox that I’ve always found very helpful. He said, "The opposite of an ordinary fact is a lie, but the opposite of one great truth is another great truth." Contemplation and action are among those great truths in our lives which must be held together as opposite but equal, opposite but complementary, opposite but paradoxical. When a paradox falls apart, what happens is that both of those great truths degenerate into something not worthy of themselves.

   Let me illustrate what happens when paradox falls apart with an example other than the one I’m working with at the moment. Did God make me for community? You bet your boots. I’d die without it. Without community, I’d have no life worth living. Did God make me for solitude? You bet your boots. I’d die without it. Without solitude, I have no life worth living. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German theologian, talked about that paradox when he said, "Let the person who cannot be in community beware of being alone, and let the person who cannot be alone beware of being in community." The paradox has to go together. Solitude and community are like breathing in and breathing out. When that paradox falls apart, you get a degeneration of both poles. You get the condition, I think, of too many of our lives, which vacillate not between solitude and community, but between loneliness (which is the degeneration of solitude) and the crowd (which is the degeneration of community).

   What happens when the great paradox of contemplation and action falls apart? What happens then, I think, is that action becomes fruitless frenzy and contemplation becomes irresponsible escapism.

   Some years ago, when I first felt the wounds of my active life, I started seeking a spiritual escape, a place to run away to. I remember hearing a tape by the great Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who served as novice master in his community, the mentor who introduced the younger monks to monasticism. His talks to the novices were taped, and I found one called "Contemplation in a World of Action." With great eagerness, I put it into the tape deck; I can still call up the mental image made by the sound of the papers rustling, and the microphone being adjusted, and Merton calling for a time of prayer.

   I could feel the posity of the young men who had come to live the monastic life. I could feel how they were in full flight from the world of action, just as I wanted to be. I could feel the beauty of the retreat that they had found for themselves. Then, when the prayer ended, I heard Merton, in a very sharp voice, saying, "Men, before you can have a spiritual life, you’ve got to have a life!" I remember being brought up very short by that, caught by the irony of Merton’s message: The spiritual life is about your life as you find it, and not about running away. The spiritual life is about plunging into your life as it is and trying to learn from what’s there.

   Those of us who live in the active world have to realize that the spiritual life is not about fleeing from the world of action. The spiritual life is, instead, about challenging the illusions that make the world of action a demonic place. The spiritual life is a plunge into the world of action in a way that challenges all the illusions that lead to burnout, to stress, to exhaustion, to a sense of personal failure, to loss of self-esteem. The spiritual life is about shattering the illusions that make the world of action a place that is death-dealing, and returning it to the life-giving place that I think God intended this world to be.

   Let me offer you a definition of contemplation that may help us with this task. There is a tendency to think of contemplation as some esoteric technique, like sitting cross-legged and chanting a mantra, a methodology that will somehow reduce our stress and bring us peace. I don’t think the contemplative life is about stress reduction in the first place. Here is my definition of contemplation: Contemplation is any way you have of penetrating illusion and touching reality. If you are sitting cross-legged chanting a mantra and you’re not penetrating illusion, it’s not contemplation. You may even be generating illusion by doing that. It depends.

   When I offer that definition, I have in mind a woman I know. She’s the single mother of a child with severe mental retardation. Talk about someone who lives an active life! Indeed, she lives a double active life: she has to dress for that child, she has to eat for that child, she has to walk and play for that child, because the child is almost incapable of doing anything for itself. This woman has no time for contemplation as traditionally understood. She has no time for a spiritual retreat. And yet, this woman is a world-class contemplative in my judgment, on a par with Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, and I can tell you exactly why. She is a world-class contemplative because her active life has required her to penetrate every cruel illusion this society has about what makes a human being human. Her child measures up to none of those standards of "success," of "effectiveness," and yet the mother knows in her love that her child is fully as human as you or I. And she has had to fight and wrestle and yell and shout about the illusions that this society has about what makes a person human. Her mode of contemplation is to live a very active life for both herself and her child. And she has used that action to see through illusions that are so thick in our society that we hardly know they are there. She is a world-class contemplative, without a minute to sit cross-legged and chant a mantra, without a weekend to go on retreat.

   I have a question for you, and for myself, at this point: How in your life, and how in my life, have we broken through illusion and touched reality? What have been the moments and experiences where illusion has fallen away and reality has been touched? I’ll make you a bet (and this may be more about me than about you, but I’ll make the bet anyway) that illusion often falls away for us in moments of loss and defeat, the crushing of dreams and visions, the shattering of expectations, times when we or others turn out not to be what we had thought we were.

   Listen to the language: We call those events moments of "disillusionment." That’s a wonderful word, but we do a very strange thing with it in this society. Someone comes to me and says, "I’m so disillusioned by what happened the other day." My tendency is to put my around them and offer consolation. Instead, I should say, "Congratulations! You’ve lost another illusion! Congratulations, you’re that much closer to reality! Congratulations! And is there some way that this church or this family or this relationship can disillusion you further?"

   Disillusionment is about the journey that God takes us on, a journey away from fiction and fantasy, toward reality and truth. Disillusionment is a great thing. Disillusionment is what it means to be on a spiritual journey. I have talked before with members of this congregation about my own experience in the last decade with bouts of clinical depression. That is not a "retreat" that I recommend to anyone, but I know that in a crowd of this size, there will be a number of people who will have shared that experience with me. It’s an experience of being driven underground, into the worst kind of isolation, into self-esteem so low that the language doesn’t even apply, a feeling of real annihilation. I cannot say that I welcome such experiences, but I can say, on the other side of them, that the illusions I lost in those times about myself and my image of reality are among the things that I am happy to be without! It is only through such losses that one survives such experience. It is only by understanding the guidance within those painful disillusionments we become contemplatives-in-action.

   I’ve tried to say a little about contemplation as understand it. I’ve tried to say a little about the relation of the contemplative and the active life. Now I’d like to move to exploring four or five of the specific illusions that some of us need to penetrate in this wrestling match between faith and frenzy. I’d like to talk about four or five illusions that have many of us in their grip, that are very common in the world of work, in the world of home, in the world of civic community, illusions that need to be penetrated as we move along the spiritual path. I’d like to identify four or five destinations that we might come to if we took a spiritual journey into the world of action, a journey away from frenzy and toward faith.

   First, let’s look at an illusion about the world that seems prevalent in our society—the illusion that the world is a battleground that is essentially hostile to our best interests. I know lots and lots of people who go to work each day clinging to that illusion, feeling certain that the world is a hostile place, full of enemies "out to get them." The military language and imagery that we use to describe the world of work is quite astonishing, where everything is "battle," "big guns," "enemies," and winners.

   I was in a conversation a week ago down in Tennessee with a group of lawyers who tried to convince me that warfare is their reality, that there is no other way to see their world, that there’s no other way to play their role. But I believe that by acting on that illusion, we create that kind of world.. Illusions are self-fulfilling prophesies. We act upon them and we create a world in which warfare becomes the truth for ourselves and for other people.

   It was quite amazing to talk with a group of lawyers who simply refused to consider that maybe mediation was a way around some of the adversarial problems that they worked with every day. They did not want to, I suppose, because they might lose their jobs if mediation became too popular; they need to keep creating the very warfare that kills their souls. And yet our adversarial system of law is so log jammed at the moment, so tied in knots, that the need for alternative solutions is desperate. Even worse, in this society that is dying for creativity, as long as we define our active lives as a battleground, we will keep coming up with trite and trivial solutions. When people get locked in mortal combat with each other, they quickly fall back on what they already know, on what they already can do. They do not think imaginatively, they do not think creatively, because they lack both the time and the trust to do so.

   We cling to the strange illusion that creativity is spurred by competition. But there is growing evidence in education and in business and industry that competition within companies and within classrooms does not in fact create the best results. Community does. Collaboration does. It’s a spiritual insight from long ago, that we get the best results in any situation when we trust each other, when we extend hospitality to the new idea, to the stranger and to the strange thought, which allows all of us to think anew.

   For some of us on this spiritual journey into the world of action, one illusion to be penetrated is the illusion that the world is a battleground hostile to my interests. I’m convinced that that illusion has us locked into the most counterproductive kinds of behaviors, into the deadest kinds of schemes and dreams that are costing this society an immense amount. We need a spiritual breakthrough. We need a contemplative breakthrough from people who have been wounded by life in that kind of world, and who are no longer willing to settle for that sort of life. We need people who can say, "I have penetrated the illusion of the world as a battleground, and I am going to start acting in trust in hopes of creating a more trustworthy reality."

   A second illusion that we need to penetrate on our spiritual journey into the world of action is the illusion that scarcity, rather than abundance, is the law of nature and of human nature. This is the assumption that lies behind the battleground image. The scarcity assumption is that whatever it is we want, there is never enough to go around, so we must fight for our share (and for more than our share). We do that individually, we do that nationally. Every economics textbook I’ve ever seen proclaims, in the first sentence, that resources are scarce, therefore economic systems exist to distribute them, and usually to distribute them inequitably.

   Amazingly, we apply the scarcity assumption not only to material goods, but to nonmaterial goods as well. What is jealousy, except the feeling that love and esteem and affirmation are in scarce supply, and if you’re getting more than your share, then I’m getting less than I deserve. I spent 15 years living in intentional communities, and I am astonished at the number of times that my own thinking reverts to a scarcity assumption about love, esteem, affirmation. It’s an illusion. And yet, it’s an illusion that becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy when we act on it.

   Let me give you the example I know best about how the scarcity assumption becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. I do a lot of work in the world of education, and throughout our educational system, there is a deep driven assumption that intelligence, knowledge, wisdom, insight, are in scarce supply, and that only a few can finally be credentialed for possessing it. You’ve heard of this thing called grading on the curve? A fascinating practice! Apparently, unbeknownst to all of us, there is a warehouse somewhere in this country where boxes of grades are stored, and there are very few boxes of A’s, a larger number of boxes of B’s, and lots and lots of C’s along with some D’s and F’s. Faculty call into this warehouse each semester to request their quota of these grades, so only a few A’s can be given, but lots and lots of lower grades. The result is that we have an American population in which hundreds of thousands of people walk around feeling stupid because they have been pitted against others in a win-lose battle for the scarce supply called insight, intelligence, wisdom.

   Psychologists have studied this subject, and they have identified between eight and twelve distinctly different kinds of human intelligence. That is fascinating, and that is liberating! The schools are concerned with the top inch and a half of human intelligence, the cognitive, numerical kind, the capacity to manipulate symbols, which some of us do very well. But have you ever had a practical problem in your life, and you know whom to turn to among your friends because he or she has a practical, problem-solving intelligence? Do you have friends who, if you’re in a difficult relationship, you can turn to because they have relational intelligence? Have you ever met somebody who had visual intelligence, the eye of an artist? That’s another kind of "smarts" that psychologists have demonstrated. How about people who have intelligence in their hands? I have two grandfathers, now dead, but alive in memory, who were master craftsmen one a machinist, one a carpenter. I have seen their work. Both had Einstein in their fingertips. Neither of them was schooled, both were dropouts from the formal system, but both had high intelligence.

   Intelligence — and much else that we need—exists in abundance in this world, in nature. It just comes in diverse shapes and forms. Some of us must be at work in our active lives penetrating the illusion that scarcity is the law of nature, penetrating the illusion that this world doesn’t have enough to go around. There’s plenty of everything to go around, if we know how to be in a sharing community with one another rather than in warfare over these illusory scarce resources and rewards.

   A third illusion that some of us need to work on is the illusion that "I am what I do," the illusion that my worth comes from my functioning, from my capacity to perform. Perhaps the deepest form that illusion takes in a lot of our lives is the notion that we have to earn love for ourselves by succeeding. If there is to be any love for us, we must succeed at something. This is a tremendous and painful confusion in human life. In our society, apparently it’s not enough to be a human being; you have to be a "human doing."

   This illusion leads to the most profound distortions in almost all of our work, in almost all of our work, in almost all of our institutions. Again, let me give an example from the field that I know best. I go around the country working with college faculty on the improvement of teaching and learning, and I find college faculty enormously hung up on the notion that somehow good teaching is a matter of finding the right technique. I suppose that stands to reason, because for 25 years an increasingly technocratic society has delivered that message: "You can’t be a good teacher unless you know exactly what to do. You can’t be a good teacher unless you have a methodology of performance."

   But do you know what I hear when I ask students about who their great teachers are? I never hear about performance. I never hear about methodology. I hear about qualities of personhood that jump the gap from the lectern to the lives of those young men and women. They see in their good teachers not technique, but authenticity. They see in their good teachers not methodology, but integrity. They see in their good teachers people who are there, people who care, people who want to build a bridge from a great subject to their students’ lives. The students tell me that their great teachers range from A to Z in terms of methodology. So do mine.

   I had one great teacher in college who every Wednesday afternoon, walked into the classroom, looked around and said, "Any questions?" But I had another great teacher who was so inflamed with his subject that he lectured nonstop. We’d raise a hand and try to get in a question, and he’d say, "I’ll get to that in a minute, I’ll get to that in a minute," but four years went by and he never got to it! In the middle of a lecture he would start arguing with himself; he’d make a statement, and then he’d step to one side and he’d say, "But that’s baloney! Who would ever think that?" And we’d be out there wondering which notes are we supposed to take here? I finally figured this guy out: He was a one-man community! He did not need us to be his community, because he was so alive with his subject matter and with the great history of his topic. He was a world unto himself. He was a universe that I wanted to inhabit. I wanted somehow to be a part of his world, and it was almost as if his reluctance to invite me into it was part of the lure: I wanted even more badly to get in.

   Technique? Methodology? No. What those two teachers communicated to me was self, personhood, authenticity—not what they did, but who they were. It’s like that in every field of endeavor. Ultimately, it is always more important to be a human being than a human doing. We are not what we do. We are who we are.

   A fourth illusion is that our active lives should be organized around what we have been trained and rewarded to do, the illusion that what we ought to be doing is what we are prepared and paid to do. But the truth often is that our training and our rewards take us farther and farther away from our birthrights gifts; the crisis in midlife, for some of us, is to find our way back through that training, that programming, that reward system, to our original nature, to our God-given reality.

   I deeply believe that every person is born world with an original gift. I feel that very strongly right now because I have a brand-new granddaughter who is just a little over a year old. She lives next door to me, and I am reminded every day that already, at three months or at six months or at nine months, this human being is already this kind of person rather than that, or that, or that. She has a nature, she has an identity, she has a way of being in the world, she has an original gift. But her story will probably be like mine. Somewhere along the line, powerful voices from school or community or somewhere will say, well, what you ought to be doing with your life is such-and-such. And then you will spend four, eight, twelve painful and expensive years learning to do it, and twenty years later, that skill is what you will name as your original master gift. In fact, however, your original gift is one that you had from the beginning, one so strong in you and so natural that you don’t even know you have it. In truth, you have been trained away from your birthright opportunity.

   It’s fascinating to me that the newest mode of vocational counseling for people having struggles in their active lives does not start with the want-ads and how they relate to your training or degree. These new vocational counselors ask you to begin by going back in memory, as far as you possibly can, to the days of your childhood, and to write vignettes about what you were attracted to (and what you were repulsed by) in order to get clues as to what your original gift might be. We need clues as to who we actually were before we were so heavily programmed into images of what we "ought" to be. These counselors report immense success in helping people get back on their true track with that method.

   I’m reminded of that wonderful definition that Frederick Buechner offers of the word "vocation," or calling. He says that our vocation is where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need. Our true reaction may have precious little to do with our training, and with the effortful skills that we use each day. But it may have a very great deal to do with our birthright gift, given by God.

   The fifth illusion that we need to penetrate is the illusion that the end of our action, the measure of our work, must always be effectiveness and measurable results. It’s a powerful illusion, and it’s a distorting and deforming illusion. We stand in a faith tradition that has very little truck, I think, with the criteria of effectiveness and results. When a society adopts effectiveness as the ultimate measure of its work, what happens is very simple: We start taking on smaller and smaller and smaller tasks, because those are the only ones on which we can get results that can be measured! The logic is very clear. Do you want to know why this society is no longer addressing the great needs of humankind? It’s because we are caught up in a logic of results that makes our work more and more trivial.

   We are called to the Biblical work of spreading love and justice, of walking with mercy and building community. But this is not a work that will show results in our lifetime. If we try to measure our lives by narrow standards of effectiveness, we will abandon Biblical work, which is largely what this society has done. We are called, I think, to penetrate the illusion that effectiveness and results are the measure of all things, and to adopt another standard for what we do: Faithfulness. There is a very great difference between trying to be effective and trying to be faithful. I have learned from people who are on that journey that the rigors of effectiveness pale by comparison to the rigors of trying to be faithful–faithful to my gifts, faithful to the other’s reality, faithful to the larger need in which we are all embedded, faithful to the possibilities inherent in our common life.

   Well, those are some of the illusions that we might work on, on this spiritual journey, this journey from frenzy to faith. We all know, I think, what frenzy is. At least I do; I fall into it with some regularity, and have pull myself out. But I think that the word "faith" is often misunderstood, and I’d like to close my remarks with a brief comment on that. Faith is not a set of attitudes that we are supposed to adopt. Faith is not a set of beliefs that we are supposed to sign up for. I think faith is the courage to face into our illusions and allow ourselves to be disillusioned about them, the courage to walk through our illusions and dispel them. Faith I would define (for the moment, at least) as a "disillusioned view of reality." Faith is a way of viewing reality that lets the beauty behind the illusions shine through.

   To end this talk, I want to tell a story that was first told by Woody Allen. Some of you will remember his movie, "Annie Hall." At the end of that movie, a strange thing happens. Woody Allen comes on the screen and he tells a joke. But the joke turns out to sum up the message of the whole movie, and it goes like this: A man went to a psychiatrist, and said, "Doc, we have a terrible problem in my house. My brother-in-law thinks he is a chicken." The doctor said, "Well, give me some details. What exactly does he do?" "Well, he cackles at all the guests, he scratches at the furniture, he makes nests in the corner, he carries feathers in his pockets and sprinkles them all around." The psychiatrist says, "Well, it sounds to me not like a severe psychosis, but just a simple neurosis. Bring him in and I can cure him completely." And the guy says, "Oh no, Doc, we wouldn’t want that. We need the eggs!"

   The question I want to leave with you is, "Where in our active lives do we need the eggs?" Where is it that we don’t want to be cured completely of our illusions, because we know how to live by our illusions, because our illusions are so comforting, because our illusions are so approved by the majority of the society, and because our illusions make us feel so at home in this world? Where is it that we prefer frenzy to faith? And how is it that we might go arm in arm through those illusions into the world of reality that God gave us?