![\"\"](\"https:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/_niPwTW3rBbU\/RsB8mZIJhlI\/AAAAAAAAASY\/rhfx8lVzFEs\/s1600-h\/marcus.aurelius.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nUP UNTIL THE TIME OF YOUR DEATH 12 August 2007 Text<\/p>\n You are composed of three things: body, breath and mind. Marcus Aurelius This past week I was wandering around the web looking for references to Stoicism and in particular to its possible connections to contemporary Western liberal religion. I wasn\u2019t terribly surprised although quite pleased when I found two Unitarian Universalist sermons on the subject. The first was by UU minister Scott Alexander, who currently serves the River Road Unitarian Church in Bethesda, Maryland. In 2005 he preached a sermon called \u201cLearning to Fall: Stoicism.\u201d<\/p>\n I was caught pretty much from the title. I\u2019d already thought a lot about falling. I\u2019d experienced a major herniation in 1999. In fact it nearly prevented me from flying out to Boston to pre-candidate for this pulpit. Jan and I had to figure out how to handle that flight with me sitting pretty much straight up for five hours. The solution wasn\u2019t difficult, although it did involve timing. Just before Jan bundled me aboard the flight from Phoenix I ate a lot of major painkillers, and I swallowed some more about two hours out. We calculated I\u2019d only be slightly goofy, or as you all know, only slightly more goofy than normal when we landed. Fortunately the search committee was well apprised of the situation and assumed behind the goofy I was in fact brighter than is the case. Sometimes things which seem bad at the time, just break the right way. You never know.<\/p>\n But, there\u2019s that falling. My surgeon was apparently a Taoist, so good he didn\u2019t actually have to cut me; and instead had advised despite its severity how the herniation should heal itself in about a year. Just be careful, he said, and don\u2019t fall,. So, during that trip and all around it, I was being very careful, waiting impatiently for nature to take its course, and trying not to fall. About a year from the incident, it was deep into a Boston winter when I was walking downtown. By then I was overly cautious, pretty much all the time. I also seemed more inclined to fall than if I hadn\u2019t been so obsessed with my situation. So, perhaps, of course, while walking in that wintry, frozen Boston, I slipped on a bit of ice, my legs shot out straight in front of me, and I fell flat on my back.<\/p>\n I lay there for a few minutes thinking I\u2019m paralyzed for life. Then, I got up. My back had healed. So, I really was taken with Scott\u2019s image of falling as a foundational insight for the Stoic way. For a continuing thread in his sermon, Scott drew upon Philip Simmons powerful book Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life, Philip\u2019s reflections on his life with Lou Gehrig\u2019s disease, which would eventually kill him. A lifelong UU, Philip wrote of this condition of mortality, of how we are all falling, that we all share, with wisdom and eloquence.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are all \u2013 all of us \u2013 falling. We are all, now, this moment, in the midst of that descent, fallen from heights that may now seem only a dimly remembered dream, falling toward a depth we can only imagine, glimpsed beneath the water\u2019s surface shimmer. And so let us pray that if we are falling from grace, dear God, let us also fall with grace, to grace. If we are falling toward pain and weakness, let us also fall toward sweetness and strength. If we are falling toward death, let us also fall toward life.\u201d<\/p>\n That wise Unitarian thinker Forrest Church frequently observes how the questions of religion all follow our awareness of being alive and our knowing we\u2019re going to die. From the moment of our birth we are falling toward death. The art of life, is knowing how to fall. And, I believe, Stoicism has a lot to say to us on that subject.<\/p>\n In fact it was the second of the sermons that I felt really put it all in perspective for me. Doug Muder, a member of the First Parish Church, Unitarian Universalist, in Bedford, is a fairly regular contributor to the UU World, but is possibly better known to those among us who follow political bloggers as the pseudonymous Pericles at the Daily Kos. Anyway Doug wrote a sermon called \u201cIs There a Western Path to Enlightenment?\u201d He opines there is and it is Stoicism. I\u2019m strongly inclined to agree.<\/p>\n Doug starts his sermon with the observation how \u201cThere\u2019s a classic story that gets acted out in reality every few years. It goes like this: A young adult (typically male) grows up in the center of civilization (typically England). He has a certain measure of success and comes to be quite proud of himself. And then he goes off to an apparently backward part of the world (typically India), where he finds ancient teachings that wake him up spiritually.\u201d Doug cites some of the more famous examples from Kipling\u2019s classic novel Kim to the Beatles studying with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.<\/p>\n While he doesn\u2019t deny the metaphorical value of the spiritual quest (and I would add our need to be willing to be surprised in order to be ready for insight when it appears), Doug points out the obvious error of taking the story literally together with an observation about how frequently that error happens. He writes \u201cAs much as I admire and even envy some of the Eastern or indigenous religions, I am a Westerner. The West is not just where my body happened to be born. It is the home of my soul.\u201d<\/p>\n
What the Stoics Can Teach Us About a Life of Wisdom
<\/strong><\/em>
A Sermon by
James Ishmael Ford<\/p>\n
First Unitarian Society
West Newton, Massachusetts<\/p>\n
The first two are yours to the degree that you are responsible for their care;
only the third is truly yours.
If you do not attach your sense of who you are
to your thoughts,
to what others say or do,
to what you have said or done,
to what you will say or do,
to the vicissitudes of your health and other physical conditions,
to any of the raging currents of your life beyond your control;
so that your mind is not entangled by those things that pass away:
you will dwell in freedom
and become the master of your house;
making all your actions just,
doing everything mindfully,
and living truthfully.
If you live mindfully without clinging to any thought
of bodily condition, or the future or the past,
and become like Empedocles\u2019 globe,
perfectly contained and joyful,
and strive to live only the life you have,
in this moment;
then you will own your life
up until the time of your death,
marked by wisdom and joy,
at one with the god within.<\/em><\/p>\n
Meditations, Book XII, Chapter Three<\/p>\n