Living Well While Doing Good
July 29, 2007
by Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper

So far in this service, we have been admonished not to be rubberneckers on the great highway of life. Thank you, guest dramatists, for all the good that you did for the world all week. And thank you also for how well you did it. We heard you: Bystanding is not allowed. Standing by is not allowed. Pausing the clicker is not an option.

We have also been admonished by Holy Scriptures to "Set our Own House in Order," and every time I hear that phrase I want to cringe. You should see my basements and my attics, what my old friend who lost control of her personal housekeeping called her "Unconscious," where when she died we discovered literally thousands of garments. None were pressed or ironed. Nor did her kitchen table look like a Cezanne Still life.

I often hear this scripture as advocating the Cezanne Still Life: a perfect, quiet, well-blended well composed order. And then I think that no such thing exists. Instead what exists is the violence of citizens on stand by. The idea that I would be composing still lives in the middle of agitated life is absurd. I loved Bethene's summer letter in which she describes the wonders of her trip to Istanbul, her "helplessness" around peace and justice - and the way she contradicts herself in the letter. She warmed to the Moslem Way of calling prayer 5 times a day - and prayed for us by name. Helplessness? I don't think so. She prayed for us by name. Agitated life? Why NOT compose a still life? Why not get our own houses in order?

Many people think that you can either live well or do good but not both. They are wrong. And the error in that kind of thinking is what I want to argue today. Getting our own house in order is not just about our own attics or kitchens but it is also about those of the world. Getting the world in order is, however, not even slightly possible if we do not have the consolation of the still life, the painting, the prayer, the letter writing - which is beautiful for many reasons but especially because we don't HAVE to do it. Compulsion will not clean our houses; freedom will.

Living well and doing good are simultaneously receiving the spiritual permission to get our own houses in order and receiving the spiritual courage to see the world. We need not hide in either household chaos or rubbernecking. We can do both. I have long thought that housekeeping gets a bad rap. You remember the early feminist slogans about hating housework? You remember how often it is considered less than advertising or finance or something that you put a suit on in order to do? I hope the various contemporary texts rehonor such work for you. I hope that they attract rather than assault. The art of making a home for ourselves and for others is a brilliant art. It is not easy. But when done with a spiritual ease, it is a magnificent thing, as magnificent as Cezanne stilling life so that we can garner and give the strength we need back out on the road. The inner and the outer are richly blended in the real world: when we live well and do good, both/and, not either/or, we are poised for both still lives and seeing lives. Rubbernecking is something we do because we just can't take anything more in. We go on automatic pilot. We "Veg" out - one of my favorite terms. We shut down. We eliminate input. Why do people rubberneck? Out of self-defense. When calm and still replace shut down and vegging, violence on the road will change. People will learn to see it. Housekeeping helps us calm and still so that we can see.

So let me get a little more practical and real - about getting our own houses in order. Some of you know I have just returned from Provence and Barcelona - where Warren and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary. We had taken a month's anniversary to France after July 4, 1982. We went back - all on behalf of getting our own house in order.

While in the world of the Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys, the world of the Impressive Dollar Eating Euro and the world of $75.00 sunscreen, we enjoyed the luxury of time to think. We found ourselves doing a lot of evaluation of what had happened between us and around us in 25 years. I am sure that one of the things it means to order our own houses on behalf of living well and doing good is to be able to reflect on what has happened. The absence of reflection is the presence of rubbernecking.

Some stuff, in our little evaluation, is tucked away in private guidebooks no one else can see; some is available for public scrutiny. Warren thinks I helped him get "in gear;" I think he helped me to understand a world that is very far away from West Virginia. He learned to like Sinatra; I learned to like France. Class differences meant a lot in our relationship. I moved up, he got an energizing dose of working class energy and fear.

A climb up Cezanne's mountain helped us think beyond the obvious dramatic structure of our class up and class plateauing lives. Cezanne credits Mt. St. Victoire with developing cubism. Cubism is many things but it is at least the insistence on LOOKING (not rubbernecking) but looking at things from a variety of viewpoints. Once you have seen the mountain you know why he took that step towards Cubism: it is less real than imagined, in splotches of stone sewn together in a dozen greys and two dozen peaches, pinks and roses, climbing high into the sky as though they were a mountain. We too have been wed as though we were a marriage, when actually we were two people who lived side by side for 25 years, splotching our experience together as though it made art. Our favorite joke is "the eroticization of everyday life." Don't we wish.

On the mountain lavender and rosemary make soft what at first looks hard. The occasional jasmine scents the air as their rivals. At one point, when we wondered if the trail dared take another turn (it did), I said to Warren, "You be Lewis, I'll be Clark." He laughed.

So our learnings: It is harder to come down than to go up. I knew that in a number of different ways already. But my knees made the point quite clearly on the way down. It is also easier to raise money than it is to spend it wisely. It is easier to dream than it is to realize dreams. It is also easier to cook than to clean up. It is easier to get married than to stay married.

Another learning is similar: when you buy the expensive Bouillabaisse that the guidebook recommends, it is rarely worth the money. Forgo the guide books, hit the side streets and you will find a fish in a basil cream sauce and an anchovy vinaigrette that will please thrice for half the price.

If no one thinks a Jew and a Christian minister can be happily married, so what? What do others know about what we like? Plus, even though I thought I had to leave ministry if I married Warren, the truth is that he has helped my so-called career at every point, both internally and externally. Who would have thought that? What guidebook tells us? Who would have known that it would be I who would bring him (forward) to religious respect from skeptical disknowing? Who said that religions don't mix? I know: the guidebook.

As we set our own houses in order, it is very important to be able to define what we mean by order. Otherwise others will.

Having a house in order means the ability to enjoy a vacation, to reflect on our experience, with our own categories and in our own intimacy. It also means the ability to connect to the real world while away. We may have been smack dab in the middle of Provence's melon season, but emails were coming in from Miami that dear Ute, our favorite sailboat captain, was dying and that Andy, her partner (both third marriages) has lost faith. After so many years, he says, of being an optimist, despite his chair bound serious version of MS, he can't take her dying. She has moved to the guest house on their property, where we stayed when first we went to Miami, as he was chair of the search committee. Why? Because she can't BOTH die and feel guilty about not caring for him any more. It pains me to know that they hadn't worked this out before now.

We used to play scrabble with them and with our kids on Sunday afternoons. Having our own house in order often means something about how we think we are going to die. When my friend died and left us and her children all STUCK with a lifetime wardrobe and much more chaos, it wasn't fair. She should have lived more with the knowledge of her death. When many of us worry the clutter of our lives, both spiritually and domestically, we are being kind. We are living well and doing good. There is nothing right about rubbernecking our own death either. Not to mention that seeing our own death will help us see the violence of the world.

We walked by a linen suit store in Provence. We bought a white linen one. Warren will only wear it for special occasions, when he doesn't eat food. (Extension of guidebook rule: there are no special occasions without food so he will wear it all the time.) I hope he will wear it to my funeral (unless I have to buy something for his) and that he will remember with joy the day we climbed Mt. St Victoire and the way we laughed about how he couldn't eat when he wears the suit.

When you evaluate a partnership of 25 years - and look at others whom you deeply love and hope you don't end up in the guest cottage alone or needing a dumpster to take stuff out of your house - you become aware of having a house that has had some order but also not had some order. No, it has not all been rosey. Back to rubbernecking: just because things aren't rosy doesn't mean we can't look at them. For us there were the usual diapers, toe fungus, scoliosis of the back and cancer. There were times when we discarded too many parts of ourself on behalf of the other or this thing called love/marriage. Joyce Carol Oates already wrote Marriages and Infidelities so I won't. We were sometimes faithful to the wrong things.

We looked up this summer and all three of our offspring were gone. Katie now in Mexico with the Zapatistas, Isaac on his way to Israel to meet his new bride there, Jacob still uncertain but in his usual affable way. We have been ridiculously lucky in job and health and offspring: I often say we made it this far with the little credit card that could. When we really like a desert, we have a practice of ordering two. One day the coffee machine was broken at the lunch restaurant, so we ordered the brandy. Excess continues to be a problem.

This sermon needs more examples of people who try to live well and do good. (By the way I always think summer sermons should be very personal, it's a quirk.) I'll give you some. Bethene's letter and its self-contradiction: I feel helpless/I prayed for you by name. Or calling Gordon Smith yesterday during his daily Committee Meeting (Cocktails) in the assisted living in Minneapolis. His friend Mike, a dentist who had a stroke at 47 years old, answered the phone, "If it's not really important, please call back. We're busy." Or an octogenarian I saw in Marseilles, on a scooter. Not a motorbike, a scooter on which you scoot. She was carrying a lot of groceries. My mother in law who has learned digital photography and now is teaching us. Well and good are not in conflict: Well and good are a team.

SOME YEARS AGO Emily Dickenson wrote "The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the next ecstatic experience." The real point of such a luxurious evaluation of one's own life is to keep the door open to the next stage, the next phase, the next mountain.

Yesterday I was walking home from the office through the Park. Yes the Park continues to be something about which we must concern ourselves. It is part of our house. We are to set our own houses in order - which can be defined as living as well as possible in them while making them forces and sources of good.

A young white man had pushed his piano into the park - and with a few other musicians was belting out a great version of "Great Balls of Fire." A homeless man was dancing with his cane. Children were jumping up and down to the music. A Chinese man was yelling Bravo, Bravo. No body was rubbernecking. No one was just standing by. We were standing BY.

*****

Ancient Testimony: II Kings 20:1