Breaking Up Is Hard To Do
Most of us are familiar with that old chestnut, “Work should be its own reward.” Give the assignment your best effort and full attention, look for ways to improve your performance, then let what you’ve done speak for itself. Under the right conditions, the task at hand may become so engrossing that all considerations of external reward or validation disappear, and the work and the worker become one. The result is a species of consciousness University of Chicago cognitive scientist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly describes as “flow”.
As a writer and public speaker I’ve experienced this enjoyable sensation a few fleeting times: hours race by like minutes and outside distractions seem to bounce off the bubble of my concentration. On such occasions, the work is undeniably its own reward. But could we say the same about a career? Looking back on the work of a lifetime can we casually dismiss the tangible and intangible rewards it produced? That may be just a little harder.
Those of you who have been following these blog posts will recall that I kicked off this project earlier in the year with a piece entitled “Leaving and Losing.” In it, I evinced some frustration and disappointment in the Unitarian Universalist denomination’s “best practices” as they affected recently retired clergy. I conceived of that blog as a first-person cautionary tale highlighting the experience of loss - in this instance of a community my wife and I had belonged to and served sacrificially for thirty years.
Needless to say, some suspicious readers of this blog didn’t take it that way, and before long I was apprised that serious charges of “clergy misconduct” had been lodged against me. To make a long story short, after a bit of back-and-forth with my accusers I recognized that Trina’s and my best course was to sever our ties - completely and irrevocably - with my former congregation and the Unitarian Universalist movement at large. Although my ordination remains valid, I have become (to paraphrase Edward Everett Hale), a man without a denomination.
Will the bitter pill of forfeiture prevent me from seeing all the gifts life has, and will continue, to offer? Not a chance. Although this denouement is tied directly to policies I disagree with, they are what they are. The “rules” - as in many other facets of our common life - have undergone a quantum shift from when I entered the ministry. It’s my misfortune that I haven’t kept apace.
Although I was raised in the Unitarian Universalist tradition and always regarded it as my spiritual home, Buddhism has also held an attraction. At present, that ancient tradition’s teachings on “attachment” and “clinging” seem particularly apt. According to Buddhist commentators, these two closely related mind habits are the primary source of much of our psychological suffering. Thus, if we could just do our work, then let go, life wouldn’t seem like such an unremitting struggle. “We are our own jailers,” Stephen Batchelor writes. “We keep ourselves unfree by clinging, out of confusion and fear…instead of accepting and understanding things as they are….”
Still, while such a common sense insight might leave us nodding in agreement, it isn’t all that easy to put into practice. Try as we might, we can’t stop clinging: to reputation, to pride, to ego, and to the grudges we nurse when something precious has been taken from us. “If my mind didn’t cling,” Sylvia Boorstein writes, “it would be totally fearless. Nothing would frighten me, because there would be nothing I would be afraid to lose and nothing I would need to be happy.” Boorstein, a popular Vipassana teacher, admits that clinging is still a problem for her, but it turns out that being in touch with the tendency is half the battle. What you don’t see, you have no control over.
It’s only natural that one would wish for people to think well of them for the work they have done, and for future generations to find merit in what one has contributed. Indeed, for those of us who aren’t really counting on a heavenly reward, the only immortality available to us may be confined to the halls of human memory. But perhaps that, too, is wishful thinking. I delivered an address entitled “The Evanescence of Fame” in 2016 in which I made a long-forgotten point. “We need to remember that all reputation,” I wrote, “is like the morning mist on a summer day: evanescent.”
It never lasts, and if it does, the record of accomplishment is likely to be distorted beyond recognition over time. And, often as not, what remains is merely a name bereft of qualities or of context, a word dropped into a void. This being the case, fame probably shouldn’t rank high on our list of priorities.
In my letters of resignation to the First Unitarian Society of Madison and the Unitarian Universalist Association, I noted that at age seventy-one I was well beyond needing or wanting an extended professional life. Consequently, the loss of my credentials will have little practical effect. The clinging mind is where the arrow strikes deepest. Here, then, is where the late Ram Dass, a Jewish-Hindu sage of some note, comes in handy. “You’ve been somebody long enough,” he reminds me:
You’ve spent half of your life becoming somebody. Now you can work on becoming nobody, which is really somebody. For when you become nobody, there is no tension, no pretense, no trying to be anyone or anything. The natural state of the mind shines through unobstructed - and the natural state of the mind is pure love.
Love, of course, needs an object. For Trina and me it’s the community of people who have reached out to us in sympathy and understanding since retirement. That’s an “attachment” we still cherish – a gift that keeps on giving.
