January 22, 2012
“Only the people who risk are truly free.”
– Anonymous?
It wasn’t until I sat down to write my sermon for this morning that I was reminded that today is my son Ben’s 29th birthday. One could say that the greatest risk any of us ever takes is having a child. I vividly remember my initial reaction on seeing Ben: O my God, what have I done?
Now my son is about to have a son. What will the ever uncertain future hold for him?
Unlike in the days before birth control, having a child today is often a carefully taken decision. We carefully consider all the pros and cons before making the fateful decision to bring a new life into what we know is an often beautiful but always troubled and tenuous and possibly already overcrowded world. Then, we take the leap, with all the risk that leap entails, never knowing the outcome, of course, but changing our lives forever. That we don’t know just how much our lives will change is undoubtedly a very good thing.
As now, and perhaps as in every time, there wasn’t a lot of certainty in the world into which we welcomed Ben in January 1983. It was the height of the cold war, and the fall of communism only six years later seemed a remote possibility, more like an impossible dream. (I could not have imagined, at that time, that less than twenty years later I would have traveled widely and made dear friends in a formerly communist country.) The possibility of nuclear Armageddon, as vividly portrayed in a movie of that time, “The Day After,” seemed very real. There was terrible violence to our south, in places like El Salvador and Honduras, a little understood and seedy secret war in which our own government was engaged. Apartheid still held its evil sway in South Africa, and the beautiful “cedars of Lebanon” were ablaze in civil war. The cultural divide in our country was beginning to become more visible in fierce debates around religious values and social issues such as abortion and gay rights, even in the liberal state of Minnesota, where we were living at the time. It was not a particularly hopeful time, perhaps it was not a smart time, in which to bring a child into the world. But we did it anyway.
Was it worth it? Of course. One is never prepared, I think, for the love or the anguish we will feel for our children. As noted, it has changed my life in ways I could never have predicted. Yes, there have been the inevitable ups and downs and disappointments of parenthood. But I would not have missed those experiences, and I hope that they have changed me for the better, at the least made me more empathic and compassionate toward the trials and tribulations of others.
If it is true, as it says in the little quotation on your orders of service, that “Only the people who risk are truly free,” I guess that should mean that we parents are all free. Perhaps. Maybe we are, in ways which we now only vaguely perceive.
As our responsive reading this morning [by Rabindranath Tagore] painfully reminds us, it is difficult to take the risk of sharing our true feelings. But if we are to grow and change for the better we must learn to do so. Therapists have long recognized that keeping our “deepest and truest and most precious words” locked away in our hearts is destructive of our well-being. Dare we take the risk?
Dare we take the risk to love? For even requited love is risky business. Love may not mean “never having to say you’re sorry,” but it does surely mean grief in time. When we love, we do so in the sure knowledge that someday all that we love will die. Let us hope that that day is far away; but make no mistake, it will come. For many it comes too soon. To love is to risk all that we are and all that we have. But what would life be without love?
That quote on your orders of service comes from a poem entitled “Risk.” Is it true that only the people who risk are free? Here’s the poem:
To laugh is to risk appearing the fool—
To weep is to risk being called sentimental—
To reach out to another is to risk involvement—
To expose feelings is to risk showing your true self—
To place your ideas and dreams before the crowd is to risk being called naïve—
To love is to risk not being loved in return—
To live is to risk dying—
To hope is to risk despair—
To try is to risk failure—
But risks must be taken, because the greatest risk in life is to risk nothing.
The people who risk nothing, do nothing, have nothing, are nothing, and become nothing;
They may avoid suffering and sorrow, but they simply cannot learn to feel, and change, and grow, and love, and live. . . .
Chained by their servitude, they are slaves; they’ve forfeited their freedom.
Only the people who risk are truly free.
It would appear from this poem that risking the things that make us most human is a necessary aspect of living an emotionally full and complete life, a life which is “free.”
Having little of it myself, I have always greatly admired physical courage, the courage to risk one’s very life, especially the courage to “lay down one’s life for another.” Is there something or someone for whom you would risk your life? It is hard not to wonder how one would react at the moment of ultimate crisis. Some of you know, having met the challenge of a life or death moment. Would I abandon the ship like the cowardly captain of that ill-fated Italian liner? Would I cut and run?
In spite of my personal doubts about all that, I have to agree in principle with that unknown author that taking some risks in life, even physical ones, is essential if we are to grow as human beings. I worry if nowadays we are so overly protective of our children that we prevent them from taking some of the risks that they need to take in order to become healthy, mature adults. I worry that we don’t allow them to fail often enough, or bump up against the sometimes harsh realities of life enough. I certainly feel that I was more protective of my children than my generation’s parents were of us, and I think theirs may have been even less so. Perhaps they were more fatalistic and less sanguine about the realities of life and death.
I’m not talking about taking foolish risks—God knows there are abundant stupid and meaningless risks one can take–and I took many of them. I am definitely not advocating dying a meaningless or ignominious or untimely death. What I am talking about is taking risks which might entail physical or emotional harm, but without which we will never experience what it means to be fully human or to fully appreciate the amazing gift of life we have been given.
Two of the great books that I have read in recent years are A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and Water, by the only recently deceased Patrick Leigh Fermor, who, in 1933, at the age of 18, with his parents’ blessing (he’d been misbehaving at school), walked, by himself, all the way from Holland to Istanbul. It’s hard to imagine parents allowing such a trek today, even with the benefit of all our modern means of communication and GPS tracking systems to boot. And it wasn’t as if pre-WWII Europe was a much safer place than it is today.
Fermor went on to live an almost unimaginably interesting and romantic and adventurous life, one which also included becoming a hero during the war. Was it worth the risk?
One of the interesting contrasts that I have noticed during my visits in Eastern Europe is that “security”—perhaps we should say the “myth” of security—is not a big priority there. People living in that part of the world have never experienced much security. The attitude there is much more one of carpe diem: live for today. Live is lived more on the edge.
The expectations about safety are quite different than they are here. Farm and industrial machinery usually lack the safety devices we have come to take for granted. Transylvania is an OSHA nightmare. There is no effort to make parks or trails safer for those who choose to make dangerous or foolish decisions. Young and old ride bicycles on narrow, winding roads where trucks and cars whiz by, missing them by only inches. The riders don’t even wince. Horse drawn carts appear suddenly out of the dark on busy highways. Though operating under the influence is severely punished, serious accidents due to speed and reckless driving are not uncommon. Young people hitchhike because it is the only cheap means of transportation and most don’t own cars. Children still walk, sometimes for miles in all kinds of weather, to get to school. I would guess that permission slips for school or church trips are unheard of and would be laughed at.
Somehow, it all seems more realistic and honest to me. There is no security in this life, in spite of all our best efforts and wishes to make it otherwise. I hate the expression “homeland security,” and I hate what we have done in the name of it.
Years ago, my ministerial mentor Charles Grady wrote the following little poem, entitled “Our Jeopardy.” It seems like an appropriate way to end:
It is good to use
best china
treasured dishes
the most genuine goblets
or the oldest lace tablecloth.
There is risk of course
every time we use anything
or anyone shares an inmost
mood or moment
or a fragile cup of revelation.
But not to touch
not to handle
not to employ the available
artifacts of being
a human being—
that is the quiet crash
the deadly catastrophe
where nothing
is enjoyed or broken
or spoken or spilled
or stained or mended,
where nothing is ever
lived, loved
pored over
laughed over
wept over
lost or found.
May we, too, be willing to risk those “available artifacts of being a human being,” and in doing so, may we find the more abundant and free life we seek. So may it be. Amen.
-The Rev. Harold E. Babcock
Readings: “Come to the Edge,” by Guillaume Apollinaire (sometimes attributed to Christopher Logue); “Risk,” by Anais Nin
