Let me begin by stating the obvious: pleasure is not a natural subject for a sermon. Those of you who are new to All Souls, thinking this is a typical church, may fear that I am about to rail against the pursuit of pleasure, arguing that pleasure seeking distracts us from important things. Those of you who know this congregation well probably expect me to say that pleasure is a good thing and we need more of it.
My hope, of course, is that everyone will go home today feeling satisfied---that's what the old French verb for pleasure means: to please or satisfy or delight. But a sermon about pleasure is indeed a curious thing, given that pleasure is implicated in at least five of the seven deadly sins, and most religious traditions roundly chastise pleasure as trivial and ephemeral. Since ancient times, philosophers and spiritual leaders have debated its worth and character, often comparing it unfavorably to its more stable sibling, happiness.
The usual distinction between happiness and pleasure is based on the difference between the mind and the body, or reason and emotion. The contemporary American philosopher Jeremiah Creedon once explained the difference in the following way. Happiness, he says, is an enduring state of mind, which gives you the ability to make the most of life. Pleasure, on the other hand, is born of the reckless impulse to forget life and give yourself over to the moment. Like fire, pleasure is a natural force that humans have always sought to harness and subdue. We sense that pleasure is somehow crucial to life, perhaps the only tangible payoff for its hardships. Yet many of us fear that unbridled pleasure can also be dangerous.
Wordsworth would certainly disagree. In an essay titled The Fate of Pleasure, Lionel Trilling cites a passage from Wordsworth, in which Wordsworth speaks of what he calls the grand elementary principle of pleasure. Wordsworth says that pleasure constitutes the naked and native dignity of humanity, and that it is the principle by which we know, and feel, and live, and move.
These are words worth paying attention to. Pleasure is a grand and elementary principle (like gravity) that constitutes the naked (free or untrammeled) and native (essential or basic) dignity of humanity, by which we know and feel and live and move. Wordsworth is unequivocal on this point: if you want to know and feel and live and move, then pleasure is the key. In other words, we find satisfaction in life neither by looking fearfully at the present or wistfully at the future, but by jumping right in, here and now.
But there are forces in our world that tempt us to wait wistfully and live fearfully, and I wish to point out two of them. One lies in Christian theology and turns up on the calendar, which today marks the beginning of the Christian church year and the first Sunday of Advent. The season of Advent begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas and ends on Christmas day. During Advent, Christians wait with hopeful expectation as they prepare to celebrate the advent, or coming, of the Messiah.
This emphasis on waiting for the future is a signal element of both Jewish and Christian theology. It not-so-subtly suggests that this life is merely a holding action until a wonderful and transformative event occurs sometime in the future---the coming of the Messiah, for example, or the triumphal return of the risen Christ. In the meantime, the faithful are admonished to live in hope and expectation, waiting, watching, working, praying. Don't worry if things get tough, because the present doesn't really matter. It's the future that counts. These days, you and I may no longer hold this to be true theologically, but existentially it still wins the day most of the time. For whatever reason---biological nature or theological nurture---we often live with our focus on the future.
That is not the way of pleasure, the way of women and men who hold fast to the celebration of this day, this moment. But there is another way in which you and I are waiting during this Advent season, which also tempts us to disengage from life, but in a different way. For almost four weeks now, we have kept a national vigil, waiting for wise men and women to prophesy our future president. I've spent a lot of time wondering what the legacy of the past four weeks in the political life of our nation will be. I'm not wondering about the immediate details of governance, such as who will become our 43rd President, whether Congress will remain gridlocked, or whether the Supreme Court will veer this way or that in the years ahead. Each of these issues matters---some of them matter a lot---but they do not constitute the legacy I wonder about this morning.
Put simply, I wonder about the long term consequences of a generation of Americans coming of age watching our most prominent politicians engage in the electoral equivalent of a barroom brawl. Nothing matters except winning. Long-standing philosophical commitments to federalism or to states rights' suddenly disappear like chad in West Palm when it seems expeditious to take a different stance. We hear earnest warnings that our beloved system of democracy will dash itself on a rock at the bottom of the cliff off which it has just driven if we don't stop counting ballots by hand or start counting by hand, never mind what the will of the people might be. We hear sonorous pleas that a full and accurate account be made of what the people want---especially the people in specific counties that historically vote certain ways.
My concern is not that a once-pristine enterprise has become sullied and tawdry. Even at its finest, politics has never been pristine. When the issues are vital and the stakes high, then the point of engaging in politics is not merely to be fair or decent or respectful, but to win. The Tammany Hall power brokers knew that one century ago here in New York, as did the Daley machine in Chicago fifty years later. Given the goings-on in South Florida today, one would think the election was being conducted by retired people from New York and Chicago.
Even so, the trajectory of our political enterprise usually extends beyond the ego-maniacal, win-at any-cost means employed by some of its operatives, at least it once did. As Jedediah Purdy reminds us in his recent book titled For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today, politics has for centuries been a source of inspiration and purpose for many people. After the French Revolution, politics held out the promise that the human predicament can be changed in elemental ways. Politics can replace foolish and cruel human institutions with fair and humane arrangements, in which people can live as free as they were born. For crusading reformers in Britain and America, as well as revolutionaries around the globe, "politics was the fulcrum on which women and men could move the lever of history. They needed only a firm place to stand to take up Archimedes' old boast and move the world."
For much of our nation's history, Purdy continues, the extraordinary promise of politics attracted people who had great capacity for hope, who had a keen sensitivity to injustice and a strong impulse to work against it. Politics was a means of turning moral truth into historical reality, which is why, for many people, politics took the place of religion. What kind of men and women do we want to become? How shall we live together as a people? How shall we work and love? These were questions that politics promised---or threatened---to resolve. In grappling with humanity's high longings and deep aspirations, politics became an alternate path to service, to heroism, even to sainthood.
All that has now changed. "In roughly the past twenty-five years, politics has gone dead to the imagination. It has ceased being the site of moral and historical drama. It has come to seem petty, tedious, and parochial. Today, politics is presumed to be the realm of dishonest speech and bad motives."
Why has this shift occurred? According to Purdy, it is partly the cause and partly the consequence of a larger shift away from a culture based on trust and commitment, toward a culture based on irony. Ironic individuals turn trust and commitment upside down: they believe nothing, hope for nothing, bear nothing, and endure nothing. In other words, they distrust almost everything they see and hear and feel. Fearing that they may somehow be disappointed or humiliated or betrayed, they keep their cynical distance from everything. The ironist, Purdy concludes, "expresses a perception that the world has grown old, flat, and sterile, and that we are rightly weary of it. There is nothing to delight, move, inspire, or horrify us. Nothing will ever surprise us." Everything is suspected of being a setup, a rip-off, a shell game, a scam.
What a dreadful way to live: insulated from events that might dismay us, isolated from people who might disappoint us, guarded against institutions that might betray us, we keep our distance and make our lives flat and sterile. Nothing can get through to move us; nothing can get through to please us. It's another way to deny yourself the pleasure of whatever comes in this moment. Whether we are waiting for a future that may never come or insulating ourselves by holding back in the present, we will doubtless deny ourselves almost everything life has to offer.
When was the last time you took pleasure in a moment? When did you last drop by someone's house and stay for dinner? Or make phone calls for a cause you believe in? Or lie on the couch with your feet up, reading a novel? Or buy a sandwich for a hungry neighbor? Or sit for an hour and watch the sun rise or the clouds sweep the sky? Or linger over lunch or stay up late talking to a friend?
These experiences of pleasure, or something like it, must have been what Ezra Pound was talking about when he wrote:
...whatever comes
One hour was sunlit and the most high gods
May not make boast of any better thing
Than to have watched that hour as it passed.
An openness to whatever comes is a way to celebrate experiences that give life its texture and depth, and bind us to one another. Pleasure is about finding satisfaction in life by jumping right in, trusting that there are things we can believe in, ideals we can pursue, people we can care for, words we can say in earnest. It's true that sometimes we will be disappointed or betrayed, even humiliated. But that's the price of other times being moved, energized, amazed, even awestruck. If we pay attention, if we watch carefully the hours as they pass, we can find these moments of depth almost anywhere. It only takes an openness to whatever comes, a willingness to take a chance on life, to wing it from time to time. Or as Henry James once put it, "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to." Copyright AllSouls 2000.