SERMON
This is a hard day for me. Joe Stone, the worship associate, suggested an April Fools joke, but I’m not good at those, so maybe I can just mention the history of the day. The origin of April Fool’s Day was uncovered by Joseph Boskin, a history professor at Boston University. During the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century, his court jesters tell the emperor they could do a better job running the empire. Constantine is amused and chooses one of the jesters, Kugel, to be king for one day. Kugel issues an edict calling for nothing but absurdity on that day, April 1, and it becomes an annual tradition.i It’s a great story, it made the news in 1983, but unfortunately it’s not true, it’s a hoax. Boskin made it up.
The real origins of the day are unknown, probably connected to the Spring Equinox and the pagan New Year, in much the same way that Christmas is connected with the Winter Solstice.
If there is a moral to this story it is this: if you want a simple explanation for something, someone will be glad to make one up for you. That pretty much sums up religious dogma, and I could end my talk now.
When most of us think of the Fool, we first think of the April fool that is the brunt of the jokes, and the fool in general as the naïve, slow-witted one, the bumbling clown. We struggle with the uncomfortable humor that both distances us from these characters, and the awareness that our culture uses the label ‘fool’ to categorize a large number of people, including many with mental or physical illnesses. We recognize in ourselves our own limitations, our forgetfulness, our clumsiness. We struggle with this awareness of our limitations.
But there is another side of the fool, which often coexists with this simple side, and that is the fool as trickster. This fool is the court jester, that middle-ages character who wore clothing usually with the motley multicolored pattern and a cap with balls symbolizing asses earsii. While the primary role of the jester in the royal court was entertainment, joking and insulting people, the fool served the court in other ways. The fool was given pardon to go anywhere, and participate in any conversation, so he could at times serve as a spy for the court. This position required a certain amount of cunning and guile for survival! The fool’s cynicism and insults often were encouraged by the wise ruler to be an antidote to sycophants that invariably clustered around political power. (I’m trying to hold off making comments about modern political power.) Medieval illustrationsiii often show this fool holding up a mirror, either for self-reflection, or for inviting the reflection of others.
Going farther, some of these fools used their role to upset the order of things in society. On this Palm Sunday morning, some preachers are remembering Jesus, who came into Jerusalem to turn the tables and raise a ruckus, as a fool for change.
These fools and jesters have appeared the world over. The earliest known jester was a dwarf at the court of Egyptian Pharaoh Pepi Iiv. Jesters appeared in early Chinese imperial courts, and in the Aztec civilization. The fool is celebrated in dances in Hopi tradition, and the trickster, the coyote, appears in many Native American stories in this region.
The fool transcends ages and cultures. This idea of the foolish character seems a part of the common human unconscious. The Jungian school of psychology saw the fool as an archetype, a part of all of us, an aspect that connects us with each other and the past.
Probably the most accessible example of this sort of archetypal understanding is through the Tarot, that medieval divination technique based on a special deck of cardsv. To use Tarot, one draws cards from a shuffled deck, and lays them out in certain patterns or spreads. These cards include many more or less archetypal symbols that can be interpreted as life experiences of even a universal nature. One then examines the meaning of these spreads in the context of one’s life. While many Tarot practitioners feel such a reading is predictive of the future, I find that I am more comfortable seeing Tarot as a tool for self-understanding, a means to tap into and give voice to my most interior motives and feelings
One of the central cards in the Tarot deck is that of the Fool. An example of one of these cards is shown on the cover of the Order of Service. Here, the fool is pictured out wandering in the wilderness, carrying his worldly possessions in a bundle. Not paying attention, he is about to step off a cliff. A small traveling companion, a dog, nips at his heels to warn him. This animal may represent the animal instinct, the intuition that often protects the fool from danger.vi
In the Tarot deck, the Fool is a special card, like the Joker in a deck of playing cards, and the number of the Fool card is zero. The fool invites us to consider our own foolish aspects, to travel on the journey of life, the fool’s journey. The fool is a sort of embodiment of our confrontation with the big questions that we must contend with in our lives.
How the fool interacts with the other archetypal aspects, represented by the other cards, may give us a clue in how we live our lives. The Fool’s Journey is interpreted as the meandering of the fool through each of the 21 other cards known as the Major Arcana cards, sort of the face cards, from the first card, the Magician, representing creation, to the last, the World, representing Eternity. This Fools Journey then is an attempt to represent aspects of the story of our lives.
Let me tell you a bit of my own fool’s journey. I suspect my story is not unique. As I grew up I learned the virtues of stability and security in life and work. These messages I received from observing my father, my uncles, my grandmother and those around us that they respected, all of whom had stable, secure positions with government or with major companies. Those who drifted around, who moved a lot, or went from job to job, like my grandfather, were not held in high esteem. I internalized these messages deeply, making a decision to study engineering rather than science in school, thinking that I’d be more employable. I attended a large land-grant university, and was employed as a design engineer at Bell Laboratories, part of the old Bell System, the bluest of all the blue chip companies.
I found that as time went on, I was sinking into a kind of malaise, a despair that I could not name and did not understand. I was so driven to stay on this career track I had chosen for myself that I could not consider that it might not be the right path. In a way, this personal journey became foolish because I was rejecting the very need to be a fool.
In my late twenties, some kind soul – I think it was the minister of the UU church I began to attend, I’m not sure – suggested I read Daniel Levinson’s book, “The Seasons of a Man’s Life”. Levinson suggests that men – he later studied women – go through a series of stages or developmental periods in their lives, each five to seven years long. The period are marked by transitions as one lets go of some of the identity of the prior period and begins to change identity for the next period.vii If a person fails to navigate these transitions properly, trouble builds, and the next transition is likely to be a crisis, and be that much more painful.
This ides was for me an epiphany; this was salvation. I could see that my struggle was not unique, that not only was I not alone, but my work was what most man, most people, had to do. I felt I had permission to change, to accept that I wandered off course.
My life changed fairly quickly after this. I met my wife, I left AT&T, we moved to Colorado, I went to school for an MBA. Over these following decades, my career path has formed an arc that moved me from things to people, from engineering to marketing to management to ministry.
While this arc appears in hindsight to be smooth and orderly, I still see it very much as a journey of the fool. This is certainly not the Hero’s journey! At each juncture, difficult decisions must be made, and I worried about ramifications of my decisions on those around me. I‘ve learned that I’ve needed to welcome possibility in my life, to be sensitive to what calls out as my life’s purpose, but at the same time not too fixated on my particular call. It after all could just be an echo.
Almost two decades after reading Levinson, it would be easy for me to be critical of Levinson’s work now, as he focused primarily on middle class, mostly white, college educated, professional men, and his developmental periods seem to be too rigid and well-defined. I’m also not even sure everyone goes through these stages.
But I think most of us sympathize with this fool’s journey because we recognize that part of our task in life is to confront the existential question: how shall we live, knowing we will, too soon, die. Erasmus, that 16th century classical humanist, spoke of this in our reading this morning, noting that Folly is what causes us to love life, and inspires us with hope.
As John David wrote and our wonderful Intergenerational Women’s Choir sang:
One more day
when time is running out for everyone,
like a breath I knew would come
I reach for a new day.
I reach for a new day, we reach for a new day, in part by leaving a legacy. This is the underlying message of Levinson’s work, too.viii We hope to leave legacies of different kinds at different times in our lives. In early adulthood, many seek to create a genetic legacy, by reproducing. In mid adulthood, many of us seek to maximize our career accomplishments, whether this is uncovering new knowledge, or exciting the mind of a child, or creating new objects of art. In later adulthood, we often focus on passing on our wisdom, through mentoring others.
For many of us, this opportunity to stand against our mortality comes in participating with communities and organizations that are larger than we are. Organizations, whether they are businesses, non-profits, even churches, have no fixed life-span. I think we put up with the hassles and quirkiness of belonging to organizations in part because we somehow want to attach to that immortality. Perhaps we can make a difference in such institutions, make contributions that will endure long after we are gone.
I think organizations, and this includes churches, walk on their own fool’s journeys. But because they are immortal, they have no life-span, they do not have the kind of existential pressure we humans face. Certainly there may be intense pressures on the organization to survive, but after early growth phases, many churches and organizations settle into a sort of perpetual adulthood, in which the focus of the organization is internalized on its own existence. Little effort is made by membership or leadership to reflect on the direction of the organization.
I am told that if a person is lost in a trackless area, and starts to walk, without benefit of a compass or similar aid, they will walk in a large circle, because the dominant leg takes a slightly longer step than the other leg. This could be the metaphorical journey of the fool for an organization that didn’t take time to get its bearings once in a while. It would always be going, going, going, and always coming around to where it had once been.
It is worthwhile for a church to ponder its purpose, its mission, from time to time. I hope JUC continues in this process of action and reflection. Maybe someone might even want to do a Tarot reading.
As for myself, I know that my wandering is not done. Even though I am well down this path toward UU ministry, I still have my doubts. At times, the shroud of uncertainty descends, and I wonder once again, am I good enough, is this really what I’m called to do. Even as recently as early this week when I was writing this sermon, I struggled, I wandered.
So, even in the midst of the torment, we reach for a new day. And when things settle out, and we are, as that wandering fool in the Tarot deck, walking absentmindedly toward the next cliff, we can still remind ourselves:
Hope is my philosophy, just needs days in which to be,
love of life means hope for me, borne on a new day.
This is my prayer for us all: That hope can be our philosophy. That we can each discover that lightness of being, tap into that spontaneous joy of life that the fool brings. I hope we can all share the simple pleasures of amusement that the clown brings. That we can each stir up the existing order as the jester does. Let us inspire one another as we each travel our own fool’s journey, with all the foolish inconsistency and sincerity and love of life we can bear.