“The morning wind forever blows,” says our Unitarian Universalist ancestor Henry David Thoreau in his classic book, Walden. “The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it.” 

Thoreau is essentially saying we are already wealthy but that this wealth goes unrecognized. A big part of this is that we don’t have all the nice things our materialistic culture says we MUST have. Our lives can already be basically healthy and comfortable. But our consumeristic culture gets in our heads and drives us mad with its message that we are intolerably poor unless we have this or we buy that. 

And so the sacred poem of creation–of which our lives are a part–goes unheard. It is tragic–especially when we remember that the unique vocation of our humanity in the wide universe is to love life, to witness it, to take conscious pleasure in it, and to feel gratitude for it (knowing how fragile beauty can be). This is our holy vocation as humans. Trusting that the wholeness is there even in moments which feel anything but whole. Letting all the imperfections mingle with the parts that feel more acceptable until, as in some mystical vision, you realize that your life–with all its woes and all its joys–is the poem that had to be written, it needed to be written, it is still being written, and the world has a hole in its heart without you. 

“However mean your life is,” says Thoreau, “meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. […] It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is.” 

I need to hear this every morning, every day. 

How about you?

And, how delightful to hear Thoreau’s wisdom coming through the voice of bell hooks! We are absorbing her thoughts all year long, as we read her book All About Love together. 

Just like Thoreau, whom she honored, she reminds us that loving our lives does not depend upon being perfect–including possessing all the things. Just like Thoreau, she targets our culture of consumption and greed: how our materialistic culture aims at creating wants and desires in us which blow past our essential needs. How all such essential needs can be met and yet, given the explosion of wants that have been created in us, we can feel like we are the most miserable people in the world. 

The worst consequence of this culturally-manufactured self-disgust is that it makes us less charitable. We aren’t as generous as we could be with institutions (like this church) that will use our money to do helpful and hopeful things in the world; we aren’t as generous as we could be with people in true poverty, also. It’s this way because our culture of consumption and greed has trained us to feel that all our purchasing and all our consuming is nothing less than our salvation. We are trained this way. To feel that all our purchasing and all our consumption saves us from the dread of being seen as less-than by our peers; to feel that it saves us from the disaster that’s implied in every advertisement we see–if we don’t buy, if we don’t consume. 

When we are trained like this, charity–generosity–ends up feeling positively dangerous. It ends up feeling like self-harm. Others ask for our generosity, and to us it can feel like bread is being ripped from our hungry fingers. How dare others ask! How dare they!

Our materialistic culture gets in our heads and hearts like that! 

Preach it, bell hooks! But, it is Thoreau’s anti-materialism she is channeling. He is the grandfather of all folks who preach a vision of simple living and of “loving your life, poor as it may seem.” That’s what our Unitarian Universalist ancestor is. 

And, bell hooks is not the only one who has been blessed by his simple living vision. I’ve encountered story after story of people who have gone to Thoreau to be cured of the consumeristic mania and reconnected with their true wealth, which is their birthright. 

Consider the story from Wade Rouse. 

Wade Rouse is the author of At Least Someone In the City Would Hear Me Scream: Misadventures in Search of the Simple Life, and in this book, he begins with what it was like to grow up gay in rural America. He says, “I grew up worshiping Erma Bombeck instead of George Brett, Joe Montana, or Buck Owens. When boys from school would come to my house they would inevitably make fun of her books—The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank and If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?—which I had sitting on my nightstand, and the photos of her I had pinned to my corkboard wall.”

“’What’s wrong with you?’ they would ask.”

“Which is why I ran and ran, and kept running, from rural America, until I found myself in the city doing everything but what I had initially set out to do: write. I was making great money, I was traveling, I was eating at the best restaurants. But was I happy?” Ultimately, this question—this yearning—would lead Wade Rouse to emulate Thoreau and return, after so many years, to live in a rural setting that embraces simplicity and enables him to be authentically happy and whole. 

There are so many stories of people engaging in their own Walden-like, anti-materialism and anti-consumerism experiment in simple living. Another story comes from psychologist Stella Resnick, in her book The Pleasure Zone: Why We Resist Good Feelings and How to Let Go and Be Happy. 

She says, “After years of graduate study and training, I became a successful therapist with a thriving practice in San Francisco. I bought a home, made many friends, and traveled widely giving talks and seminars. The only problem was that I wasn’t happy.” 

It would lead her to spend a year in the country “more alone than ever before.” She says, “it was a chosen solitude. For guidance, I read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Like Thoreau, I had a pond full of croaking frogs in the summer, which froze over in winter. Like Thoreau, I had a visitor now and then and made regular forays into town for supplies. And like Thoreau, days and days would go by when I neither saw nor spoke to another living being.”

Can you imagine what that must have been like? Stella Resnick’s simple living story is fascinating, especially in the way that it goes deeper and deeper. At first, the loneliness and crankiness. “I would find myself staring at a wall, not knowing how long I had been sitting there or what I had been so lost in thought over. […] Some nights when the cold winter wind blew especially hard, I would stay awake stuffing newspapers between the planks of the uninsulated walls of this summer house, grumbling to myself and wondering how this was ever going to make me into a cheerier person.”

At first, this. But then the powerful insight comes upon her, which is the theme of her book. She says, “What I began to discover during those endless days was how little I knew about how to be happy on a daily basis. I knew how to criticize myself for how I wasn’t good enough. But I didn’t know how to take on a day and enjoy it.” “I began to see that while understanding and releasing pain is certainly crucial for lasting results in psychotherapy, it’s not enough. Getting good at struggling with problems just makes you more skillful at struggling with problems. To enjoy your life more,” says Stella Resnick, “it’s better to become skillful at what inspires your enthusiasm and generates vitality and good feelings.”

Hearing this would make Thoreau smile. That’s exactly what he was about, when in his book Walden he says, “Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.“ 

In the sharpest of contrasts, the consumer world is a fault-finder; in its gaze we are all wanting. It teaches us we can be saved through our purchases. But not so, says Thoreau. Thoreau says start with love. “Love your life, poor as it is.” And then he shows us a way of living which is low on things and high on experiences, many of which happen to cost nothing at all. It cost Thoreau nothing at all to listen to the birds and to savor those sounds, to let them fill his soul. 

What are some soul-satisfying experiences you can have, that would cost you nothing at all?  

When is the last time you just sat there and did nothing, and gazed with love upon the world around you?

Above all: The more we love our lives, the less tightly we will clutch at our money and our things, and the more there will be to share in a world that needs more of us to put more of our money in service to lovinkindness. That’s the key point right there. The less dangerous generosity will feel. The more free we will feel as individuals to share our wealth. The more committed we will be as a nation to establish policies that are financially fair and are compassionate towards the poor. 

But it starts with love. Loving our lives more. 

Let’s turn once again to Wade Rouse—his Walden story. The day when everything changed, and he made the decision to get out of the city and do the Thoreau simple living, anti-materialism thing. He writes, I had been waking up at four A.M. to write my first memoir, America’s Boy. I had been consumed with writing about my childhood—the beauty, the horror, the unconditional transformational love of family—and could not sleep any longer without getting it all out. 

One morning, when it came time for me to go to my job as a PR director at a prep school—a position that entailed mucho schmoozing and dwindling self-esteem—I had to force myself to stop writing by turning on the TV as loudly as possible to distract myself.

The Today show was blaring as I raced around our tiny city bungalow, leapfrogging our mutt, Marge, in the hallway. Matt Laur was interviewing a couple who had quit their jobs to run a B&B in Bali. “We have discovered the secret of happiness. Follow your obsession,” they told Matt. “You freaks!” I yelled at the TV….  “I’m happy!”

I found myself in my car, already late to work for another day of insanity and stupidity—already preoccupied about what I was wearing, preoccupied about the fact that I didn’t have enough time to write, preoccupied about the last thing I’d yelled. I was happy, damn it!

Or was I happy in the way that sheep or lobotomy patients are happy, mindlessly bleating and going through the motions? Was I just one of the ‘“sheeple’’ (part sheep, part people), a term a friend of mine used when referring to many Americans who seem to sleepwalk through their lives?

I got into my car, gripped the wheel, and saw that my hands were shaking. I eased into an all-out traffic jam and instantly came to a complete stop. No! No! No! Move, traffic, I’m late!

And for one moment in my life, I couldn’t go anywhere. I couldn’t rush ahead. So I started thinking of my morning, of my life. Was I having a bad morning? Or a bad life? I asked myself again, Wade, are you happy?

And then I became emotional. So emotional, in fact, that I lowered my head on my steering wheel and began to sob as Christina Aguilera told me I was beautiful.

When a car honked to knock me from my stupor, to let me know I could inch ahead a few feet, I lifted my head from the wheel in time to see a man holding a sign on an overpass above the highway. The man, who looked like a greasy, heavily medicated version of Jesus, held aloft a cardboard sign that read in poorly scrawled letters: WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOU COULD NOT FAIL?

He was backlit by the morning sun, rays splaying from behind his body, and the image looked like one of those religious paintings, in black velvet perhaps, or color-by-numbers, that you find buried under other crap in cluttered antiques stores. […] As my car inched toward the overpass, the man simply reached over and, as if on cue, dropped his sign, which flitted and fluttered and floated like a butterfly caught in a crosswind before landing directly over my windshield. All I could see, in close-up 3D, my eyes crossing to make sure I was still reading it correctly, was its message: WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOU COULD NOT FAIL?

I braked immediately, panicked, unable to see, and fetched the sign off my window, ignoring the angry honks of drivers. I shoved the sign, which was covered in grimy fingerprints and smelled like gas and motor oil, into my backseat. As I came out from under the overpass, I glanced in my rear-view mirror, and Jesus was waving at me—alternatively blowing kisses and doing the sign of the cross, like a mix of the Pope and Liza Minnelli. The sun had obliterated his face into an explosion of whiteness. As my eyes turned toward the road again, it was then I caught a glimpse of the backside of Jesus’ cardboard sign reflected in the driver’s mirror. It was the outside of a packing box, with an address that read: WALDEN’S AUTOMOTIVE.

And that is Wade Rouse’s story of how he was led to love his life more. 

It can be so hard to learn how to do this–especially with consumeristic culture’s megaphone jammed up to our ears, hypnotizing us with sing-song visions of danger and disaster if we ever stop spending our money all on ourselves, if we ever stop trying to satisfy all the wants that we think are ours but are as artificial as plastic. As astro-turf. As polyester. 

Not natural, but artificial!

But we can be stronger than all that hypnotic conditioning. We can push that megaphone aside. We can instead focus our attention on people telling Walden-like stories, simple living stories–stories in which they dared to defy stereotypes about success and trusted that they were free to explore and fall and get back up again because they in fact could not ultimately fail. 

And then, we write the story that only we can tell, because it is ours. 

Listen to Stella Resnisk’s story. Listen to Wade Rouse’s story, especially that last part where it suggests that, in our confusion to learn how to love our lives, the universe does not abandon us. The universe, synchronicity and all, constantly calls us to a deeper life of witnessing the Wonder and Mystery of creation. 

Even when we are not looking for Walden, Walden never stops trying to find us. 

And then there is Thoreau. He’s the man on the overpass, dropping the sign, waving at us from more than 150 years ago, trying to redirect our attention to what’s truly real and truly good.

Love your life, Thoreau says. 

“It looks poorest when you are richest. 

The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. 

Love your life, poor as it is.”

To do this is nothing less than our holy vocation as humans. 

It’s also about personal justice and social justice both. 

The more we love our lives, the less need there is to cling to mere money and mere things, 

and the more there will be to share. The safer it will feel to share. 

So love your life, congregation. 

Love your life, friends. 

Love your life.

Love your life.

AMEN