April 2009

More Than We Deserve

BY ROBERT R. WALSH, MINISTER EMERITUS, FIRST PARISH CHURCH UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST, DUXBURY, MASACHUSETTS

I heard the 2nd Brandenburg Concerto played in honor of J. S. Bach’s 300th birthday. I was swept away. I remember a story about the people who send messages into space in hopes they will be heard by intelligent beings on other planets. They were trying to decide what content would best tell them who we are. Someone suggested that we send something by Bach. The reply was, “But that would be bragging.”

Some say we get what we deserve in life, but I don’t believe it. We certainly don’t deserve Bach. What have I done to deserve the 2nd Brandenburg Concerto? I have not been kind enough; I have not done enough justice; I have not loved my neighbor, nor myself, sufficiently, nor praised God enough to have earned a gift like this.

The stories of Passover and Easter are about an urge to life that is somehow built into everything. Your life is a manifestation of that urge. Your beating heart, your seeing eye, your questing mind, your love, your service, your enjoyment, your suffering, are all substance pushed toward life and freedom by the creative process. The stories tell of life triumphant in spite of individual death, of freedom victorious though many have suffered bondage.

This, too, is a gift we have not earned and for which we cannot pay. There is no necessity that there be a universe, no inevitability about a world moving toward life and then self consciousness. There might have been—nothing at all.

Since we do not deserve Bach, or crocuses, or lovers, the best we can do is to do our share in the world of creation, and to keep telling the stories.