In a previous life I was a radio talk show host. One day I got to interview one of my favorite people, Coleman McCarthy. Some of you may not know who he was, or is, but he was a columnist for the Washington Post and a syndicated columnist. He also started a peace center in Washington, D.C. We got to talking about Gandhi, and I think I wanted to impress him with my knowledge of Gandhi because, you know, I’d seen the movie [laughter] and I also had read Gandhi’s autobiography. So I mentioned that to him and he said ,”Well that’s good, Bill. Gandhi wrote about 80 books, so you only have 79 more to go!” When I think of someone who lived their life fully alive, I think of Gandhi. Gandhi was a very spiritual person. He knew how to live fully alive as we all need to do.
St. Irenaeus was an early church leader, a second century bishop. He said once, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” But how can we live fully alive, how can we achieve that? I think there are at least seven steps to living life fully alive: being aware, being thankful, being loving, being kind, being curious, being creative and being playful. Now each one of those seven steps probably deserves their own sermon or their own chapter of a book, or their own book. So I’m going to give you the Reader’s Digest version of those seven steps and maybe in a year or so I’ll preach a seven part series on each of the seven steps to living fully alive.
When I was seven or eight years old, I was playing in my aunt’s backyard and I climbed a tree. I was clinging to a branch and it broke! I fell to the ground. Gravity! For the first time I was aware of my breath, because the wind was knocked out of me. I couldn’t breathe. To be aware begins, I think, with being aware of our breath. Although it may be the most difficult of the seven steps, to be aware, because to be aware you have to be aware that you’re not aware and how can you be aware that you’re not aware unless you’re aware? It’s kind of a circular thought. But I think being aware, achieving awareness, takes maybe a spark of enlightenment or an epiphany or an “ah hah” moment. But once we are aware, I think we can enhance our awareness with our breath. Aristotle said, “The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness,”and I think we can enhance our awareness through meditation. If that’s a difficult concept for some of you to wrap your mind around, consider it relaxation, just sitting and being for awhile. Don’t do something, just sit there. Sit down and shut up, but also sit down and wake up. I think the first step to living fully alive is being aware.
Sometimes I’ll go for what I call a Thanksgiving walk. I’ll walk and I’ll see the blue sky, as I did yesterday, and I’ll give thanks. I’ll hear birds singing and I’ll give thanks. I’ll feel a cool breeze on a warm day and I’ll give thanks. I’ll smell flowers and I’ll give thanks. When I’m done with my walk I’ll go home and drink a cold glass of water and I’ll give thanks. We all need to be thankful, grateful. Meister Eckhart was a spiritual mystic, a German theologian in the Middle Ages. He was, for a time, considered a heretic, so he’s my kind of guy! Meister Eckhart said, “If the only prayer you ever said in your whole life is ‘Thank you,’ that would suffice.” We all need to be thankful, we all need to have “an attitude of gratitude,” as they say. We have to be aware of what we’re thankful for, but we all need to give thanks more often than once a year on a Thursday in November. I think we should be thankful every day. I think the second step to living fully alive is being thankful.
One of my favorite political satirists lived basically before I was even born – Will Rogers. It was Will Rogers who said, “I belong to no organized political party; I’m a Democrat.” It was Will Rogers who also said, “I never met a man I didn’t like.” I want to broaden and deepen that a little bit and say we all need to strive to say that we never met a man, woman or child we didn’t love. We all need to love everyone. Now it’s easy to love someone you just met. It’s more difficult to love someone you’ve gotten to know. They may be filled with flaws and imperfections different than your own and so you may not like them. I know it’s not easy to love everyone, but I think it’s something we need to strive for. Whenever I do a wedding, I often quote one of the most profound pieces of literature ever written: “Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” Our love for others should never end. I think the third step to living fully alive is being loving.
We were visited recently by a couple of window salesmen. Thankfully my wife answered the door. They sat in the living room and I, thankfully, had to go do some things. When I came back about an hour later, they were still there; she was still listening to them and they were there for another half hour or so. My wife is very kind. I think in a lot of ways she personifies kindness. She was too kind to say to these guys, “We’re not going to buy these windows,” after just a few minutes and so she listened to them. Maybe it wasn’t kind to lead them on [laughter], but she was too kind to shuffle them out the door. We all need to be kind, maybe not spending an hour and a half with window salesmen, but to do something nice for someone. We can all do something nice for someone. If we can’t be kind, we can at least not be cruel. If we can’t be helpful, we can at least not be hurtful to someone. We all need to be kind. Plato said, “Be kind because everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” We are all fighting a hard battle of life and we need to be kind to each other. If we can be kind to people whom we know, then maybe we can be compassionate with someone we don’t know. And then maybe we can work for justice for people we’ll never even meet. We all need to be kind. The fourth step to living life fully alive is being kind.
I spoke on my radio show the other day (I have a one day a week radio show now, instead of a five day a week one) and I spoke about the difference between ignorance and deliberate ignorance. We are all ignorant to a certain extent. We all don’t know everything. We don’t even know what we don’t know. But there are people who are deliberately ignorant. I’ve got to believe that somebody who thinks the earth is only 6,000 years old knows in their heart of hearts, their mind of minds, that scientists are more accurate than that when they say that the earth is billions of years old. These people are just being deliberately ignorant, perhaps for religious reasons, to follow whatever scripture they believe, but I think some people are sometimes deliberately ignorant. All the rest of us are curious. We want to know the truth. Mortimer Adler, the long-time editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica – he was one of the founders of the Great Books Program – Mortimer Adler said, “We all crave knowledge, the way our body craves food.” We all want to know (or most of us do anyway), we want to know the answers to life’s big questions. We want to know the meaning of life. What is our purpose in being? I think the fifth step to living fully alive is being curious.
What must it have been like, to be Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak creating Apple computers? A second important question that follows that is, in order to be creative, do you have to be named Steve? [Laughter] We can all be creative. I think we should all be creative. There are those who say that when we are creative is when we are like God, the Creator. (I don’t know that anyone here would say that, but there are those who do say that.) We all need to be creative. Bill Moyers is a creative genius. He introduced us to Joseph Campbell and the power of myth. Bill Moyers says, “Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.” We can all pierce the mundane to find the marvelous. Now, maybe we can be creative at home or at work. In cleaning the house we can be creative, or in mowing the lawn we can be creative, or we can be creative in making widgets. But if we can’t be creative at work, maybe we can be creative away from work – we can paint or write or garden. Somehow I think we can all be creative. I think the sixth step in living fully alive is being creative.
I get a kick out of watching my wife’s grandsons (well now they’re also my grandsons) just play. They are eight and ten years old and they can take an old piece of wood and find a way to play with that. They can find fun in anything and when they giggle and laugh about it, it’s such a delight! We all need to take time to play, to carve out some time in life to play. We can learn so much from children in doing that. It doesn’t have to be play with a purpose, it can be purposeless, meaningless fun, play. Maybe it’s playing cards with friends or going bowling or golfing or shooting pool or swimming in a pool, whatever it is that brings us joy, we should do that and have fun. George Bernard Shaw, the great playwright, said, “We do not stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing.” He should know because he lived to be 94 and his plays were often playful, humorous. He always could find ways to play. I think the seventh step in living fully alive is being playful.
Deepak Chopra is another person I think of when I think of people who are living fully alive, living a spiritual life. When I talk about living a spiritual life, I mean someone who’s living fully alive. Someone who recognizes that we are spiritual beings in bodies, not bodily beings with spirits. We are not fallen creatures, we are rising spirits. I was surprised about a year ago to see Deepak Chopra in an ad for a computer or Microsoft or something. But what he said in that ad was profound and you don’t usually hear something profound in a television ad, but this was. He said, “I am a human being. Not a human doing.” Each one of us is a human being, not a human doing. But if it’s possible, I think we can better ourselves as human beings by living fully alive, by being aware, being thankful, being loving, being kind, being curious, being creative, being playful. It’s like a song by Tom Cochran that has been sung by different groups, Rascall Flats, I think did it: “Life is a highway. I wanna ride it all night long.” My hope for each one of us is that we ride life like a highway: all night long, all day long, for all time.
