The Lies We Tell Ourselves

Here’s a cheerful Thanksgiving and Christmas message for you:

Self-sufficiency is a lie.  

It is, I think, one of the foundational ideals of our Western, certainly our American culture, that we are supposed to endeavor to be “self-sufficient”, to not have to depend on anyone or anything else for help.  To pull yourself up by your bootstraps.  To not be indebted to anybody. To make it on your own.

It’s a fallacy.   Impossible, actually, to achieve. 

Growing up in the Unitarian Universalist Church as a child, we kiddos were supposed to memorize the “Seven Principles and Purposes” of that tradition. I didn’t.  I think maybe I can recount a couple of them off the top of my head if you quiz me today.  But I pretty impressively failed at this task.  Hilarious that I eventually got ordained. 

The one of these I will always remember is the seventh one: “Respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we are all a part.”  Maybe I remember it because it is so true.  We are not solitary beings, independent and self-sufficient.  We can’t be.  For our bodies to keep going, we must eat healthy food and drink clean water, we must walk and run upon the good earth and breathe the clean air.  Our very planet itself would be inhospitable except that we turn neatly on our axis and are situated just-so-far from our sun.  And, as is true in ecological and cosmic matters, so too in human ones: we depend on international peace, on global networks of trade, on the many complex links between communities and nations, businesses and private individuals and the decisions made by governments and their people.  As we learn every time a global pandemic hits or a ship gets stalled in a major canal, we depend on one another, whether we like it or not.

And, of course, as Christians this is true theologically and spiritually as well.  We do not exist on our own - indeed we cannot - but only through God’s creating power and God’s sustaining grace.   

We are profoundly dependent creatures, not independent ones.

This time of the year, if we let it, can be a season to draw our attention to these facts.  All Saints Day and All Souls Day remind us of the reality of death and its inevitability.  Thanksgiving Day allows us the opportunity to pause and realize the many unearned blessings and gifts that uphold and enrich our lives.  Advent reminds us Christians that this is God’s world, that we are God’s creatures, and that we are accountable to that fact.  And Christmas reminds us that God’s greatest divine revelation - in the Christian tradition - was not an act of grand, self-sufficiency…but of utter dependency.  God came among us not as an emperor, a master of trade or of war…but as a helpless infant, born into an oppressed, occupied country, to poor parents.  

This can move us in many ways: to gratitude, anger, annoyance, awe.  But, perhaps, the greatest possibility is that it moves us to generosity.  To act - not to withdraw from our dependency - but to strengthen the bonds of mutual support in our web of existence.   To connect with our communities.  To stand in solidarity with the suffering.   To care for God’s Creation.  To uplift the weak, the poor, the sick, the struggling.   To imitate the incarnate activity of Jesus, the Word of God: as creator, healer, and bread-breaker, as crucified savior, as child.

Faithfully,

The Rev. Adam Spencer, Rector