Things Fall Apart

It is a basic fact of life.  Things fall apart. THINGS—material items, situations, jobs, status, possessions, relationships—they fall apart.  But there is something greater, and it lasts.  You can call that greater thing what you want to, God, Allah, Enlightenment, Yahweh, Brahmin, Love, but whatever you call it, it is a universal concept of something greater, a truth that holds us together and that will go on forever.  It is only when we base our lives around things, rather than this greater truth that we too will fall apart when things do.

William Butler Yeats began his poem “The Second Coming” with an image that I think presents this idea very well:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 


Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 


Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The falcon, which has lost touch with the voice of his falconer, cannot hear the directions he is being given as he begins to circle.  There is nothing of substance in the center of his spiral, no tether to rein him in, nothing solid to cling to, so he continues to spin out of control until the force created by his pointless turning causes him to crash.

This could be compared to anyone who loses touch with his true center.  As we build our lives around our possessions and status, always concerned with what we have or don’t have, what we’re going to get next, we begin to turn.  The gyre widens, and our false center cannot hold.  Things will fall apart, and when they do we’re crushed by it.  A wrecked car, breaking up with a boyfriend, being passed up for a promotion, even a terrible haircut can truly feel like Yeats’ “mere anarchy” being loosed on our world.

“Okay,” you say, “we all know that we shouldn’t be obsessed with material things!  So what?”  Well, there’s more to it than that.  It isn’t bad to want something nice.  Some THINGS are wonderful, and many THINGS are necessary for life.  I’m not recommending that you ditch all of your friends and loved ones to go live alone in a cave.  After all, when you think about it, your position as ascetic hermit would really be just another thing…But my point is, there has to be something more solid at the center.  There has to be that greater force keeping you tethered, so your spirals can never get too wild.

I took a world religions class two years ago at the College of Marin.  I thought it would be very interesting to study other religions, coming from a Swedenborgian background, because we don’t believe that other religions are “wrong” and we’re “right.”  As we usually say during the opening of our service, we honor the truth found in all religions.  And that was the remarkable thing about this class.  There was absolutely a thread of universal truth running through all of the religions we studied that resonated with my own beliefs.  To quote Gandhi, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”  Create heaven for yourself through your actions and interactions with others.  The idea of living each day as if it could be your last is a good one, if it inspires people to get up and do things, but I think it’s also inspiring to live each day knowing you’ll go on forever.  There is more than this bad hair day, this broken radiator, and this dead-end job.  There is also more than this luxury car, this hot new girlfriend and these kind and supportive parents.  And that something more is where you find your solid center when things fall apart.  And they will, trust me.  I know a little something about falling apart.

Actually, for a long time, falling apart was my “thing.”  It was the false center I clung to.  I had grown so used to things not going my way that I became overly attached to it.  And without anything more solid at the center to pull me back, I was spiraling around constant drama and near disaster.  In fact, if something went well it was terrifying, because it might destroy my central force.  It became easier to sabotage myself and continue the spiral than to risk the anarchy that might be loosed if I let go of my attachment and allowed something good to happen.  It was only through teaching myself that I am not my things, or in this case my past and my actions, that I was able to risk changing.  My former image of myself had to fall apart.  Friendships had to fall apart.  I had to quit a job I loved last year, and more recently I had to take a break from school to spend two months closely examining the mess I was making by pushing myself to either be perfect or a total failure.  But in the end, when those things were broken and gone, I had found a tether and I was ready to try again.  It was only through admitting powerlessness in the face of this false center, and through serious soul-searching for a connection to my higher power, my true center, that this was possible. That and a lot of therapy.

In Buddhism, the ultimate goal is reaching Nirvana.  We translate Nirvana as Enlightenment, but the literal meaning of the word is “extinguish.”  Buddhists believe in reincarnation, and they believe that a person will continue to be reborn until they accept the 4 Noble Truths, follow the 8-Fold Path, and reach Nirvana.  The 4 Noble Truths tell us that life is suffering, or, more accurately, life causes friction.  This friction is caused by obsessive want or attachment.  To eliminate the friction, you must eliminate attachment.  The 8-Fold Path guides the follower to a friction-free way of living, primarily through mindfulness—paying attention to what one says, does, thinks, eats, and so on.  When one has eliminated their attachments, they will be freed from the wheel of reincarnation.  A Tibetan Buddhist monk who spoke to my class explained it to me like this:  When a match is struck it continues to burn until there is no fuel left, until the last of the wood on the matchstick has been consumed, then it burns out.  Our attachments and desires are like the fuel for the fire.  As long as we hold on to them our fire keeps burning, keeping us tied to our earthly existence and the friction and suffering associated with that.  If our earthly bodies die before we have let go of our attachments, our “matchstick” of attachment continues to exist on earth.  We return in another body to continue trying to rid ourselves of suffering.  When we rid ourselves of attachment and desire, there is no more fuel for the fire, nothing keeping us tied to the earthly plane, and our fire is extinguished.

From a Swedenborgian perspective, we might say that when we’ve used up all of the fuel for the fire we’re living in a heavenly state.  We are living in touch with our greater force at the center, and ultimately, living in touch with that greater force is what heaven is!

When I originally sat down to write this sermon it turned out very differently from how I’d outlined it, and now with the additional changes I’ve made it’s even further from my original vision.  What can I say, things fall apart!  But that was actually a change for the better.  Well, I hope it was.  However, I have a few more thoughts that haven’t fit in with what I’ve said so far, and I want to squeeze them in at the end so you can think about them.

First, I want to share with you something titled after Yeats’ poem. Chinua Achebe’s novel “Things Fall Apart” explores the collapse of a tribal culture in the face of European colonialism in Africa.  The main character, Okonkwo, finds his things – in fact, life as he knows it – falling apart around him.  Okonkwo’s tragic flaw is a fear of being seen as weak.  He cannot adapt to the changes (it would mean admitting he might be wrong), and it ultimately destroys him.  When his things fall apart he can’t fall back on an ultimate truth, he’s too invested in the way “things” are supposed to be, so he is left with nothing.

Joan Dideon wrote an essay which takes its title from the last line of the poem.  “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” is about the last days of the Haight/Ashbury scene.  Again, there is an inflexibility or an inability to move on that keeps people stuck amongst their broken things, and separate from the truth.  Sadly, the ultimate goal of the people she chronicles was, at first, to find some connection with a universal truth, and to break away from the “establishment’s” need for “things.”  In the end, they’ve merely replaced the things they were escaping from (9 to 5 jobs, fiscal responsibility, societal rules and cultural norms, the government) with other things (drugs, music, the norms and rules of a counter culture, more drugs).  While music can be something people find great truth in, and freedom of expression is a wonderful thing, following the Grateful Dead and dropping acid with 12-year old runaways is not the same thing as finding a solid center.

And it happens sometimes that the institutions we put into place in the name of “truth” and a greater force become too invested in things, and they fall apart too.  So we end up with corrupt politicians, religious wars, and televangelist scandals.  No one is exempt from having to look inside himself to find that solid center.

The Old Testament reading today was a story of something incredibly important falling apart, but ultimately it was the greater force at the center that was important to the Israelites, and they went on in spite of everything falling apart again and again.  This has continued to be the case throughout the history of the Jewish people.  They come back from having absolutely everything fall apart because of a solid center binding them together.

A biblical example of things getting in the way of a connection with something higher is the story of the Golden Calf.  Moses came back down from the mountain with the commandments, and in the short time he’d been gone the people had already melted down all of their gold and built a new “thing” to worship.  Their faith wasn’t strong enough to survive without something physical to reassure them.  Of course, God got mad.  He tended to do that in the Old Testament.  He smashed up the idol and smote people left and right.  Oh yes.  Things were certainly falling apart, and for the people who needed things to be okay, it was all bad.  But for the people who had something else, faith in something they couldn’t see, understanding that there was something greater than themselves that kept them connected to each other and to the whole universe, something that loved them and something that would go on forever, for those people, it was okay, because things are meaningless in the face of something as great as all that, and the impermanence of a precious metal is ridiculous compared to the eternity of heaven.

Things fall apart.  Things.  But we’ll go on, all the better for having learned to let go.