Whack-A-Mole
Preacher: Reverend Andrea Abbott
Whack-a-mole
Some of you may be familiar with the game that inspired this sermon. It used to be played in arcades when my children were young. I don’t know if it still is . Since it was non-electronic, it was the only game I could deal with, at least a bit. It goes like this. You stand at a low table with holes in it. You have a plastic mallet at the ready. After you feed the table your money, little plastic moles come up out of the table. The object is to smack as many of them as you can back into their holes. But, as you smack one back, another one comes up to take its place. And so there you are, flailing around with your mallet, whacking away at these grinning little beasts who pop up out of the holes to mock you. There are more and more and more of them and the more you whack, the more of them there seem to be. For each one you whack, you get a point but in the end, the moles outnumber the whacks. The moles always win. At least that was my experience. It’s a game that combines frustration with a certain sadistic delight.
I think you can see where I might be going with this. All too often our lives resemble a game of whack-a-mole. And often we don’t even get to experience the fiendish joy that comes whacking. Too often the moles we try to subdue don’t respond to a good whack. They are the moles of anonymous agencies and companies, the moles of badly designed websites that don’t tell you what you want to know but have cleverly hidden their phone numbers. If you find the phone number the mole that answers is a recorded mole and the menu will take you right out of the system. You can almost hear the little devils snickering in the background. Or they are the moles of incomprehensible instructions. Or the moles of the car/refrigerator/roof that packs it in at the same time your carefully planned budget unravels. Then there are the moles of health problems which catapults you into the health system where all the moles in the universe seem to congregate. Or worse yet, the moles of interpersonal strife, whether work issues, friend issues, or family issues, the kinds of situations that make you long for the good old days of car troubles or computer issues.
All these different issues have one thing in common. No matter how much you whack away, your mallet beating moles left and right, it seems as if the moles come back thicker and faster. Pay the overdue utility bill? The cable and the mortgage bills are waiting in your mailbox. Get that nasty sinus infection under control? Your doctor sends you off to a specialist for that funny looking wart on your back and is concerned about your bloodwork. Then the medical bills join the rest of the collection. Replace the failing washing machine and you can bet the dryer wants to join its beloved in the funeral pyre while the water heater is losing its grip. For each problem solved, two are waiting to pop up from that table and rush at you. I always heard that troubles come in threes. And threes. And threes.
Then there are the evils that afflict the world. Evils that beg for our intervention, people who beg for our help, the many causes whose pleas crowd our ears and eyes. Should we save the children, the whales, the redwoods? Should we turn our time and energy to helping the poor, the stranger, the sick, the prisoner? Which one is worthy of our efforts? Where can we help the most? And, again, as we whack one mole, two other moles pop up. For each problem solved, sometimes because we have solved one problem, two other appear.
We live in a world that is composed of stuff that disintegrates, stuff that wears out, stuff that gets lost or torn or burns. That includes our bodies and our minds. We forget; we misunderstand; we are misunderstood. And, in the end, our lives are finite. The material world is vulnerable and it does not last. This is simply the reality in which we live and it can be a hard reality to come to terms with.
Particularly hard because within us we soar beyond those restrictions. Within us we can imagine perfection. We yearn toward that which transcends the limits of this world. Everyday we confront the difference between life as it is and that beyond which we long for. But every day we cope with the limits of our material life. We can whack away at this reality or we can try to find another way.
And so we come here, or to a place somewhat like this, hoping to hear some good news, some point to all the whacking and flailing about. We want to know that somehow all this is not in vain, that a great reward awaits us, or that we will be given some secret to the problems that beset us—- Sorry, wrong church. To add insult to injury, we say we don’t have THE answer. We don’t offer one solution that will solve all the problems of the world. Our magic wands don’t work and we’ve forgotten all the incantations. We say to the seekers who ask for definitive answers that each of us has to find our own way out of the molefield. All we can offer is a shoulder or a hand. Although, actually, in this world, a shoulder or a hand is not to be despised but they may not be what were hoped for. Really, why would anyone want to hear that?
I’m going to guess at why some people might want to hear that. For one thing, honesty is often an underrated virtue. We want honest answers, honest appraisals of the problems that beset us. Most of us understand by this point in our lives what solutions work for us and what don’t. And most of us have found that ready-made solutions, solutions made for others, just don’t work as well as the answers we carve out, painfully and with much trial and error, in response to our own situation, our own histories.
But doesn’t that mean that coming together is totally irrelevant? Doesn’t that mean that we could all stay home and whack away at our own moles if all we have to offer each other is mutual bewilderment? I think we offer more than that, here, each Sunday morning.
For one thing, we offer companionship. Each of us whacking away at our own table of moles get lonely. Sometimes it helps to lift our heads for a moment and see that we are not alone in life’s battles, that others too have frustrations, disappointments, regrets, problems. And when we are able to lift a hand from our mallets and help someone else, doesn’t that feel good? Doesn’t that make us feel as if we are contributing to something larger than our own lives? We are larger than the moles. In addition, life is a balance. We all need some challenges, some difficulties in life in order to keep going. A life with no demands can often feel very empty. In other words, having no moles is as hard as having too many.
Sunday mornings, or any time that we are able to take some time out from whacking can also be valuable for another reason. It gives us some time to think and some time to discern how much we need to keep on whacking. Some moles are real and some are moles that just live in our heads. They feel very real, but with some reflection we can often put them in perspective, put them in their proper place, I can’t be the only person here who has needlessly worried, who has lain awake nights over issues that turn out to be easily resolved. In short, I can’t be the only person who has made a mountain out of a—you guessed it—molehill.
I may have not remembered the game correctly, but I think it was so designed that the better you were at whacking, rather than being rewarded with a vacation, instead you advanced to another level that garnered more points but that meant you had to whack more moles. In other words, the more moles that you whacked, the faster they popped up. Now, for the ambitious mole whacker this is a challenge and an opportunity. But for many of us, the idea of whacking successfully only to get the opportunity to whack more lacks appeal. It is, however, what makes this game such a symbol of contemporary life. We find that we are expected to go faster and faster and faster, but our reward is only to go faster yet. Sometimes. We. Just. Need. To. Stop.
Stop, sit, look around. Take some deep breaths. Perhaps we need to unstiffen that upper lip. Perhaps a little ranting is called for, or a good cry, or a prayer. A talk with a good friend. Take some time to sit outdoors and count the blades of grass or pay attention to the grasshoppers as the poem I read earlier does. Perhaps we need to remember the speaker from the Zen center who offered a way to stop whacking and learn to live in each moment. Every religious tradition offers some way to get in touch with the riches of the world. Every religious tradition offers a way to reach beyond the turmoil of the everyday and touch the depths of our lives and the peace that comes from being in turn with ourselves, with each other and with the world around us.
Without the ability to do that, we are in danger of forgetting why we are here. We are here to enjoy life, to love each other, to love this world. Beyond the challenges and evils of the world, those things which are all too much in our faces, the world lies in beauty It unfolds its wonders every day. But all too often that world exists behind a veil; it goes on beyond our awareness. Sometimes when we drop our mallets, when we find the way to draw aside that veil, we see a world that is not illusion, that is as real as the world of anxiety and frustration that we live in most of our lives.
Unitarian Universalists historically been known for our focus on social justice. We have been noteworthy for our attention to summoning our resources to help those in need. Many are well aware of our inclusion of those who have been marginalized or shunned. We have often been pioneers in seeking to help and seeking to include. When we are aware of a problem, one of the first things we ask is, ‘what can we DO.’ Perhaps because this has always been my orientation, I never considered that there could be an alternative until someone who was new to Unitarian Universalism mentioned his surprise that we do not have a contemplative tradition.
I guess, having had some time to think about this, I might say that we have all the contemplative traditions. We have the traditions of all the world and of all time on which to draw, just as we draw so much from all traditions. The end of our exploring is not just to add to our store of knowledge but to be seekers on a journey, a journey that may take many paths but ultimately paths that will allow us to find wholeness and to find peace within ourselves. We are called to respect the ways that each of us travel and for each of us to respect ourselves in this search.
Some reject the path of contemplation because too often it has been seen to lead only to individual indulgence, a spirituality that returns nothing to the world. I think that any true path to peace and health always involves a return. It always offers a way of thinking and acting that is not the way of the world of excess or self-gratification. It involves as well a way to find a deep place from which our convictions and compassion can act, a deep place from which we can see how we are all connected.
We are immeasurably deep and resourceful, though we do not always give ourselves time to realize that. We have within us something that it is hard to describe. Some say it is a bit of the divine. Some say it is the human spirit. Whatever it is, it comes to us when we take time to let it surface. When we are able to turn aside from the frantic urgings of the material world, when we find within ourselves the peace that is beyond understanding, we rejoin the beauty and wonder that is always around us, waiting for the discovery of the spirit. As Mary Oliver says,
“what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
And now, let us sit in silence together as Leigh sounds the singing bowl and, in that silence, let us take this time to find our own peace. Then, when we have retuned, I invite us to share our thoughts with each other.