Weathering the Pandemic of 2020: Five Small Sermons for My Eleven-Year-Old Daughter

What follows are five small sermons that would cause my daughter to roll her eyes if I delivered them to her in the car now, where I still have her as a captive audience, but sermons nonetheless that one day, I hope, will show her how much I have admired her courage, her creativity, and her resilience over the year of the pandemic. She has, in fact, taught me a great deal, and all five of these short-takes derived from conversations I had with her about how the world and our tiny part of it were getting along as the virus grew and her social life shrank.

FIRST SERMON

Don’t try to fix the world; try to improve your little corner of it, even if that only means feeding the dogs. If the world were fixable, the great spirits among us would have already fixed it. In fact, the problems you solve now will only recur later in strange shapes and new sizes that rise from the strange and new world that daily manifests around you. If you see this as an obstacle to your happiness—that the world’s problems don’t stand still so that your solutions, once discovered, will not always work—then you will never find happiness. On the other hand, if you take this change as an opportunity to get comfortable with impermanence, to find the opportunity for progress that rises from impermanence, from the fact that anything can potentially change for the better because it is impermanent, then happiness is yours for the taking.

SECOND SERMON

Oscar Wilde once allegedly advised that you should be yourself because everyone else is taken. Although no one has found precisely where or when Wilde said that — including the many Oscar Wilde societies — the sentiment is a sound one. Determining who you are and what you will do with yourself, however, is at once a very dangerous task and the most important one that you will undertake. And one, I hope, that you will never complete. It is dangerous because coming to terms with yourself can lead you into miserable territories like narcissism, self-enchantment, and even low-grade solipsism, and when that happens, you will miss the wonders that surround you: the stars, galaxies, animals, flowers, good cups of tea, and interesting people. But this task of self-discovery can also help you uncover what you love, and if you are lucky enough to find what you love about your life—and about life itself, another concern entirely—and if you can tap the strength to pursue and cultivate this love, no matter the obstacles, then you have a very good chance of becoming what only you can become and so giving to the world what only you can give it. The happy people that I know play out their lives in an arena that seems to reward this perspective. May you find this arena and gain admission to it. But don’t compare the gift that you offer the world to the other gifts that you see others offering the world. The power here doesn’t lie in the gift itself; the power lies in the energy of giving it.

THIRD SERMON

Try to read one book, article, or essay a year whose author you’re convinced is reputable, honest, and well intentioned, but whose work you don’t fully understand. And by “don’t fully understand” I don’t mean “really disagree with” because to disagree with a book, you must first understand it. The emotion you want to feel here is wonder: that sense of a recognizable mystery that attracts you simply and only because of its mysteriousness. It is a great gift to realize that there are people who are entirely comfortable investigating this mystery and reporting back to the rest of us what it’s like to live there, what they are seeing, and why we should care. The virtue you’re searching for here is humility: humility in the face of those who have discovered things that challenge and increase our understanding of our place in the universe, however you want to define that universe—the Milky Way or your own backyard or a falling leaf. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you regularly recognize the good work of others. And that you understand how dependent we all are on that good work of others.

FOURTH SERMON

Blaise Pascal said “that we know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart.” I have found this to be true in my own life, although it has taken me decades to bring the two into balance, and even now, it’s a constant struggle to maintain this balance. And most of the time I fail, but I am convinced that such a balance, when I find it, improves the quality of my life, and so I count this little insight a victory. I have always been a head-person, relying on reason and intellect to solve every problem, and that has brought me at times a great deal of pain and difficulty. One of my closest friends said to me, “Burris, if you don’t find it in a book, then you don’t find it.” True enough, and sad enough, as well. It took me a long time to understand that the heart speaks a different language from the head, that it transmits on a different frequency, and that my particular education, a kind of testosterone-fueled, book-laden view of the world never really taught me the heart’s language. So I have had to learn it for myself, and as I’ve indicated, I’m an unreliable student. I don’t know how you will lean in this contest, what language you will naturally understand — my suspicion now is that you are more fluent with the heart’s language — but I would suggest that fluency in both are essential to living a full life.

FIFTH SERMON

Balance the weight of authority with the lightness of being. The world is full of talented and intelligent people, and they have said things about our lives that ring so true, are so impervious to doubt, that we never forget them. And the longer we remember them, the more they seem to be unmovable, granite-solid, heavy truths that no one need question. They carry the weight of authority, and in many cases they should carry this weight, and we are blessed to be able to recognize this heavy authority. Who among us would question the Golden Rule? Not me.

But there is another condition of the soul that doesn’t get much attention. I’m thinking of insouciance, a weird word that is unsatisfactorily defined in one of my dictionaries as “a blithe lack of concern.” Other dictionaries reflect the same bias. If we seem to be unconcerned, these definitions imply, then we will seem equally to be uncommitted . . . to truth or justice or equality, or whatever concern presents itself for our consideration. When I was in elementary school, for example, I always received unsatisfactory marks under the rubric “Makes Wise Use of Free Time” because, as my teachers explained to my parents, I would finish my work early and then stare out the window for long periods of time when I could be getting other things done.

I would suggest to you that I was simply being insouciant, that I was unconcerned with one kind of sanctioned production, while I was getting other things done, invisible things, that prepared me to complete the tasks that my teachers or my friends or, later, my employers would deem worthy of doing. As you know, I still stare out of the window a lot, and I value the insouciance that allows me to do it even when other things need to be done. To me, this insouciance is a kind of lightness of being, a way of finding room to move within my interior space, until I find it is time to emerge and engage, once again, the weight of authority, the press of necessary action.

For what it’s worth, the poet of insouciance, although he doesn’t use that word, is Walt Whitman, who did use and love the word “loafe” instead. Loafing, then, as a virtue: “I loafe and invite my soul / I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.” Whitman too, under my teachers’ stern eyes, would have received low marks for using his free time wisely. But remember it is your right, and a necessary right I would argue, to stare at the grass for as long as you wish.

Particularly when doing otherwise during the pandemic might get you sick.