A philosophy professor friend of mine used to distribute ballpoint pens inscribed with the words of Socrates, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”  At least for people with a certain amount of privilege, that may well be true. But I have wondered if the reverse might apply as well: “The unlived life is not worth examining.”  By an “unlived life,” I mean a life of holding back, of not committing, of regretting, the opposite of what Mary Oliver imagines when she urges us to “Bless the feet that take you to and fro/Bless the eyes and the listening ears.”

    Unitarian Universalism is a natural home for this conversation, for we embody, sometimes awkwardly and inadequately, sometimes more bravely, the conversation between head and heart, intellect and passion.  We find meaning, and, yes, pleasure, in understanding ideas, and truths, in exercising the perhaps unique human ability to take reality apart mentally and put it back together again.  But at our core, we long to know that we fully inhabit every moment of our time on this earth, that we grasp it and appreciate the exquisite fact of it.

    That’s all a statement of the head itself, though, isn’t it?  Let me try some real life and a little heart.  When my mother had a terminal illness in 1977, at the age of nearly 56, she wrote to me that she did not feel too badly about her approaching death, for, she said, “I have lived my life.”   I was stunned.  Could she possibly think that?  I found out later that she did indeed grieve the years she would not have, but in pondering her statement, almost as Buddhist koan, I first began to grasp that a life can be whole at many points.  A life can be whole at many points –don’t ever take that from people who are ill or who live against the odds. Their lives can be whole.    

    Dawna Markova, author of I Will Not Die an Unlived Life, tells of her own epiphany in this regard.   When she was revived after having died on the operating table, she learned how very much she wanted to live – not in the length of life, but in the width and depth of it.  She saw that really living means risking enough so that what we love survives beyond our own days.

She offers some questions to help others live so as to find a sense of completeness, and satisfaction, to take an unfinished life and give it a sense of completeness that surmounts regret at any moment. I have used some of hers and added my own.

         The first of my questions lays the ground for the others.  What do you need to let go of?    If you have lost a love, which did not feel finished, but is gone, how do you let go of that so that you do not live in the shadow of its absence?  How do you let go of a dream that has become a fantasy?  Or pain of which you have constant reminders?  I think of an older man, long ago and far away, who talked to me about a hurt he had experienced from his wife decades previously.   Although their marriage had endured, he could never get over it, he said, but now thinking about it had become toxic.  I asked if he had talked to her about it.  Not in a long time.  I suggested he consider doing so, gently.  But I also asked him to think about everything they had done together since then, everything this person had meant to him, and to consider that her hurtful action was just one piece.  Much later, he told me.  “I guess that one piece is part of her, too, but a part that is done.  I haven’t always been so great either.  Somehow, recently, I’ve been able just to leave it where it belongs, in the past.” What piece needs to remain in the past for you?  What do you need to let go of?

   The next question is perhaps the most important but difficult to answer.  What is unfinished for you to give?   In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, one of the Nag Hammadi texts found in a desert cave in the 1940’s, Jesus says, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”  It’s an important insight, as is Aristotle’s more measured advice:  “One’s purpose in life can be discovered merely by knowing where one’s own talents and the world’s needs intersect.”  It’s like the kids’ game of “hot and cold,” where you try to figure out what “It” is, and someone guides you by saying you are hotter, colder.

  The point is that to live fully we need to identify what we can give because when we give, we know we are alive and we realize our humanity. As mentioned, Markova’s own struggle with illness led her to commit to living more fully, and she discovered that above and beneath and beyond everything, she wanted to empower people to learn.  After some training, she became a learning specialist in a migrant labor camp in Florida.  Put simply, this meant she taught kids on whom everyone else had given up.  Jerome, who was fifteen years old and twice as large as she, was sent to her to learn to read, but his first defiant words hit her hard:  “You ain’t gonna’ make me read.”  Markova quickly noticed that Jerome loved playing chess and had become the chess champion of the camp.  She figured out that her only hope was to find a link between chess and reading.

   One day, she left out on her desk a big book filled with photographs and bearing the title:  A History of Black America.  Then she cut a deal with Jerome.  She would play him a game of chess, and if she won, he would learn to read the book.   If he won, she would read it to him. She won, she says, the only game of chess she has ever won in her life.  Jerome stuck to his deal, and in a few months he was reading obsessively.  We hope Jerome found an open door, a way for his world and the possibilities for his life to expand. We know that Markova found passion in intellectual diversity: her life had intersected with the world’s need.  And so I ask.  What is waiting beyond your illness, your career frustration, your creative let-down, what is waiting beyond your financial limitations or geographical boundaries, beyond your fear of failure?  What is unfinished for you to give?

      The next question has to do with completion, so that we are not left, at any point, with regret.  What is unfinished for you to heal?  Sometime, in the appropriate place, try this exercise:  ask people to talk about their favorite scars.  When Markova did this, she discovered that people from CEO’s to survivors of illness found strength and even comfort in telling the stories of their greatest wounds.  Metaphorically, of course, it’s true: our greatest strengths – our insights, forgiveness, self-understanding, humility – come from the experiences that take us to the edge, through suffering, and  back to life again.

   One woman was an incredible concert cellist of grace and talent, the kind of brilliant musician who gives listeners the gift of deep feeling. Then she was injured in a car accident caused by an intoxicated teenager, so badly injured, in fact, that she could never play her instrument again.  When asked what was unfinished for her to heal, she floundered.  But in response to a follow-up question, “What do you love that is bigger than your wound?”  she looked up and said, “I love being alive, learning and teaching others.”  Now she knew what to do: she returned to school and earned a degree in counseling.  On graduation, she set about working with young people who had been arrested for Driving Under the Influence.   It’s there, right there between your own tragedy, your own frustration, your own bad luck, on the one hand, and your future, on the other.  What is unfinished for you to heal?

  And so the final question, in some ways inclusive of all, is, “What do you truly love?” If making money were no object, what would you do?  People from all walks of life who are asked this talk about teaching kids to love nature or caring for animals, helping women feel a sense of dignity in work, or working with inner city kids.  Perhaps no one more poignantly captures the power of simply living the answer to this question, however, than another brilliant cellist, Vedran Smailovic.  During the Bosnian War of the 1990’s, Smailovic watched his people lose hope after the bombing of Sarjevo, and he desperately wanted to help.   And so he tapped his love.  Every day he went to the heart-breaking ruins of the national library in Sarajevo, a site that symbolized a threatened culture.  Here Smailovic positioned himself among the rubble with his cello and played with exquisite beauty, day after day.  He did it, he said, so that his people would not lose heart.  Did Smailovic most truly love the soulful sound of the cello or the courage and endurance of the human soul?  We do not have to know; we need only realize that he lived with passion and purpose.  I ask you. What do you truly love?

   When my mother grew ill, my greatest fear was that she would not feel she had lived a full life.  She wanted to do so many things she had not:  travel the world, perform acrobatics, live in a nice house, drive a car, see her only granddaughter, my niece, grow up. But a few months before her death, she wrote me a letter in which she talked of her illness, but in which she also told me that she was proud of me.  In words she had not used since I was a tiny child, if ever, she wrote that she loved me.  I know that this woman who had so much trouble expressing emotion was determined not to die without having said it. It must have been a considerable risk for her, and for me it made a great difference.  I pray that for her, it was enough.

     Bless these feet that take us to and fro. Take a risk. Find what you truly love and give what is yours to offer.  So long as we breathe, it is never too late, or too early, for our lives to be complete.