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The End of Our Work

August 28, 2017 By Scott Neely Leave a Comment

Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Thomas Aquinas

“We all fail in life…we always die too soon, or too late.” (Jean-Paul Sartre)

A meditation on failure. A meditation on existence. A meditation on our existence. A meditation on pushing beyond the limits of our work, to reveal the truth of ourselves. A meditation on the City of Light.

Offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Spartanburg, SC on August 27, 2017.

A recording of the sermon may be heard here:

An excerpt of the transcript may be found here:

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What this place represents,

what you have created here

and in which I join you

is a place trying so hard

to do what others literally—literally—believe cannot be done

 

that in the very failure to convince them

you witness to that for which

you are striving so hard:

 

a community of love, beyond belief.

 

And that is just the point:

It is not just a question of the work we accomplish in life,

but of the life our work creates in us.

 

Our work may finally be assessed as incomplete.

Some may one day call it unfinished, or a failure.

 

Nevertheless,

may it create in us

the very thing we so long

to achieve through all our labor.

 

Consider Sartre & de Beauvoir.

Their work,

each in their own ways,

was incomplete, and easily critiqued,

full of flaws,

by many measures, failure.

 

And yet their pursuit of their work

created of their lives

a witness—

for all of their flaws,

with perfect clarity,

they witness—

to freedom

and the commitment to matter in the world

and to each other.

 

We see in them what they tried so hard to write for others.

 

And Aquinas

who endeavored the Summa,

a complete compendium of faith and reason,

 

but who was stopped short

by a vision

beyond all words and images,

something he could not describe

even after the thousands of pages he had written,

 

the end of all his work

that somehow communicates

what all his ideas and words and work

had striven to say,

 

as if his very failure fulfilled

what he had striven so long

to accomplish:

 

a witness to a reality beyond human understanding.

 

And this is my hope for us, for the work we join in together here—

that we will attempt so much,

that we will risk so much,

that even in our failing,

 

all which we have striven to achieve

will be revealed in the way we live our lives.

 

We are certain to fail in a thousand ways,

to let one another down,

to misunderstand each other,

to offend where offense was not intended,

to come up short,

to overreach.

 

What we are attempting here

is too implausible

to all work out.

 

May we have the vision and the courage

the reason and the faith

to do it any way,

 

to strive,

to try and to fail,

 

but to work, together, over and over,

in the search for what is really true

in our lives

that no external authority can finally condemn.

 

In our incompleteness,

in whatever finally stops us,

 

may the world see clearly

exactly that for which we strove

with such brilliance.

Filed Under: Sermons

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