by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, November 16, 2003
Over twenty years ago when I was still living in the San Francisco Bay Area I went out one evening with a friend to a concert downtown. We were in the car and stopped at a light when the street we were on became filled with a loud, celebratory crowd, mostly made up of young men, some of them apparently very drunk. It turned out that the source of their elation was the fact that the city's football team, the Forty-niners, had just won the Super Bowl.
Not being sports fans, neither my friend nor I had anticipated running into a human roadblock on our way to the concert. We didn't even know the game was being played that night, much less that San Francisco had won. So for a minute or two we were purely bewildered by the mass of hollering people streaming past us, and then we figured it out. What they were all shouting, as they pounded with fists on our car and on all the other cars around us, was, "We're number one! We're number one!"
Because it was nighttime and therefore a little isolating, because drunkenness was part of the revelry, because the crowd felt perilously close to being a mob, I remember this particular moment vividly. But the shout, "We're number one!" is one that echoes in all of our minds because we hear it all the time. We hear it from fans at all kinds of sports events, and often from our own kids when they win at soccer or baseball or hockey. We hear it in advertisements, competing brands telling us they're at the top of the heap, or best-selling novels blaring the news on their covers. And we hear it from our nation's leaders, when they name and claim our superiority as a people in terms of wealth or moral fiber or military strength.
It doesn't take any reflection for us to know what it means. Number one is the winner, the one who clutches the blue-ribbon prize, the first to cross the finish line, the team that racks up the highest points. Number one is the top of the heap, the leader and trend-setter, the one to whom everyone looks with envy or admiration and with whom they long to trade places. To be number one implies power, especially when the term is used to describe a nation. In geopolitical terms it means being in control, getting to do what we please, choosing the course that suits us because we can: being number one means no one can stop us.
Striving to be number one makes sense some of the time, especially in the context of a competition. But in the spiritual or religious realm, its meaning evaporates. Our religions operate out of a different set of priorities and purposes. They are not trying to teach us about winning a contest, but about knowing God. They hold up a kind of mirror to show us our place in the world, not in relation to our pride or the pleasures of our egos, but in relation to the holy, to the enormity of the universe, and to our brothers and sisters.
In spiritual terms our goal is not supposed to be to climb to the top of the heap or be the star of the show. It's to wake up to our true nature, or deepen our relationship to God, or learn better how to serve the purpose to which we are called. In the spiritual life, if achievement can be measured at all it isn't in terms of power, but in terms of love. So in that very different light of the spirit, the claim "we're number one" sounds not only arrogant but absurd.
The various religions of our world instead try to turn us toward humility. Christians kneel in prayer, Muslims touch their foreheads to the ground, Jewish rabbis lie prone before the Torah scrolls during the High Holy Days. Hinduism teaches that all beings equally are manifestations of Brahman, the one great divine energy. Buddhism teaches an emptiness at the center of all things, including the center of the self; Buddhist practitioners bow in gratitude to the teacher, to an image of the Buddha, even to the meditation cushion. Though it's not particularly known for its humility, even our own Unitarian Universalism teaches us that we can't stand alone, and that we're radically dependent on the whole intricate web of life.
Spiritual seekers like the desert monastics understood humility not as an end in itself but as the opening in the heart that would allow compassion to grow. One story from the desert fathers tells of a time when a young brother committed a serious error, and was brought before the community of elders to be judged. The elders sent for the senior abbot to preside over the hearing but he didn't come.
They waited and waited for him, growing ever more impatient for the judgment to be made. Finally a cluster of elders went out themselves to fetch the abbot, but halfway to his cell they found him slowly walking toward the assembly, carrying on his back a large and tattered basket out of which sand was streaming through the many holes. "What is this, Father?" they asked. He said, "My sins are running out behind me, where I do not see them. I am only looking forward, toward the council, where I can judge my brother!" Hearing this, the elders were chastened, and forgave the younger monk.
Humility is the ground in which compassion grows. It makes us acutely aware of our own basket of sand, our own flaws and errors drifting out behind us through the holes, so that the gaze we lift to one another is a little less quick to judge and condemn. It gives a completely different view of the world than the one seen from the top of the heap by "number one". It shows us that in reality, there is no top of the heap in the things that really matter to us. Enlightenment isn't a competitive sport. Neither is joy or wisdom or serenity or justice-making. We are all together in our effort and our errors, stumbling our way through this life and trying our best to get it right.
We live today in a society that is intensely individualistic and therefore very competitive. We're deeply conditioned by that society, and can be led almost without noticing into the habits demanded by the goal of being "number one". We forget sometimes that in other realms, being number one isn't the goal at all. Odd and paradoxical though it sounds at first, in the religious realm what we're really trying for is to be "number zero".
At first that sounds just plain silly, because we can only think of zero as a loss, or a nothing, the complete lack of value. Though it's snuggled right up against the number one, zero seems to be its opposite: the bottom rather than the top, failure rather than success. But zero is a much larger concept than that, not only as spiritual metaphor but in mathematical terms. Almost two thousand years before it arrived in Europe, the zero was familiar in the ancient Arab civilization cradled around what is now war-torn Baghdad. Their word for it, shifr, meant 'empty', and what they understood so long ago was that it was on that emptiness that a whole world of mathematical understanding could be built.
That's what the spiritual zero is like: an emptiness that is more like a listening silence than a vacuum. It is within that listening silence that we come closer to a real sense of who we are and how we fit into the larger scheme of life. It isn't the nothingness of annihilation, but something rich and mysterious and far more worthy of our attention than the more commonly celebrated number one.
When Mohandas Gandhi was once asked late in life if he was now free from ambition, he said, "Oh, no! I'm the most ambitious man in the world. I want to make myself zero!" I think Gandhi knew a lot about the spiritual zero, and the paradoxical power of humility -- a power that was at the heart of the independence struggle from Britain. When Gandhi and his followers began that struggle, nothing could have seemed more impossible than that a poor and subjugated people could force the greatest military power in the world to relinquish its control.
The tool the Indian people used with the greatest effect was humble household salt: it's a kind of zero, because it's so common it is almost invisible, yet it's utterly essential. And their method was not a weapon or a sneak attack, but another sort of zero: they withdrew themselves, withdrew their consent from the system, and by doing so developed a dramatic form of nonviolent resistance and change.
When Gandhi said that his ambition was to be zero, he didn't mean he hoped to be meaningless or ineffective. He meant that his attention was turned in a different direction from that in which we're driven when we're trying to be number one. He understood from direct experience that new possibilities arise from the listening silence, and from the willingness to move from humility rather than arrogance.
Turning ourselves toward zero means opening to a radical awareness of who we are and where we stand in relation to the universe. To live in the listening silence means walking continually with the question, Who am I? Like the story of the desert fathers whose abbot refused the role of judge, every act toward another person is grounded first in the questioning of ourselves. Not only, Who am I?, but what am I called to? What are the large consequences of my actions? Who will be hurt by this and who will gain?
On May 1st of this past spring, our government declared victory in our war in Iraq -- quite prematurely, as the unfolding months since then have shown with bitter consistency. Some of us have been in support of that war, believing it to be our only option; others of us have opposed it with great passion, and still others have withheld judgment, confused and afraid. But beyond disagreements of ethics and strategy, it has seemed to me tragic almost beyond the naming that in leading us to war, our government has been unable to bring us there walking a path of humility.
It's only on the ground of humility where we find a common language with the others who struggle with us on this planet, only there where we can speak the honest truth that we too are flawed, that we are sometimes too hasty, that we might make mistakes. It's only on that ground that we can name an error, speak an apology, try to make amends.
Some of you will remember the statement that Lt. General Jay Garner made at the declaration of victory on May 1. He was our top official in Baghdad at the time, and in addressing our soldiers he said, "Fellas, we ought to be beating our chests every morning. We ought to look in the mirror and get proud and suck in our bellies and stick out our chests and say, 'Damn we're Americans!'. It reminded me a lot of the noisy crowd in San Francisco all those years ago: "We're number one!"
I have been haunted by that tone particularly this past week, in relation to Veterans' Day. I have been thinking of our soldiers, the real men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan who wear our flag, and bear the weight of all it stands for, good and bad. I've been thinking of their families, who wake up each morning and go to sleep at night feeling the tug of invisible threads that link them intimately with such far-away places.
I've been thinking of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, whose villages are host now to these foreign men and women. I imagine them passing each other on dusty streets, and I pray for those moments I know happen every day, when the eyes of each lift beyond the uniform and gun and meet, and recognize each other.
And I've been thinking of the old veterans from World War II who visited my fifth grader's school on Monday to talk about Veterans' Day. One old man began to tell the children how at the end of his war, his only prayer was that his sons and grandsons would never be asked to fight. He had to stop because he began to cry.
Wars are ended when someone is declared to be the victor, the 'number one'. But those who know war the best, the warriors themselves, know that it has no winners. It tears apart the fabric that binds us together, and it can tear apart the souls of those who fight as well as those who are victims. There may be times when war is the only option. But surely it has to be entered with humility rather than arrogance, with profound uneasiness, with endless regret every step of the way.
Poet Wislawa Szymborska wrote a poem called, "A Word on Statistics".
Out of every hundred people,
those who always know better: fifty two.
Unsure of every step: almost all the rest.
Ready to help, if it doesn't take too long:
forty-nine.
Always good, because they cannot be otherwise:
four -- well, maybe five.
Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.
Led to error by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.
Those not to be messed with:
four-and-forty.
Living in constant fear of someone or something:
seventy-seven.
Capable of happiness:
twenty-some-odd at most.
Harmless alone, turning savage in crowds:
more than half, for sure.
Cruel
when forced by circumstances:
it's better not to know,
not even approximately.
Wise in hindsight:
not many more than wise in foresight.
Getting nothing out of life except things:
thirty (though I would like to be wrong).
Balled up in pain
and without a flashlight in the dark:
eighty-three, sooner or later.
Those who are just:
quite a few, thirty-five.
But if it takes effort to understand:
three.
Worthy of empathy:
ninety-nine.
Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred --
a figure that has never varied yet.
Our lives are not a race to the finish line, and we cannot be measured by how many blue ribbons we win, by how high our SAT scores might be, how high our salary climbs or how many awards we win. Our stature doesn't have to do with our power, but with what we are able and willing to give back to the world. Will we bless one another? Will we make ourselves vulnerable with compassion? Will we let ourselves see our lives and world with the God's-eye view?
It's not so hard to do, after all -- that shift of vision away from number one. It just takes a little remembering: that one hundred percent of us are mortal, that we bleed when we are cut, that we need peaceful nights of rainfall and wind with no fear rocking us to sleep, that each of us is lonely, that the holy grail -- the one we're really after -- is always lodged in the tenderness in someone else's eyes. We aren't number one. We are zero: mysterious, infinitely full of possibility, and all of us, out where it really counts, the same. AMEN.