In Search of Something to Hold On To
based on II Corinthians 4:16-5:5
By Dr. David Rogne

In his play, The Time of our Lives, William Saroyan deals with life in the limited existence of a San Francisco bar.  People who are really not making any headway in life interact with each other.  The most significant event to occur in the play is when someone has a brief moment of glory by winning a game on the pinball machine.  There is a drunk sitting at the bar whose assessment of life is that there is nothing left to hold on to.  Like the writer of Ecclesiastes, he has seen the transience of life and has become a pessimist.

Are there some things that will support us, sustain us, when other things are falling apart?  Film makers have certainly explored that question.  A James Bond film suggested that "Diamonds are Forever," but there have been numerous James Bonds who haven't yet found the staying power “things” are supposed to provide.  Marilyn Monroe sang in rather throaty fashion that "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend."  The underlying philosophy is that, even if relationships fade, there are some things more dependable than relationships.  But the girl who sang about them wasn't sustained by the durability of the gems.  In another film made a few years back, "The Planet of the Apes," an astronaut lands on a planet where apes dominate and human beings are hunted.  In a marvelous scene of revelation, the astronaut discovers the head of the Statue of Liberty at the edge of the ocean and realizes that he has come back to his own planet after being asleep for centuries in the timelessness of space.  He becomes aware that the culture which he left, destroyed itself with nuclear weapons.  All the values to which he subscribed have been turned on end.  Even diamonds would lose their value then.

If we don't do ourselves in, there are those who are convinced that it will be done for us.  Some astronomers, for example, assert that color among stars has to do with age.  Blue stars are considered to be in early life, yellow stars in middle life, and red stars in old age.  From the quality of its spectrum, the sun is classified as in middle age.  This suggests that the solar system itself is not eternal.

In spite of these prospects, something within us cries out for permanence, dependability, eternity.  If the universe itself is not going to last, can there be anything left to hold on to?  Is there anything, ultimately, beyond pessimism or hopelessness?  Paul says there is, and it is to his words that I would like to turn.

The first thing I want to do is to point out that Paul acknowledges the transitory nature of material things.  He says, "What can be seen is temporary."  Certainly that is true with regard to physical objects.  We have come to live in a throw-away society.  It seemed so innocent at first.  We saw the reasonableness of disposing of Kleenex and throw-away diapers.  We also enjoyed not having to take back no-deposit bottles and cans, until the enormity of the disposal problem caught up with us a few years ago.  Now society is making some efforts to control consumption of disposable products, but it is hard for this generation to learn to conserve.

I am a part of the generation that went through the depression.  I am one of those who find it difficult to throw away aluminum pie pans, plastic tumblers, the heavy-duty plastic knives, forks, and spoons one gets at a picnic.  I still save ball-point pens that run out of ink in hope that one day I'll find inserts to put back in them.  Of course, if companies keep giving the pens out free, it doesn't make too much sense to buy the inserts.  But when I see disposable cigarette lighters and flashlights being tossed in the trash, it goes against all I was taught.  Yet, at home I am eventually forced to throw out disposable items in order to make way for more disposable items.

In these ways we are developing a society in which people's relations with things are increasingly transient.  In his book, Future Shock, Alvin Toffler reminds us that when a second generation of improved Barbie dolls came out, the Mattel Company offered to take back the first generation dolls as a trade-in to lower the purchase price of the new doll.  The fact that the company did this to stimulate sales of the new doll is no surprise.  But the fact that little girls had so little attachment to their dolls as to be quite willing to trade them in, indicates how impermanent our relationships with things have become.  Their mothers would not have parted with a doll so easily.

People are generally fond of their automobiles, for which they pay considerable, but the average length of relationship is only a few years.  A person may own as many as twenty in a lifetime.

This same transience even applies to the physical environment.  In urban renewal projects whole streets are torn down at once, so that even landmarks are razed, and our links with the past are cut.  Novelist Louis Auchincloss complains angrily that, "The horror of living in New York is living in a city without a history .  .  .  All eight of my great-grandparents lived in the city," he says, "and only one of the houses they lived in is still standing."  I am not seeking to condemn this characteristic, but simply to point out that our relationship with things is becoming increasingly transient.  Instead of being linked with a single object over a relatively long span of time, we are linked with a succession of objects for brief periods of time.  Things, therefore, cannot provide us with a sense of permanence which something within each one of us cries out for.

The same may be said about our relationship to places.  In each year since 1948, one out of five Americans has changed his address, picked up his children, some household effects, and started life anew in some different place.  In a given year, more than 40,000,000 Americans change their places of residence.  That is more than the total population of Cambodia, Ghana, Guatemala, Honduras, Iraq, Israel, Mongolia, Nicaragua, and Tunisia combined.  Such mobility makes even the great migrations, like that of the Mongol hordes, puny by comparison.

Of course, that kind of mobility leads to loss of commitment to any place of residence.  One Army wife said, "I'm not decorating any more houses.  The curtains never fit from one house to the next, and the rug is always the wrong size and color.  From now on, I'm decorating my car."  I believe I've seen such a car, with carpet all over the outside, right here in our county.

Some of us, I am sure, feel like that woman right now.  We may spend a couple of years in a new place, thinking about how we would rather be where we were before, only to find that, by the time we are willing to unpack the suitcase of our mind, it is time to pack it up for the next move.  We find ourselves so much on the move that we learn not to put down roots because it hurts to pull them up.  As a result, our relationships to places are fragile and temporary, giving us no feeling of permanence or belonging.

That can also be said about our relationships with people.  Most of us probably come into contact with more people in one week than a feudal villager did in a year, perhaps even in a lifetime.  We cannot possibly have a deep relationship with so many people, so we limit our involvement to the functions the people perform.  In a small town we might have known the butcher's family and the grocer's mother-in-law.  But under our present circumstances, we neither have nor seek such involvement.  We do not want to know the shoe-salesman's problems, his hopes, his dreams, his frustrations--we simply want him to function as a salesman.  So we have created, in effect, disposable persons with whom we have very limited contact.

Even if we manage to stay in one place for a long time, the breaking of relationships still occurs, but it is gradual, piecemeal, not as abrupt as when we move.  One week the mailman changes; the next week it's the barber; later it's the checker at the supermarket; and then a neighbor across the street and around the corner moves out.

Of course, if we are the ones moving, all the relationships terminate at once.  John Barth has captured the sense of turnover among friendships in a passage from his novel, The Floating Opera:  "Our friends float past; we become involved with them; they float on, and we must rely on hearsay or lose track of them completely; they float back again, and we must renew our friendship--catch up-to-date--or find that they, and we, don't comprehend each other any more."

The transitoriness of our relationships is brought home to us most fully by the deaths of those dear to us.  For most of us it is not the prospect of our own death that troubles us about the ultimate meaning of life, but the deaths of those we have loved a while and lost.  Certainly, our senses do not give us much reason to hope that people survive the death of the body.  Here, too, it appears that what is seen is transient.

It becomes clear, then, that neither physical objects, nor places, nor even those whom we love, will satisfy the desire that every one of us has to be related to something permanent, something enduring.

Therefore, the other thing that I would like to do this morning is to consider the second half of Paul's statement, which is that the eternal dimension we seek is found in the realm of things unseen.  By "unseen," certainly Paul is talking about those things we label "spiritual."  But the spiritual world is not exclusively the province of religion.  For example, our response to beauty is a response to the world of spirit.  Every once in a while I find that I need some inner restoration that comes from beholding beauty.  I go to one of our city's art museums and sit before the creation of one of the Flemish masters, and I am put in contact with something beyond myself that is enduring.

At other times, I find that the Eternal is experienced in nature.  Wordsworth celebrated such delight when he wrote:

     My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky;

     So was it when my life began;

     So it is now I am a man;

     So be it when I shall grow old,

       Or let me die.

For him, the love of nature was a spiritual experience and prepared his thoughts for eternity.

For others, that eternal dimension begins to be revealed in love.  On the fifth anniversary of her son's death, Grace Coolidge wrote these words:

     You, my son,

     Have shown me God,

     Your kiss upon my cheek

     Has made me feel the gentle touch

     Of him who leads us on.

     The memory of your smile, when young,

     Reveals his face,

     As mellowing years come on apace.

In these unseen things, then, we are brought near to the eternal dimension of life.

It is all well and good to speak of the spiritual characteristics of beauty, nature, and love, but there has to be a vehicle by which even these characteristics are expressed, and it is those vehicles that do not last.  We speak of the everlasting hills, but they are not eternal.  There are new, sharp mountains like the Sierras, and older rounded ones that are settling.  The hills are not everlasting.  The Bible speaks of the dependability of the cedars of Lebanon, but there are only about forty of those trees left of what was once a forest.  The oldest living things of which we know are the Bristlecone Pines in the White Mountains of California.  Some of them may be four thousand years old, but their number gets fewer and fewer.  They are vanishing.

Paul does not deny that this is the case.  Speaking of human beings he says, "Our outer nature is wasting away."  But he goes on to affirm:  "Our inner nature is being renewed day by day."  From a physical point of view, life is inevitably slipping down a slope to death and the grave.  From a spiritual point of view, however, life is ascending a hill that leads to the peak of the presence of God.  Paul insists that there is something about us which is enduring, and he uses the figures of a tent and a house to illustrate what he means.  He says that in this life we live in a tent, the body, but that for the next life God has prepared us a house.  The tent of this life is temporary, but that house will be enduring.  Here we are simply camping out; there we shall be at home.  A person who lives in a tent doesn't belong where he is, he is just a temporary resident.  A person who lives in a house has a more permanent dwelling place.  So if the tent of this body is found empty one day, it doesn't mean that the resident has left home; it may mean that he has gone home.

The world in which we now live, together with mountains, trees, stars, and oceans, is perishing, but human personality survives.  Human personality is the unseen spiritual reality that lives in the present transient world and prepares itself for a future, spiritual existence.  We start out in life as a combination of things physical and things spiritual, and we have a certain amount of energy to expend in becoming whatever we shall become.  If we expend our energy in the accumulation of those things which will pass away--the kinds of things we talked about earlier--or pour our energy out in self-indulgence, the opportunity for realizing our true potential will be lost.  If, on the other hand, we expend our energy in the pursuit of those things which are unseen and unchanging, then we are transforming the energy of a mortal body into the characteristics of an eternal spirit.

In another place where Paul is trying to tell people how to develop their eternal qualities he says:  "Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is any thing worthy of praise, think about these things." (Philippians 4:8).  In all these ways we come in contact with the eternal dimension in life.  We discover that there is something left to hold on to.  We call it God.