"Stubbornness: All I Cannot Save"
Peg Duthie
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Cookeville
18 May 2008

I am a Taurus. As it happens, I'm not a believer in astrology, and I can't recall anyone ever trying to pick me up with the line, "What's your sign, baby?" However, the astrological profiles I've looked at over the years have pretty much been on target when it comes to my personality and preferences: according to such profiles, Taureans tend to be reliable, practical, materialistic, and highly allergic to drama and flakiness. As befits a tribe represented by a bull, Taureans are also notoriously stubborn. There are many words and phrases for "stubborn" in the English language. They range from persistent, determined, faithful, strong-willed, stoic, and unshakable, to inflexible, intransigent, uncompromising, obstinate, ultraconservative, and plain outright impossible. Some of my work colleagues call me "the Energizer bunny," because they've seen me "keep going and going and going" to get a deadline met; I've also been called names I can't repeat in church by other folks who've concluded that I'm mad, bad, and if not necessarily dangerous to know, at least a serious aggravation and inconvenience. I try to take that as a compliment: for many people - not just Tauruses - change is terrifying and dissent is threatening, no matter how large or small the stakes may happen to be, and they're going to resist and challenge anyone they perceive as one of the Powers That Be. Unfortunately, there are also plenty of times when I'm pretty sure I'm right, and I'm pretty sure I'm trying to do the right thing, and I still end up losing sleep over the fact that my stubborn is going to collide with someone else's stubborn, and that there's going to be tension or outright unpleasantness, no matter how fair or reasonable I strive to be.

Like I said, I don't personally believe in astrology. It's not a good fit with either my logical or theological leanings. The scientist in me insists that assigning blame or credit to the stars and planets is pretty much on par with saying the galaxy ate your homework, which is to say, incredibly lame. The theist in me strongly dislikes the notion of one's fate being keyed to something as banal as a birthdate, especially considering how many different calendars, zodiacs, and other systems of temporal and celestial measurement human beings have come up with since Creation. (Don't even get me started on Daylight Savings Time.) I prefer to believe in a God with a more elegant and efficient sense of design. Moreover, I don't have to look to astrology to trace where my stubbornness might come from: my mother was exceedingly stubborn. So was my father, and from what I've heard, both of my grandmothers were tough and tenacious.

That said, I'm not prepared to declare the practice of astrology absolute rubbish. Ten years ago I might've, but I was dogmatic about a lot of things in my twenties that - I wouldn't say that I'm more mellow about them now, but I've become less inclined to think or speak of them in generalities. This is especially true of belief systems, be it astrology, atheism, Christianity, Judaism, or Unitarian Universalism. In the case of astrology, I admit I'm not at all inclined to regard your average newspaper listing with any more seriousness than I would grant to a ten-cent fortune cookie. On the other hand, I know of people who turn to astrology as a tool of discernment or of motivation, and that doesn't strike me as all that different from people who utilize prayer beads, candles, tarot cards, yoga, specially sharpened pencils, or other rituals and devices to help steer and sustain their acts of faith.

I'm a fan of Rob Brezsny's "Free Will Astrology" column, which appears in a number of alternative weeklies across the country. The column was originally titled "Real Astrology," and there are snippets of it taped or pasted into many of my journals. To give you an idea of its flavor, here's this week's prediction for Taurus:

The daytime TV soap opera The Young and the Restless has been the most highly-rated show in its time slot for more than a thousand consecutive weeks. First appearing in 1973, the show ascended to the top slot in 1988 and has never slipped since. I'm happy to announce that in 2008 you have the potential to begin a comparable run of success, Taurus. Whether you're able to cash in on that potential may depend on the preparations you make in the coming weeks.

I often find it inspiring or thought-provoking to read the sections addressed to other signs. For instance, in this week's entry for Pisces, Brezsny says:

In their lust to prove there's no God, atheists often invoke the existence of suffering. "What kind of deity," one asked me, "allows a child in Darfur to starve to death after seeing soldiers kill his mommy?" While I don't claim to have the authoritative answer to that accusation, I think it's worthwhile to consider the possibility that suffering is a gift God gives us in order to prod our evolution. On a personal level, your longing to escape your suffering is a primal force in making you smarter. On a collective level, nothing refines and ennobles us more than our passion to keep others from suffering. For every dead child in Darfur, 100 people in other places on the planet have responded with a radical commitment to create a world in which future Darfurs won't happen. These are worthy ideas for you to meditate on in the coming weeks. You will have a tremendous capacity to convert your old wounds, as well as the old wounds of others, into brilliant opportunities.

Now, I've been entertained by Brezsny's exhortations since I started college, and for years I had no idea whether his column had any actual grounding in astrology. It was wild and wacky enough in tone that I leaned towards thinking, nah, probably not. But it turns out Brezsny is a serious practitioner of astrology, and a defender of it: his columns are based on charts he draws up, there's an "Astrology 101" section on his website, and he refers would-be clients to another professional astrologer. He does make a strong distinction between his style of guidance and the traditional newspaper blurbs. In his words,

They encouraged people to be superstitious and made the dead-wrong implication that astrology preaches predetermination and annuls free will. It was bad enough that their blather fed gullible readers inane advice that pandered to the least interesting forms of egotism. .... newspaper horoscopes based their ersatz "predictions" solely on the sun's position. They made the absurd proposition that the lives of millions of people who share any particular "sun sign" are all headed in the same direction.

Along similar lines, I've heard tarot card readers explain that their mission is not to predict the future but to clarify the possibilities it offers. To me, to some degree, it sounds like a prettier, more sophisticated version of flipping a coin not to make a decision, but to find out which decision your gut's truly rooting for. And speaking as someone whose gut instincts haven't always been up to the job, I think it's healthy to make use of whatever resources help make life make sense to you, be they a deck of cards, a psychotherapist, or attending a worship service.

All that said, I think it's also important to allow for life not making sense no matter what resources we might have at hand. You will not hear from me that life is fair. I find the fact of being alive miraculous, wondrous, and worthy of praise and celebration, but there is plenty of "not fair" to go around no matter how fortunate one happens to be. It's not fair that my parents were both health nuts and yet they both died before the age of 65. It's not fair that friends from my generation have already lost partners and children. It's not fair that people younger than me are struggling with debilitating health problems. It's not fair that some writers are better, faster, or more popular than I am, which is far more mundane than the other things I've listed, but it's still something that matters enough to me to sink me into a deep, dark sulk when things don't feel like they're going well, and it's absolutely not fair that there isn't a blessed pair of slacks in my closet that currently fit my current waist and my current hips. (We'll discuss relative values of "not fair" some other time.) I'm well aware that there are plenty of other people who would dearly love to have my "problems," and can I add that it's not fair that I don't have superpowers? There are times when I feel like telling God, Look, if you wanted me to help other people save the world, or even just to save themselves, or to save them from themselves, or to save me from myself, couldn't you have given me more brains, more courage, more patience, more va-va-voom, more ability to leap administrations in a single bound -- you know, any one of those things?


But that, as you can imagine, generally tends to be a fairly one-sided conversation. There's an excerpt printed in the UU hymnal that's taken from a poem by Adrienne Rich. It says:

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
So much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those who, age after age,
perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.

Another word for stubbornness is perseverance. In itself, stubbornness isn't extraordinary. It isn't necessarily a virtue -- sometimes it's even just plain stupid -- and I hesitate to call it a power. But I do believe it can be a manifestation and an instrument of faith -- that, in the face of our world's profound "not fair"s and its devastating mysteries, being willful about doing what we can -- what we find doable within our non-extraordinary powers -- it does matter, and it's worth celebrating. No matter what your sign or your system of belief happens to be, you have the ability to show and remind other people that they are of value. You have the ability to show up, one day at a time, to witness to creation and to help tend to its house.[*] Let us be tenacious about reconstituting the world and sustaining it with our faith. Amen and alleluia.


[*] The opening words to the service were from a passage by Annie Dillard: "We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house."