Centering (5 minutes)

This is a time to make the transition from the busy world to the group experience. A member of the group may read these words from Kalidasa:

Look to this day!
For it is life, the very life of life.
In its brief course lie all the verities and realities of your existence:
The bliss of growth,
The glory of action,
The splendor of beauty;
For yesterday is but a dream,
And tomorrow is only a vision;
But today, well-lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day.

Check-in (10 to 25 minutes)

Each person in the group has the opportunity to share something about his or her life. What significant events have taken place recently in your life? Have you accomplished something meaningful to you? Have you experienced any losses or setbacks? Have you had any insights or new ideas?

Group Discussion (45 to 70 minutes)

Our spiritual theme for this month is Transience. Finitude, Transience, and Mortality are three challenging existential realities we all face as human beings. We can explore the theme of Transience by asking questions such as these: How can we accept that even our most enduring personal accomplishments may fade into obscurity over time? How can we accept that we are part of the story of life on earth for only a brief span of years? How can we wholeheartedly embrace life even though the time of this embrace is limited?

For group discussion, please consider the questions associated with one or more of the following numbered sections. You need not address all of these sections, and you need not address them in this order.

1. Even your most enduring accomplishments may fade into obscurity over time. How comfortable are you with this?

2. Sometimes people put forth extra effort or make sacrifices or limit their own enjoyment for the sake of future generations. Do you see your own life contributing to the long story of humankind even though you are part of this story for only a brief span of years?

3. In his poem “Eternity,” the poet William Blake wrote:

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise.

Do you appreciate the good things in your life even though they may be transient?

4. The Grand Canyon in Arizona exposes layer after layer of rocks that were created over hundreds of millions of years. The rocks at the very bottom of the Grand Canyon are about 1.75 billion years old. On top of these oldest rocks are other layers of rocks – sandstone, limestone, and shale – each layer presenting a characteristic combination of color, texture, and shape. Older layers of rocks are deeper in the earth, while younger layers of rocks lie closer to the surface of the earth.

At one point, there is a significant gap in the geologic record between two adjacent layers of rock in the Grand Canyon. Geologists believe that the lower layer was deposited first, then there was a long period of erosion, and then additional layers of rock were once again deposited. The gap in the geologic record – called the Great Unconformity – is approximately one billion years. During this time, no fossils were preserved, and, more generally, no record of geological activity was preserved.

Records of human activity may be vulnerable in this way. Suppose that many years from now, all traces of human activity were erased from the geologic record, including all traces of your life. Would your life have been worth living? Or must something from your life endure permanently for your life to have significance?

5. The German poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe began his dramatic narrative Faust with the following description of Faust’s miserable life as a cloistered scholar:

FAUST. Philosophy have I digested,
The whole of Law and Medicine,
From each its secrets I have wrested,
Theology, alas, thrown in.
Poor fool, with all this sweated lore,
I stand no wiser than before.
Master and Doctor are my titles;
For ten years now, without repose,
I’ve held my erudite recitals
And led my pupils by the nose.
And round we go, on crooked ways or straight,
And well I know that ignorance is our fate,
And this I hate.
I have, I grant, outdistanced all the others,
Doctors, pedants, clergy, and lay-brothers;
All plague of doubts and scruples I can quell,
And I have no fear of devil or of hell,
And in return am destitute of pleasure, 
Knowing that knowledge tricks us beyond measure,
That man’s conversion is beyond my reach,
Knowing the emptiness of what I teach.

The evil spirit Mephistopheles comes to Faust and offers him a life of adventure and enjoyment, if only Faust will give his soul to Mephistopheles at the end of his life. Faust agrees on one condition, namely, that Mephistopheles can have his soul only if Faust ever insists on permanence.

FAUST.  If I be quieted with a bed of ease,
Then let that moment be the end of me!
If ever flattering lies of yours can please
And soothe my soul to self-sufficiency,
And make me one of pleasure’s devotees,
Then take my soul, for I desire to die:
And that’s a wager!
MEPHISTOPHELES:  Done!
FAUST: And done again!
If to the fleeting hour I say
‘Remain, so fair thou art, remain!’
Then bind me with your fatal chain,
For I will perish in that day.
‘Tis I for whom the bell shall toll,
Then you are free, your service done.
For me the clock shall fail, to ruin run,
And timeless night descend upon my soul.

Goethe’s message seems to be that life ends when one clings to the present, when one wants to stop the clock, when one is unwilling to imagine that the future can be better than the present, when one refuses to sacrifice the present for the sake of the future, when one abandons hope. Some say that this passage from Goethe is a quintessential expression of liberalism.

Have you ever wanted to stop the clock and say ‘Remain!’ to the fleeting hour?

How is wanting to stop the clock different from trying to live deeply in the present moment?

Do you trust the future? Are you willing to leave behind the present for the sake of an uncertain but perhaps better future? Do you believe the world is getting better or worse?

How do you reconcile being willing to imagine that the future can be better than the present, on the one hand, with the challenges of aging, on the other hand?

Conclusion (5 to 10 minutes)

What will you take away from this discussion? What would have made this time together more meaningful or satisfying to you? What did you enjoy? A group member may share these closing words by Unitarian Universalist minister Robert Weston:

Autumn, we know,
Is life en route to death.
The asters are but harbingers of frost.
The trees, flaunting their colors at the sky,
In other times will follow where the leaves have fallen,
And so shall we.
Yet other lives will come.
So may we know, accept, embrace,
The mystery of life we hold a while
Nor mourn that it outgrows each separate self,
But still rejoice that we may have our day.
Life high our colors to the sky!
And give, in our time, fresh glory to the earth.