December 28, 2025 - 10:30am: Finding Hope in Choppy Waters

Rev. Dennis McCarty
We live in challenging times. Anyone who strives for a just and caring world — and engages the national news — is likely to sense a bitter taste of failure as we close out a tumultuous year. To keep up our resilience, might it help to look at success and failure in a different way? Rev. Dennis will look at success, failure, and some lessons of history as we sort out these trying times.
Rev. Dennis McCarty is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Bloomington, and author, and Minister Emeritus at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Columbus, Indiana.

Note from your Technology Coordinator: During the service, I experienced a technical issue in the booth which resulted in audio dropping out on the live stream during the end of the gift of music and the beginning of the sermon. I fixed it fairly quickly, but some words were definitely lost. Rev. McCarty graciously allowed me to publish the text of his sermon at the bottom of this page, so you can read along and more fully experience this service. My sincere apologies for the audio issue.

View the video archive of this service here:

Sermon Text

Let me begin by wishing everyone a happy holiday weekend. The holidays are complicated for a lot of people in a lot of ways. They bring together memories, family rituals, and relationships which feed us—right along with tensions and shortcomings that don’t. All in the midst of an unrelenting news cycle. We ignore public affairs at our peril. But too often these days, pay attention to them at our dismay. Blessings on your human journey through it all.

News-wise, world affairs sometimes just seem to suck these days. Sometimes it’s even tempting to see the failure of religious liberalism itself in current events. I don’t think I really understood—on a gut level—what “doom scrolling” meant till this year.

Doom scrolling is, of course, compulsively scrolling through your news feed, growing depressed by what we’re seeing. I don’t think it’s helpful to pretend that bad news doesn’t exist. On the other hand, if we fixate on doom scrolling, it can just make us more miserable, and less able to help ourselves or others.

I believe it helps to step back and gain some distance. The bigger the picture the smaller both good news and bad news become. I also think it’s helpful to remember that our own cultural conditioning can color our assessment of current events. I’ve found myself doing that. Here’s an example from my own life, how someone’s personal history can shape what we think we see.

Way back when I was an undergrad at the University of Utah, my favorite cousin was on the pit crew of a hot-shot local stock car driver I’ll call Mark. Every Saturday night would find myself and my girlfriend out at Salt Lake City’s stock car track, watching the circle burners.

When I started attending that first summer, Mark was leading the season standings in his class. But he didn’t have a big money sponsor—so the last month of the season, another driver started to catch up. Mark clung to his points lead through mechanical difficulties and accidents until the very last points race of the season—when this other fellow caught him and won the track championship, just by a whisker. Mark finished second. I don’t know about him, but I was really disappointed.

The next season, another hot shot driver with a good sponsor moved into Mark’s class. This time, Mark never even tasted the points lead. Mark was a great driver, but his car was cheaper—just not quite as quick—as this other fellow’s car. Mark finished second again.

Meanwhile, I graduated from college and got married and went into the military. Right after I left home, Mark picked up a big money sponsor of his own, who built him a new car and entered him into the top division, what they called super modified sprint cars. Mark had an excellent rookie season, then won the track championship the next two years in a row! He had the chance to win three straight championships—a track record. Better than that, he drove a winter race down in Phoenix, Arizona, and got spotted by a car owner with a national tie-in. This fellow offered Mark a ride in a U.S.A.C. car, the United States Auto Club. Of course in those days, U.S.A.C. was best known for sanctioning—the Indianapolis 500.

Mark had a shot at auto racing’s biggest event. And then—he got hurt in a racing accident at the local speedway. Basically, the accident damaged his neck, not so badly he lost any function, but he had to quit racing to prevent further damage. Just past age 30, when other race drivers are just hitting their prime—Mark was washed up.

Now to me, I saw Mark as a heartbreaking case of “this much.” He’d missed winning his division by “this much” those first two years. He’d missed winning three straight track championships in the super modified division—by “this much.” He’d missed a shot at running in the Indianapolis 500—by “this much.”

As it happened, I wound up working alongside Mark a few years after that. To my surprise, I learned that as far as he was concerned, he’d never missed anything. He’d enjoyed himself, he’d won a lot of races and lots of trophies. He thought he’d had a great career. At first I was suspicious that he was just covering up the hurt, but after awhile I realized that no, he was happy with that part of his life. Now it was over and he’d taken up fishing—which he also really enjoyed. And sometimes I would hear a mutual acquaintance say of him, “Yeah that Mark. He’s what you call a winner.”

I’ve had a lot of years to think about that, particularly in light of my own thoughts—that my career as a novelist kind of paralleled his career as a race driver.

I decided at age seven to become a novelist. That was my dream. I did get some novels published in my 30’s and 40’s, by Ballantine Books, the paperback division of Random House. But my career fizzled out after awhile. Agents and publishers stopped returning my phone calls. The feeling I had toward the end, when I realized my publisher was giving me the cold shoulder, was that I’d gotten so close. I was just like Mark (in my mind, that is, not in his.) I’d missed my shot at the big time—by “this much.”

That was before I got interested in ministry. But I did get interested in ministry—and in one of many classes I took at theological school, we studied something called a genogram. Basically, a genogram is a way of diagramming a family tree, and how behavior patterns get passed down from one generation to the next. To my surprise, as I charted out my old family stories, I found one particular pattern—out of several—on my mother’s side of the family. Generation after generation, as far back as anyone in the family could remember—which was clear back to the mid-1800’s—there was this pattern of people thinking they had just missed: that they had failed by just “this much.”

A great-great grandfather had “just missed” being governor of Nevada. One of his sons “just missed” being rich with a silver mine. Great aunts had just missed and uncles had just missed. The word “almost” had been ingrained in that side of my family for four generations. And those were just the stories that got passed down to me.

What that genogram showed, was that I had been preconditioned by four generations of family dynamics to look at myself as having failed by just “this much.” So naturally, I saw both my friend’s racing career and my own literary career as having just missed. When I really stopped to think about it, I realized that I had been trained not to appreciate anything I ever accomplished in my life—but only to brood over what I hadn’t quite accomplished. And of course you probably already know—there’s no way you’re going to win that game!

For the record, Mark was quite impressed by my writing career. He and I could look at the exact same event—and where I saw a near miss, he would see unmitigated success. The only difference between winning and losing was the thinking in the mind of the person making the judgment.

What I’m trying to get a handle on, here, is that we may not judge “good” or “bad” times totally objectively, either. We may judge them according to our cultural conditioning and psychological training as well. That is not to try to claim that lying, violence, and oppression are not lying, violence, and oppression. But it is to claim that we should never underestimate the depth and resilience of human nature—including our own human nature.

There’s also another thought: in the broad scope of things, it’s impossible to accurately sum up the whole direction of our culture, our nation, and our world—because by the time the full impact of current events has played out—we’re dead. We don’t get to see how the whole story turns out. That’s the human condition.

Consider this life: a particular Asian scholar. This fellow’s father died when he was just three years old. He grew up poor. He was an active youth, though, and a good student. He had a lot of faith in his abilities. He believed he was destined for great things, that he was capable of becoming a high government official. And when he did, he vowed, he would bring order, peace, and prosperity to the land.

He held a few minor government posts over the years, but nothing that challenged his talents. So he became a teacher—a good one. Still, he dreamed of getting a high appointment from some ruler. Then he would reform society. Finally, a local lord did appoint this fellow to a high post. But it turned out to be purely honorific. It held no power at all.

The years went by, his students adored him, but his dream of rebuilding society faded and died. He accepted his failure with good grace; sometimes he even made fun of himself. But there was no doubt it really hurt. He died at age 72—a failure in life. His students called him, Kung Fu-Tzu, “Kung the Master.” We in the West have Latinized his name to—Confucius. It was only after his death that his adoring students successfully spread his teaching, making him the dominant figure in East Asian culture.

I doubt any of us can judge our own times any better than Confucius. A Unitarian Universalist theologian, Sharon Welch, of whom I’m quite fond, writes, “What we know, though vast, rests on shaky foundations. Furthermore, as we attempt to ascertain the effects of our actions, we are challenged to keep in mind the law of unintended consequences: our actions, no matter how carefully thought out, have unpredictable ramifications, multiple consequences for good or ill, often for both.”

We see this pattern repeated over and over. Time and again, century after century, the best predictions of the most wise go hopelessly astray. And when we’re counting on those predictions—or when we’re unconsciously—or consciously—counting that what we long for will be what actually comes to pass—disappointments can be really bitter. At the same time, though, there are small victories in even the worst situations. I suggest that we need to watch for them as well, and let them feed us. That kind of perspective, I think, can be a vital survival technique in hard times.

On surviving in really horrendous times: Jewish-German linguistics professor Victor Klemperer kept a diary of his life as a so-called “privileged” Jew in Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Being “privileged” meant that he and his ethnically German wife only had to worry about starving to death, rather than outrightly being sent to one of the Nazi death camps. I go back to his writings every once in awhile because, in pondering his own desperate circumstances, Klemperer often addresses the human condition in helpful ways.

On the morning of September 27, 1944, for example, he was at a real low point. Germany was badly losing the war and there was a serious food shortage. This was bad enough for non-Jewish Germans, but for Victor and Eva Klemperer, at the bottom of the economic and social ladder, it meant at one point that they were literally starving to death. On the morning of September 27, 1944, though, he was worrying less about starvation than about failure.

“I have published nothing for twelve years,” he writes. “Been unable to complete anything, have done nothing but [keep this diary,] record and record. Is there any point to it, will any of it [ever] be published? . . .And if it is completed and if it is successful, and if I ‘survive through my work’ [so to speak,]—what is the point of it all for me? . . .I shall go on. . . reading and taking notes. Not because I am so full of energy, but because I am unable to do anything better with my time.”

Those are the words of a man facing down life’s evils in a profound way—and at risk of totally giving in to despair. Now—here’s what we read on the very next page, something that happened just a few hours later, that same afternoon.

He writes, “Our neighbor, [Frau Cohn,] has an acquaintance, who asked about me. ‘At the university [she said,] I once attended a [wonderful] lecture on Dante given by a Professor Klemperer. Is it the same [Professor Klemperer]?’ I responded that I was the same professor, only twenty-three years older. Now today, Frau Cohn brought a [large] bag of apples. The woman friend had asked her, whether things were as short at the Professor’s as at the Cohn’s. Yes? Then she should present him with these apples, ‘from an unknown well-wisher! Dante apples, as it were, late fruits.”

Let us not underestimate the power of caring, of human connection, even in the most evil of times. On a forgotten day far in his past, Klemperer had touched another human being without even realizing he had done it. He had left her such a memory that twenty-three years later, she sent the Klemperers a life-saving bag of apples. We may doubt the nutritional value of apples—but at that time, when the Jewish-German Klemperers were not allowed to buy food—it was the difference between life and death.

It’s natural for any human being to ponder the meaning, the effect, of our own life. But one great frustration of the human condition—is that we can never answer that question ourselves. What’s more, anyone who insists on looking at the human conditions just in terms of success or failure, winning or losing—is probably betting on a rigged game. None of us comes out of an empty void. We are all the products of particular subcultures and particular families within our culture. In my case, I was preconditioned by my upbringing to see the world in terms of what I didn’t accomplish. Whether I achieved some particular thing or not, I didn’t have any way to recognize success even when I was in the middle of it.

When I studied Zen Buddhism in South Korea many years ago, the Dharma teachers cautioned us to not even go to that place: good or bad, winning or losing, success or failure. To do so is to become lost, either in the past or in the future. Or as they put it, because life is filled with suffering, just being born in the worst mistake you could possibly make. After that, all other mistakes are tiny by comparison. So there is only life. Success or failure are things we make in our own mind. In Zen terms, they are errors in judgment.

Nothing is permanent. Fortunes are won and lost, records are broken, citadels collapse, empires fall. As Victor Klemperer could tell us, the “Thousand Year Nazi Reich” lasted—just twelve years.

We are born, we live and love and are loved. We die and others mourn for us. Old race tracks become parking lots and office buildings. Old trophies are lost and discarded. Old novels turn yellow and fall to dust and are replaced by DVD’s and video games—which will also disappear in their own time.

And this is no matter for sadness. Rather, it is food for rejoicing. Whether we choose our role in life or not, each one of us is a splendid metaphor in the endless poem of the cosmos. My live—and your life—will continue to have meaning, however venal or perfidious national leaders happen to be. To mix a metaphor, the mills of the gods may grind slowly—but times will change.

The meaning of my life lies not in erecting some intellectual edifice of my own, or in powerful politicians suddenly figuring out how to behave themselves. Rather, the meaning of my life lies in the child I hug this morning, the laughter I share this afternoon, the tear I weep for a departed friend this evening. All are good. Mystic atheist that I am, I might even allow that all are holy. Amen and Blessed Be.