Samain                                                                           Moving Moon

presented for Groveland Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship

12/14/2014

Purity of Heart is To Will One Thing

 

Will Steger sat on the couch in the living room, clicking through slides on a presentation. This was a month ago in Roseville at a gathering of the Woolly Mammoths, many of whom are present this morning. We had eaten supper with Will and listened as he talked casually about almost dying when they couldn’t find a food cache on the way to the South Pole.

A regular guy in a lot of ways, a regular guy made special by what Soren Kierkegaard would have called the purity of heart to will one thing. He had, from a young age, a clear vision. He wanted to live in the wilderness where there was no road. And become self-sufficient. He achieved that goal by buying a piece of property two lakes away from the nearest road outside Ely, Minnesota.

Wildness and wilderness became home. Expeditions to the North Pole, to the South Pole, always with some educational outcome followed from that vision. So did the development of the Steger Foundation which focuses on educating school age kids about global climate change.

Climate change became a focus when he witnessed personally the melting of the arctic ice cap and the disruption it occurs in that fragile eco-system. Now he’s building the Steger Center on that same property two lakes away from the nearest road. There he hopes to engage leaders of the business and non-profit and governmental worlds.

Will shows up at the boundary between the wilderness and human habitation. He shows up as a prophet and a seer, a quiet prophet and a clear-eyed seer. Like Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and transitions, he looks toward the wilderness and toward our species, seeing both at the same time.

 

Purity of heart is to will one thing is the title of a short work by Soren Kierkegaard. In it he takes the focus from living by and for the expectations of others-rigid social roles, often determined by class distinctions, were still the norm in his 18th century Europe-and places the focus on the individual. The individual, Kierkegaard says, has the responsibility to choose how he or she will live and in that living what will be the aim, the purpose, the vision of that life. Will’s vision had to do with living in the wilderness and from that clarity of purpose flowed the rest: the expeditions, the education of kids, the focus on leadership.

Albert Camus, the French existentialist, said life is a river, a river that flows into one sea: death. All of us humans are in this river and we all flow with it toward the same end. We owe it to each other, he said, each of us facing the same fate, to make the journey to death as pain free and pleasant as possible. To hold Camus’ insight at the center of a life would be a way of willing one thing.

Existentialism and its bare aesthetic, its unrelenting turn toward reality as it is rather than as we would wish it to be, insists on choice as the defining characteristic of a well-lived life. There are certain things, however, that we cannot choose. We do not choose our parents, our siblings, the place where we grow up nor, importantly, do we choose the time, the geist into which we are thrown. This concept of thrown-ness comes from the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. It reminds us of the limits to our ability to choose.

Why, as the British would say, bang on about Will Steger and choice and existentialism? Because a commitment to social justice is just such a choice. Because Will’s example shows that the choice to pursue social justice may flow from a seemingly unrelated decision. You might have decided that healing was at the core of your life’s purpose. You may have chosen children, or the labor movement, or family, or truth. Or beauty. Perhaps social work or engineering or music or financial planning lies at the heart of your life.

In the purity of your heart what is the one thing that you will? Or, if, like most of us, your will divides, forking say at the intersection of family and children, or financial planning and music, or art and community, then what would you, if you stripped yourself down and focused on what really matters most, what would you will with all your heart? What would be your equivalent to Will’s decision to live in the wilderness with no road?

Perhaps you’ve always had, like Will, that center to your life, that pure, bright beacon that has called you forward. Perhaps not. In either case, let’s focus on a critical element of Will’s story and see if your choices have led you to a similar spot.

Will moved to the wilderness. He engaged in outdoor education as a job, then went on expeditions of discovery and adventure. As he did this, his face turned constantly toward the wilderness and back toward the school children or the funders or the source of changes he found in the wilderness, he slowly realized that to live in the wilderness and be self-sufficient, he could not ignore the choices others were making.

The use of fossil fuels fouled the atmosphere. Lead and mercury and acid literally rained down into the Boundary Waters and onto the arctic and Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. A lover of the wilderness, one who would live there, had to see these realities and act.

A person close to me cared for children for the last 40 years of her professional life. She did that within a medical delivery system increasingly designed by corporate and bureaucratic logic-with those ends dominant, not healing. Is it any wonder that as she looked in toward her patients and then out toward the society in which she lived that she became a stubborn advocate for a single-payer health system?

A woman I knew, a lawyer, became involved with the rights of persons in state institutions. Over the course of her involvement with them is it any wonder that she filed the lawsuits that deinstitutionalized Minnesota’s state hospitals?

Or, there was the guy, thrown, in the Heidegerrian sense, into a small bedroom community for workers in the automobile industry, who grew up with the labor movement and organizing against wealth and concentrated power. Is it any wonder he spent a lifetime organizing on behalf of working class and poor families?

No, it does not always happen that willing one thing will turn you toward acts of social justice, but it is significant that affecting a Janus-like position toward that which you put at the center of your life and the world context in which it exists, will so often carry you there.

We’ll end with another instance, perhaps a change that has already come into your life as it has in mine. Grandchildren. I don’t want to say that grandchildren are at the center of my life because they’re not, though they’re pretty damned important. I do want to say that being with our grandchildren, Ruth and Gabe, 8 and 6, gives me a clear focus on the future, that is, the world in which Ruth and Gabe will grow up, in which they will have children and in which they will grow old.

I know, as you probably do, that it will be a much warmer world and one with more erratic weather and changed food production systems-even if we do alter our carbon emissions. It will be a world in which the current gap between the 99% and the 1% will get wider-if nothing changes. Just taking these two instances, as I look at Ruth and Gabe and, at the same time, at that future, those gazes will inform the political choices I make now. Perhaps that’s true for you, too.