Whelm is a Verb

Whelm is a Verb

November 16, 2008

Rev. David Robins

The heavens made no reply, by fortunately, Vanessa took pity on me and called back, “Prioritize and pick one thing to start.” Thank you, Vanessa.

Feeling overwhelmed is not a modern phenomenon. 175 years ago, Thoreau looked at the complexities of his life and advised; “Simplify, simplify, simplify.” What would he have said today with voice mail, internet, 400 television stations from which to choose, 100 car models to pick from, 25 flavors of ice cream, and foods from around the globe. What would Thoreau have thought of a Blackberry, a MacIntosh, Windows XP, hyperlink, radio stations, ipods….and all the pages of instructions that go with them? Can you imagine living in a time that had nothing complicated enough to require 5 pages of instructions in four languages? No wonder we are overwhelmed.

Retreating from the world is no answer. We learn what we can to operate in our overwhelming world of relationships, things and information. We want to make the right choices and the right decisions, but we often have more information than we can process or organize. Our decisions, while better informed than ever before in history, still carry the weight of feeling pressured, hurried and incomplete. We long to meet the eternal in time, rather than another stressful event.

Looking in the dictionary for the word, ‘overwhelmed’, I made the discovery that ‘whelm’ is a verb that becomes super-sized by the word ‘over.’ I whelm. You whelm. We whelm. I am whelmed. You are whelmed. We are whelmed. Whelm means to engulf or crush, and it comes from a word meaning to turn over. We could just as easily say we are whelmed, we are turned over by love or awe, but whelm and overwhelm are most often used to describe negative experiences.

We live in a time that threatens to overwhelm us with problems. Columnist Thomas Freidman calls the new generation of 18-30 year olds, “Generation Q”, and they are certainly a group who I would expect to feel overwhelmed. He says of them: “they are volunteering in AIDS clinics in record number….building homes in El Salvador (and with Habitat for Humanity in our neighborhoods). In spite of the mess of two wars, they are joining ROTC. They go into the toughest schools to teach in Ameri-core or Teach for America. They are rolling up their sleeves and diving in deeper than ever. I call them ‘Generation Q’, the Quiet Americans, in the best sense of that term, quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad.” (NYTimes 10/10/07)

At home, this “Generation Q” quietly hit the streets and the telephone banks, calling and going door to door as a measurably large part of the dedicated, passionate volunteers in the recent election. They put together the web sites that pulled in more money than the last two elections combined. They designed the flyers and advertising. They set up voter registration booths on every campus. And they helped register more voters than any other election, and more of them voted than ever before. They may be a ‘quiet generation’, but they are not inactive or passive. They are ‘whelming’, they are turning over our culture. Whelming in the best sense of the word. They are engulfing our country and our world with their idealism, their time and their ideas.

One would think that they would feel overwhelmed by the largest deficits in history, global warming, two wars, a mortgage and financial crisis unseen for 90 years. But if they feel overwhelmed, they do not show it. They work 80 hours a week to bring beauty, truth and goodness into the world, from politics to the arts and education.

Molly Courtney a member of Generation Q, wrote in the online blog, The American Prospect: “We are not quiet. We have big mouths and lots of ideas. We don’t hesitate to assert opinions. We are often outraged---outraged, in fact to the point of tears about the war in Iraq. We are not apathetic. What happened is that the world became too big and too brutal and we haven’t figured out a way to process it all. (My generation may be overwhelmed, but we try) to create lives that seem to match our values. We pursue careers and seek answers to questions that we believe are important. We read anything and everything that we think might point us in the direction of some kind of political enlightenment and psychic relief. We are savvy and we are saturated and we are scared.”

Generation Q knows that they have big deadlines to take care of a lot of problems caused by the members of my generation. I’ve always known that every generation leaves unsolved problems for the next, but my generation has left an overwhelming mess.

On the bright side, we can look with hope to the multi-cultural and cross generational momentum toward solving the problems left on the table. People believe that there are enough human resources, ingenuity and creativity to change the standard operating procedure. People are coming to believe that they can whelm the world for the better.

I believe that it is up to this congregation to provide as much of the religious resources as possible to be the scaffolding for the people who are working to whelm the problems of the world. We are also called to provide spiritual scaffolding for all the coping to be done. Unitarian Universalism, I hope will be like the blades of a wind turbine, being whelmed by the spirit of the wind to turn over and generate power for those who seek it. Wind and blades. Spirit and soul. Let us whelm together, hand in hand. Let us ‘turn over,’ our lives and our world, in the best sense of the word.