© Davidson Loehr
October 21, 2001
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
CENTERING:
Let us make a bargain with our souls. Let us not trade integrity for approval or trade authenticity for anything at all. Let us learn to ask for what we need in work, in relationships, from our friends and from our religion.
A wise man once said, “Knock and it shall be opened, seek and you shall find, ask and you shall receive.” We need help in believing this for, though it is true, it seems terribly unlikely. And so we often seek too little and let ourselves be treated badly, even like dirt.
If we let ourselves be treated like dirt for too long, it can begin to feel natural. We’re not dirt; we’re stardust. We’re the stuff of which the universe is made. Let us honor that.
Let us seek relationships where we are cherished and not settle for less. Let us never make bargains where we lose our souls, our authenticity, for that’s no bargain at all. And it’s a terrible price to pay for the pretense that everything is still together.
We cannot love our neighbors as ourselves until we know how to love ourselves. Yet how many times have we sold out for something so much less than we are. How many times have we treated or allowed ourselves to be treated, not as people, but as things. Let us not settle for less.
Let us make a bargain with our souls and remember that within each of us is a seed of God, a spark of the divine, and the hope of the world. It is so important. Let us take these few quiet moments to get in touch with our true centers.
SERMON:
We’re in the middle of an extended series of sermons that are talking about the Elizabeth Kubler-Ross developed in her 1969 book on stages of death and dying. There are five stages that we tend to go through when we are grieving the loss of anything important.
Her has been used mostly in hospice work and hospital care, but I first began to realize how broad the is when I was invited to a three day business conference in Chicago ten or twelve years ago. One of the key speakers was going to be Mortimer Adler. I had read some of his books and attended his university and wanted to hear him. So I went in mostly to hear this 90-something year old man (who was still sharp as a tack).
During this business conference, one junior executive from the Bose Company that makes those great little speakers did a presentation on how his company struggled going through what you could call a paradigm shift in understanding the sound business and their future in it. He went through graphs, charts and pictures. I realized what he was doing was going through the five stages of grief that had been used to deal with death and dying. And that’s when I realized that these are the stages that we go through to grieve the death of anything that’s been important to us, to resist having to change.
The first thing we do when significant change comes is to resort to the “ostrich school”, where we stick our heads in the sand and our fannies in the air and we look silly only to everyone else. If that doesn’t work, then we get mad. If you were here last week, you got to see the full-blown tantrum that I got to throw at the beginning of the sermon. And we try to use anger to control people, to frighten people or the universe or God back into line. We’re saying, “Look, I really mean it!”
When that can’t work, we come to the third stage, which is called bargaining. In some ways, it’s the funniest of the stages. It is certainly the most creative. Bargaining is where we ask our brain to trick us. We’ve all had the wool pulled over our eyes by charlatans somewhere or other. But in bargaining, we contrive with ourselves to pull the wool over our own eyes. It’s really quite a trick. Many of the bargains we make are dramatic and very funny. You can think of examples in your personal life and relationships and your job, from all over the place.
I brought you just three from religion because I’m trying to focus on how we change or try to avoid changing dealing with religious beliefs that may have served us once but that have died a long time ago and we just don’t know what to do with them or how to replace them.
The first example is the longest but probably the most fun. When I was in graduate school, there was another doctoral student who was a couple of years ahead of me. I’ve told this story before and I’ve always protected his name. But I figure it’s been twenty years, he’s past it and he could certainly deal with it anyway. It was Steven Post. He was the grandson of Emily Post. And though his family was pretty well off, Steven was a very bright young man and was on, I think, a full ride scholarship at the University of Chicago. He also had a wicked sense of humor and he loved tormenting people.
We were sitting at a Wednesday luncheon one week. This university really didn’t have much of a sense of community. You mostly sat at home in your apartment or you sat in the library and you read and that was called Life. But they tried to fake community by subsidizing a Wednesday luncheon once a week. And we would have a very nice lunch with wine and guest speakers, sometimes world famous speakers. I went to all of them that I could.
Students and faculty would sit together at tables and have a chance to talk. I was sitting across from Steven at this table and we were sitting next to a professor who had been the dean of the school for fifteen years. I knew Steven slightly because after the Wednesday luncheon, he and I were in a very intense, advanced seminar that met from 1:30 to 4:30 every Wednesday afternoon and we were always the two who showed up about twenty minutes early after the luncheon and took notes or read or chatted a little bit. But I didn’t know much about him.
During the luncheon, somehow we began talking about cults and Steven said, “Well, you know “cults” is just what we call other people’s religions.” The professor said, “It’s sounds like you’ve studied this.” Now this is a man already in denial. And Steven said, “No.” He said, “I’ve lived it. I’m a Moonie.” Now that’ll stop a discussion! The professor, still clinging to denial, said, “Oh you were?” “No,” said Steven, “I am.”
This went on for awhile and then Steven said he was also the second person kidnapped by the de-programmers. His family had him kidnapped and taken to the de-programmers because he was an embarrassment to their blue blood. This wonderful professor said, “So, then that ended it?” Steven said, “No.” He said, “I saw through them from the start.” And that really did end the discussion.
After lunch, for no reason I can be proud of, I didn’t want to go to that room with Steven. I didn’t want to be trapped there with him for twenty minutes. I just didn’t. So as I left the room, I turned left and I made it two or three steps before Steven grabbed my arm. He said, “Oh, no you don’t. We’re going up there! – He said, – You’re going to play.” I said, – Steven, I am not going to play!” He said, “You’ll play.” I said, “I won’t play!” He said, “You’ll play.” You’re too curious not to play.” I said, “I’ll go up there, but I won’t play!” He said, “See, you’re almost playing already.”
So we went up to the room and he said, “Come on, this is your chance of a lifetime. You’ve got a Moonie in front of you. You’ve got to be curious.” I said, “I’m not going to play.” He said, “What do you want to know?”
I said, “Alright, I’ll play. What I don’t understand, Steven, is how you keep what you learn here in the same head where you keep the stuff you learn there without being schizophrenic. That’s what I want to know.” And he said, “Oh, that.” He said, “That’s easy. You just have to keep what you know and what you believe separate.” And while I was thinking about that, he reached over and poked me: “You know, there’s a lot of that going on!”
There’s a notable historical example of this kind of bargaining, keeping what you know and what you believe separate. Not well known, but it ought to be better known. It comes from the early 18th century, It was Anglican priests in England and it was called latitudinarianism – one of those words for which the inventor should just be shot. These were priests who wanted to say, “Look, look, we know all these stories are myths. We know this isn’t true. I mean, nobody believes in, you know, virgin births and walking on water, and that corpses get up and walk and float up in the sky, We know this isn’t true.” So they said all of this out loud to regain their intellectual integrity. Then they went back to church and repeated all the creeds and all the stories they just said they didn’t believe. That was called latitudinarianism because they took such great latitude with the teachings. It’s also called bargaining, because they kept what they knew and what they believed separate.
A third example is more current and it’s one I’m involved in, though I’m involved in it as a heretic. That’s the Jesus Seminar. This is a wonderful group of scholars, biblical scholars that have been meeting since 1985. Their stated purpose is to say, “Look, just like the latitudinarians, let’s just be honest about this. Let’s get scholars who’ll use their names to come out in public, make real arguments about the difference we have all known for two hundred years exists between myth and history, between symbols and metaphors and facts. Let’s have them say it out loud and put their name to it and invite any other scholar in the world who wants to come and join the argument to come do so on the conditions that they do it in public.”
Now that’s good stuff. That’s brave and remarkable scholarship and I was attracted by it as soon as I heard about it, which was about five years after they started. I called the founder of it, Bob Funk, on the phone and I said, “I read an article in the paper about this Jesus Seminar thing,” And I said, “I don’t know what it is.” He said, “What are your questions?” And I said, “Alright, it’s this.” I said, “This could really be absolutely honest, exciting and candid scholarship, or it could be a bunch of Christ-sating savages trying to destroy a religion. Which are you?” And he said, “Well, you know, you couldn’t trust any answer I give you to that. If I were the latter, I’d lie about it. So the only way you’re going to find out is to come out and spend a few days with us and make up your own mind.”
So I did. And I was stunned. This was some of the most honest religious scholarship I’d ever seen. They were really doing it. However, in the background, they were playing a mental game. Ninety nine percent of the fellows in the Jesus Seminar are Christians, and they are making about the same bargain the latitudinarians did. Once you’ve thrown out the three-story universe, once you’ve said, “We know there isn’t anything living up there above the clouds. We know that God isn’t a being, God is a concept. It’s an idea, not a critter.” Once you’ve said all of this out loud, you can no longer have a God who sees, hears, cares, or loves. Now take your pick, but you can’t have it both ways. And most of them don’t or won’t see that. That’s bargaining. This is bargaining going on by some of the scholars that I respect as much as anybody in the world. So I’m not making fun of people for doing it. I do think it’s disingenuous, but it is a disingenuousness that we all do.
What we’re doing in bargaining is we’re taking a God, to put it that way, that was alive once, maybe not in our lifetime, but was alive once and it’s dead now. And we stuff it and we prop it up on the altar where it used to sit and we bow down before it and we pretend nothing has changed. But it has changed, because it is no longer giving life to us. We’re faking it. That’s why it’s bargaining. Theologians call this idolatry. A god for theologians is a center of allegiance and orientation and if we live around it, it can give us a more authentic sense of life.
That’s what a god is about. It isn’t a critter. This isn’t a creature at Disney World. It’s a center of value, orientation and allegiance. And an idol is something that pretends to be like that, but we find, usually too late, that it got it’s power by sucking the life out of us rather than helping put more worthy life into us. An idol cannot give life. I think of bargaining as a kind of idolatry.
But I have another image from my childhood that I think of too. I grew up in the North where we had oak trees everywhere and acorns all over the ground in the fall. And I used to love acorns. I liked the little things and I would keep some in my room. I never knew why, but I think part of it, looking back on it, was that it always seemed to me that an acorn was a miracle waiting to happen. Somehow that little nut knew how to become an oak tree. That’s amazing to me. Put the thing in the ground and give it water and give it the right conditions and this thing will become something just immense. And I thought it was miraculous.
Later on, when I was older, at an art fair, I saw a truly magnificent acorn about three inches high that had been carved by an artist. Now the part of it that made no sense at all, and that has always bothered me, was that the artist had carved it out of walnut. If you know woods, you know oak is hard to carve. It splinters and walnut is very easy to carve. Still it was cheating and it wasn’t right. But it was a pretty acorn and I bought it and I liked it and it really was a magnificent carving.
I kept it for some years and looking back was surprised to find that after a few years, the fascination wore off. And the fascination wore off because it wasn’t really an acorn. It was a fake acorn. What makes acorns real is their potential: the fact that they know how to become alive and become something big. Bigger than you can handle. That’s the miracle in an acorn.
This thing, this was just an imitation of an acorn carved by an artist. It was dead. It couldn’t come alive, ever. It couldn’t do anything. It was a fake acorn. That’s what bargaining is like. Bargaining is like putting up a fake acorn and pretending it’s a real one when it has no potential to come alive and no potential to give life. It’s only the memory of the yearning for the nostalgic feeling that once maybe this old belief was supposed to give life though it doesn’t anymore. And we do this in religion all the time and we do it in life all the time.
One of my current favorite authors is a physician, a woman named Rachel Naomi Remen who has worked for about twenty years in San Francisco with terminal patients, cancer patients, AIDS patients. And since she’s so gifted at this, she’s also worked with a lot of physicians and done workshops for other physicians.
One of the exercises she has them do is to make two lists. One is a list of the things they really truly value in their personal life; the other is a list of the things they really value and work by in their profession. She said the two lists are never the same and they’re often very, very different. Sometimes someone will put something like kindness number two in their personal life and number fifteen in their professional life. There are so many things more important than kindness. I mean, you have to know your chemistry, you have to know your biology, you have to know your anatomy, you have to be able to do the diagnosis. There’s a whole list of things that count for more than kindness in the practice of medicine. And yet, in their personal life kindness is one of the things that makes them feel real and makes them feel alive. So living by values they don’t really care much about is the bargain they have made with their profession.
What we do in bargaining is to try to protect life in the wrong way. It’s trying to protect life the way you try to protect butterflies when you stick pins through them and put them under glass. It’s the way you try to protect something when you take that magnificent carving of an acorn (out of walnut), and you put it in a glass museum case and you put it on display. It truly is magnificent – but it’s dead. And it can’t ever give real life to anything.
Part of what is so ironic and sad about all of this bargaining is that all of these games we’re playing are being played against the background and within a world where the possibilities are miraculous and are all over the place and we won’t see them. One of Jesus’ famous lines was to tell a story and then say, “If you have eyes to see this and ears to hear this,” and for the most part the people who listened to him didn’t and we don’t either.
To care for life the right way, to use the image of the glass case, would take a different kind of glass case. Instead of a glass museum case, the way you’d care for life would be with a greenhouse. Something big and protective and nourishing that can let little living things grow into big living things. Even bigger living things than we know how to handle.
But it can’t happen until we’re ready for it. Because until we have eyes to see, we couldn’t see it if it were put right in front of us. Naturally, there’s a story about this too. It’s comes from Hinduism. It’s a great story about Shiva, the Lord of the universe in Hinduism and Shakti, his divine consort. They’re sitting up there in their heavenly space sort of watching mortals, and they are filled with compassion for the suffering that they see as a part of life and with respect for the efforts that people make in so many ways and the love that they see and all of the human drama that they see below them.
Shakti is moved particularly by one poor man that she sees, a poor beggar who is wearing sandals so worn through that they’re tied together with string and a coat so thin, it won’t help him if the night gets too cold. And she turns to her husband and she says, “Look, look at this man, this is a good man, I’ve seen into his heart, it’s a good heart. This is a good man and he’s suffering. Can’t you do something for him?” And Shiva looks down for an instant and says, “Nope.” And she says, “What do you mean, nope? You’re the Lord of the universe! You can do anything! What do you mean, you can’t do anything for him? Give him some gold.”
Shiva said, “Wouldn’t matter, I could give him gold and it wouldn’t matter. He’s not ready for it.” So Shakti said, “Give him the gold and let him see if he’s ready for it!” This is apparently how divine husband and wife arguments go. So Shiva drops a bag of gold in the path, in front of this beggar. The poor beggar in the meantime is coming around the corner thinking to himself, “I’m so hungry. Will I be able to beg enough money today to have food or will I go hungry again tonight? Is it going to be too cold? Where am I going to sleep? Am I going to freeze to death? What am I going to do?” And then he sees this thing in the road and says, “Oh my God. Look at that! A rock and I almost kicked it! If I had kicked the rock, I would have torn my sandals apart and now I’d have to go be going barefoot. It’s a good thing for me that I was watching.” And he stepped over the bag of gold and went on his way.
When religious stories talk like this, you know, they’re always using words in imaginative ways. This didn’t mean a bag of gold coins. This meant the bags of “gold” that are lying all over the place all the time. What are bags of gold? They’re the possibility of finding a religion for your head and your heart. They’re a possibility of bringing together what you know and what you believe. A possibility of bringing together what we love and what we do, how we live and who we are. These are the bags of gold that lie in the road around us that we don’t see until we’re ready.
There are miracles that can happen here on the road of life. And sometimes those bags contain things even richer and more miraculous than gold. Sometimes, they contain acorns.
