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© Hannah Wells

June 4, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

Let us pray for some measure of comfort and peace for those who mourn significant losses. They are members of your church community; they are the families of lost military men and women, and they are the survivors of natural disaster.

Let us rejoice for our lives, for all that we have: a soft bed, good food to eat, a choice of what to wear each morning. The future. Let us reflect – gently, but with conviction, with courage.

Which part of us is given the most permission, the most air time, the most control? Are we living our lives the way our best self would choose? Do we know who that person is? Are we giving ourselves the right “to be fabulous?” Are we giving our best self a chance to live?

Though it is fearsome, let us listen to the nagging voices in our minds that ask us to consider new ways of living, to consider changing habits, to consider changing how we think about failure and success.

Let us love ourselves in the story we find ourselves in. We each have a story, and may we see that our mistakes are important, that failures are the means to hard-earned growth and happiness. With calm intention may we let our hard lessons become blessings.

May we keep close to our hearts the certain knowledge that the nature of our world, and of ourselves, is always to be in flux. No state of our being is ever permanent.

May we each honor the other’s response to change, and the need to make a better world. Each of us are on a different path that we have been called to take.

May compassion be our guide, for ourselves and each other, and may courage be our salvation.

AMEN.

SERMON

This feels like a homecoming. It reminds me of when I preached for the first time at the church I grew up in; First Church of Austin is my second home church, I hope that’s alright with you. And I’m so pleased that the children’s choir of Tulsa is here to hear me preach today. When I was your age, I found myself forced to sit through an entire church service – I think it was summer, no Sunday School, no RE wing to escape to. The subject of the sermon was failure, and I’ll never forget it. The main message was there’s no such thing as failure. There’s only not trying. I could grasp that, as an 11 year old, or however old I was. When we’re kids, we are asked to succeed a lot; we’re not asked to fail, but we should be. We should know that option is open to us.

What this minister was saying in his sermon is that it doesn’t matter as much what the outcome is, it matters that we are part of the process of something, that we participate, that this is more important than anything. And at a young age, this is absolutely true. I won’t Pollyanna all the way for you here, it’s true that as you get older, it does matter more and more what the outcome is. But for a youth, it’s a message of courage – just have courage, it doesn’t matter if you win or lose, it matters that you try at the things you’re drawn to, that you get to know yourself by figuring out what you’re good at, and what you’re not good at.

When I was an intern minister here for nearly a full year, one thing that helped me greatly was to know I had “permission to fail.” That was Davidson’s phrase (Davidson was my supervisor and is the Senior Minister of this church, for the many visitors who are with us today). It was perhaps the most attractive thing about this church for internship, because it seemed to turn failure on its head and take the sting out of it. It was okay to fail! In fact, it was expected. Failure didn’t seem like such a specter then, and instead of walking on egg-shells trying to do everything right, I could just be myself.

Of course Davidson was not shy about telling me when I did fail. Mostly this had to do with the first drafts of sermons. I pretty much failed all of first semester with my preaching; I just didn’t get what I was failing to do. But I finally succeeded with the sermon I delivered at the very beginning of the new year. I had an “a-ha!” experience, and I finally got it. I doubt I ever would have understood what I was doing wrong, what was missing, unless someone wasn’t kind enough to tell me how I was failing – over and over.

And now I’m a working minister delivering a sermon on the topic of failure. If I fail at a sermon on failure, is that a success? I’ll worry about that later.

What are some of your most prized failures? The failures that you learned and grew from, and never could have succeeded without? Which failures do you still need to learn from? Maybe we’ve failed to maintain our health, or spend enough time with our families. Maybe we’ve failed to nurture our creative sides. Maybe we’ve failed to reach some kind of cherished ideal.

We tend to forget, though, that ideals aren’t meant to be reached. We set high ideals to remind ourselves of what we want to be close to. But we don’t reach them.

The truth is, that, most of the time, we are off-course. The nature of the world and of us is one of imperfection.

Perhaps some of you remember when, 30 years ago, the commercial plane The Concorde, began flying across the Atlantic for the first time in less than 4 hours. Because of its phenomenal speed, the course was actually maintained by two computers, one to take course readings every few seconds, and one to correct the course when it was going off-course. A passenger touring the plane asked the pilot, “what percentage of the time is the plane off-course?” The pilot smiled, and replied, “About 99 percent of the time, sir.”

This story was taken from Rachel Remen’s collection, the woman I inevitably end up borrowing from in so many of my sermons, as Davidson taught me to do. She asks, “Might it be possible to focus ourselves on the purpose we wish to serve in the same way… [as] the Concorde? Once we stopped demanding of ourselves that we be on course all the time, we might begin to look at our mistakes differently, giving them… a frictionless response. They will not prevent us from reaching our dreams nearly so much as wanting to be right will. [my italics]

Those who have the courage to offer us honesty, to be our navigators, might even come to be seen as worthy of… gratitude… “You are off-course,” they might tell us. “Why, THANK you,” we might reply. “

She goes on to say, “Serving anything worthwhile is a commitment to a direction over time and may require us to relinquish many moment-to-moment attachments, to let go of pride, approval, recognition, or even success. This is true whether we be parents, researchers, educators, artists, or heads of state. Serving life may require a faithfulness to purpose that lasts over a lifetime. It is less a work of the ego than a choice of the soul.”

If we’re using our souls to choose a destination, it is enough to be heading in the right direction. We get in trouble when we make the ideals of the world our destination. We cannot choose a trajector – or a path to follow – under the guidance of what is outside of us. These are the questions I don’t think anyone can answer for us; we have to ask our own souls, our own spirits: We have to begin inside ourselves and ask, am I trying to succeed in becoming more human, more whole? Do I do what I love? Do I know what my gifts are, and does it offer some gifts to others?

While they don’t have to be the gifts the world wants, we do need to offer the world something; but it has to be what we are able to offer. Nobody gets all the gifts, and there’s wisdom in being delighted with the few we’ve got – loving to use them and offer what little we have to offer. Howard Thurman, a theologian, can help us figure out what this is when he said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive.”

Sometimes the gifts we have, though, aren’t the ones we would choose for ourselves. There are always going to be things, that, in the end, we wish we’d been better at; there are failures we regret, but there are probably some gifts we’ve been given too that we didn’t even know we gave to others.

There was a very successful businessman named George who got diagnosed with lung cancer. He was told he didn’t have much time left. He said to his therapist, “‘I have wasted my life… I have two ex-wives and five children. I support all of them but I don’t know any of them… I don’t think they’ll miss me. I’ve nothing behind me but a lot of money.'”

It turns out that the business of this man was selling a gadget of medical equipment that he invented. The therapist – who of course is Rachel Remen, this is another of her stories – had another patient who used this device, and knew that it had completely changed her life. Her name was Stephanie. Rachel asked her if she might write a letter to the dying businessman, to thank him. The woman wanted to have him over to dinner, and he came. Rachel Remen writes,

“The week after this dinner, he sat in my office shaking his head in wonder. He had expected to have dinner with this young couple, but when he had arrived, George was welcomed by Stephanie’s whole family. Her mother was there, her three brothers and sisters, several of her aunts and uncles, and a crowd of nieces, nephews, and cousins. Her husband’s parents were there, too, and many of her friends and neighbors – the whole community of people who had sustained her in the years she was an invalid. They had decorated the little house with crepe paper, and everyone had cooked. It was an extraordinary meal and a wonderful celebration.

But George told Rachel that wasn’t the most important part. George said, “‘They had really come to tell me a story; they had each played a part in it and had a different side of it to share. It took them over three hours to tell it. It was the story of Stephanie’s life. I cried most of the time. And at the very end, Stephanie came to me and said, “This is really a story about you, George. We thought you needed to know.’ And I did, I did.'”

Rachel asked, “How many of these things do you make every year, George?”… “close to ten thousand,” he said softly. “I just knew the numbers, Rachel. I had no idea what they meant.”

That kind of story asks us to measure success and failure correctly: by our effect on others, by the gifts we’ve shared, not necessarily by the world’s standards – or maybe even our own standards.

Another inspiring tale of failure is about West Point graduate Capt. Ian Fishback, a story you perhaps already know, but merits repeating. It’s a story about doing the right thing, in the face of failure on an enormous scale.

When the Abu Ghraib scandal unfolded in Spring of 2004, Fishback, from experience, knew the tortures were in accordance with interrogation procedures. According to him, those terrible things were done to prisoners on a regular basis. But as a by-the-book officer, Fishback held his tongue, that is, until Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld disavowed the evidence of torture before Congress, testifying that “the letter of the Geneva Conventions” had been followed in Iraq. “That,” Fishback said, “is when I had a problem.”

He told Human Rights Watch, “It is infuriating to me that officers are not lined up to accept responsibility for what happened . . . That’s basic officership, that’s what you learn at West Point. It blows my mind.”

Fishback could have chosen to stay anonymous, but instead he crafted an open letter to Sen. John McCain, accusing the top officers of contributing to murder by refusing to set clear guidelines. In the letter’s conclusion, he wrote, “If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession.”

What courage it took this young man to tell it like it is! To express so succinctly the exact nature of this national failure, this international humiliation and tragedy. The fact is our country is not anywhere near on course, the fact is our ideals of freedom, the democratic process, and justice have been abandoned.

One of my failures as a minister has been speaking out against the war. I don’t feel I’ve done enough of it – but I’m making progress; I did do an anti-war sermon about 5 weeks ago, and rite of passage occurred. I got yelled at after the service by an elderly couple. I mean, really yelled at. It was amazing though, my grandmother happened to be standing there and she came to my defense – she started yelling right back at them! And I shuffled away. I’d never been yelled at before like that after a sermon, so I knew I had pushed some buttons.

The truth is I’m optimistic! I don’t want to push buttons perhaps so much as urgently share the message that we can be optimistic as a country.

I’ve got a wonderful quotation of George Clooney’s. He says, “I think we’re really great at this as a country: We do dumb things, and then we fix them. Pearl Harbor: We grab all the Japanese-Americans and throw them in detention camps. Well, that’s not very sporting of us, but we fix it. In the fifties, we grab people because they read a newspaper and bring them in for investigation. Pretty dumb. Vietnam? Pretty stupid. But there seems to be a tide turning. The Democrats aren’t providing the answers, but the Republicans aren’t getting free passes on everything. You don’t get to say you’re either with us or with the enemy anymore. So I’m an optimist about the United States.”

I think Clooney may be on to something there, and I agree: We are going to rise to the challenge of this country’s failed sense of direction. We will once again orient ourselves to the North Star, to a trajectory that is noble, and we will set a course. I know we will!

When you’re told you can either succeed or fail, either way you are being challenged. Our country was built on challenge, and I think it’s one of the nameless anchors of liberal religion as well, of Unitarian Universalism. We don’t get a lot of religious direction necessarily, we each have to challenge ourselves to identify our own noble trajectories. When we find ourselves seriously off-course in life – when we are failing – that’s our opportunity to re-orient and embrace the challenge of setting a new course. It was Edwin Friedman, a brilliant family therapist, who said, “Challenge is the basic context of health and survival, of a person, of the family, of a religious organization, or even (in the course of evolution) an entire species.”

The hardest part may be deciding which challenges to pour our hearts and souls into, because we can’t do them all. The one we should pick is usually the thing we have the most fear about doing. We have to ask, what challenge is going to honor my life, my family, my community, my country, my planet?

You have permission to fail. You also have permission to succeed.

No matter how old you are, do not be afraid to do the things that make you come alive! Because what the world needs is people that have come alive.

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Hannah Wells

July 4, 2004

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© Hannah Wells

May 30, 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

For the soldiers who are working so hard as we speak,

and for the soldiers who have already given their lives,

may our thoughts be with them, especially this Memorial Day.

May we wake up to the reality that we are not as separate from them as we think, just as we are not as separate from anyone else;

may we understand how deeply connected we all are.

May we remember how connected we are to generations past

and to the soldiers who gave their lives many decades ago;

they are standing close behind us and we give our deepest thanks.

May we come to understand that war is a part of who we are

regardless of how noble the cause. Our kind has been dying prematurely of wars and disease since the beginning of our time. May we always take time to remember those who left us too soon.

And may we extend our deepest warmth and support to those families who are left behind, whose long lives stand before them; young mothers and young children.

May we be aware of their sacrifice and pray for their strength.

May we pray for the leadership of our beloved country, and pray for an end to the chaos in Iraq so our troops can come home. May we be patient, may creative solutions be found to an unprecedented struggle, and may our support for our troops hold steadfast regardless.

May we let there be time for the most difficult emotions to unfold surrounding this war and more recent wars.

Dear spirit of life, please help us, as one nation, to take responsibility for our mistakes, to acknowledge the harm we inflict upon others and upon ourselves. Let us be that brave. Amen.

SERMON:

On “Washington Week In Review” on the TV PBS station early Friday evening, the anchor woman ended the program by saying, “and for those of you who are fighting in these wars that we only talk about, thank you for your service.” When she said that, on the one hand I was struck by the honesty of her statement, but on the other hand it seemed kind of cheap.

Every Memorial Day I’m aware of some kind of uneasiness that I can’t quite name, but this year I’ve gotten closer to putting a name on it, and I think it’s shame. Since Jr. High when I became a tune to the context of United States history, every Memorial Day I’ve had the vague awareness that there’s a debt I’ll never be able to repay. Around Memorial Day there’s a bit of a time warp, or perhaps several wrinkles in time that closely juxtapose every major war of this country – the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, WWI, WW2, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and now the Iraq War. All these wars come to mind because we know in our hearts that several of these wars were worth fighting. And we wonder how the world would be different if the good wars hadn’t been won.

I know my life is what it is because the right side won those good wars. Reflecting on this is the stuff of a healthy kind of patriotism – this gratitude and humility – knowing I could never return the favor, so to speak. It’s this reverence for a kind of dedication and courage and violence that I’ll never have to experience. And maybe that’s where the vague feeling of shame comes from – that cheapness of “thank you for your service” seems to belie a sense of entitlement. A sense of entitlement to a service that not only equals the loss of human life, but some things that are worse than death.

Some of the men who came back from Vietnam would have preferred to come home in a box because their lives had been ruined. Losing your soul and your sanity can be worse than death. Discovering humanity’s capacity for evil with your own hands can be enough to ruin a life, even if the events took place in minutes. I bring this up because I think the country is still reverberating from the pictures of torture by our own soldiers’ hands. And yet it seems like a silent reverberation.

This country doesn’t do well with shame and remorse. Like a dysfunctional family, we pretend it isn’t there and so it festers harmfully in a state of non-recognition. If you consider the behavior of our foreign policy in the frame of a family system, the question comes up: are we repeating a mistake now because a generation ago we never acknowledged and mourned properly the mistake of Vietnam? We never, as a whole nation, took the time to ritualize an acknowledgement of the shame of that event, the remorse, the defeat, the waste.

In some ways, the Bush administration is a scapegoat. Sure, we’re in Iraq now because of Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeldt. But the fact is history is repeating itself in an effort to reach an opportunity of healing that never took place after Vietnam. That’s my theory. There are different actors now, there are different reasons, there are not as many casualties, thank God. But we’re about where we were 32 – 34 years ago. We’re scared, we’re worried, but most importantly, our country as a whole is in a state of denial of the shame and remorse we’re experiencing as a result of the atrocities taking place in Iraq. And not just to the Iraqis, but probably even more so the atrocities happening to us.

See, the thing is, we are so deeply connected to one another – that is a spiritual law I am certain of and I think we forget about 99% of the time – we are so deeply connected to each other that ALL of us are fighting the war in Iraq. And the reason I say this is because I believe that any of us, put in that situation as a soldier, would probably commit the same abuses, the same tortures. All of us possess the capacity to do evil, and under the precise conditions – when the enemy is invisible, when our friends are dying bloodily around us, when the level of frustration and anger are so high, and our supervision has effectively condoned it – all of us are prone to committing these kinds of acts as a group, or alone.

What I’m trying to get at here, is not only do we need to acknowledge that all of us as a nation have blood on our hands because it’s the truth. But we need to stand in solidarity and likeness with our soldiers ALSO for the sake of healing, for the sake of grieving as one nation, for the sake of saving the souls of these young soldiers who were put in that situation by their higher-ups; for the sake of acknowledging the shame as one nation.

How do we do this? I think by naming it, by talking about it, by acknowledging it. By honoring our soldiers who are suffering the worst of this useless sacrifice. For the sake of our soldiers we need to share the shame with them and not pin it on them. We need to experience a healthy kind of shame that recognizes there’s no way we can make up for this. We can’t make it up to the children who are losing their parents or the parents who are losing their children. The war will never be over for them – for the family members of fresh casualties, the war is just beginning.

Thank goodness for the arts – for books, for movies, for music, for sculpture – these seem to be the only mediums in which our culture has attempted to address the truth of Vietnam, to give ourselves opportunities to grieve. But these are only voluntary opportunities; eventually we’ll have the same kind of movies and books written about Iraq that we have about Vietnam. But those opportunities aren’t compelling enough to do the kind of grieving work this country desperately needs to cleanse itself as a whole. I know I’m fantasizing here, but wouldn’t it be great if our leadership – whether Republican or Democratic, it doesn’t matter – declared a holiday for the specific purpose of mourning the event of Vietnam? For the specific purpose of acknowledging we made a big mistake? The Wall of Names is great, but the Wall is very quiet.

The fact is Vietnam just wasn’t that long ago. Yesterday Davidson emailed me the interesting factoid that of the 16 million Americans who served in WWII, less than 1/4 are still alive, and about 1,100 are dying every day. So I’m surmising that means that of the Americans who survived serving in Vietnam, at least half are probably still alive. I doubt there’s many people in this room who would not say his or her life has somehow been affected by the Vietnam War. The point is that this recent history is still terribly relevant and for the health of the family history of this country, I think it still needs to be dealt with somehow.

I want to talk more about this war stuff in the context of a country family system history. I learned a lot about WWI and WW2 growing up, especially WW2. I remember that history was totally overwhelming. I don’t know a thing about the Korean War, except that it was Communist related (I think) and that *MASH* was based on it. And then there’s Vietnam which I learned the most about by watching the television series China Beach, which I think was around the late 80’s. I also read Johnny Get Your Gun. Saw Platoon. I loved that show China Beach and almost every week I cried when I watched it. It wasn’t a comedy like MASH; looking back, I’m surprised such honest television was aired for as long as it was.

When I began writing this sermon and the word shame popped up, at first I wondered if I should dismiss it as embarrassing “liberal guilt.” Liberal guilt because I know my Dad didn’t have to fight in Vietnam because at the time he was a member of the educated class – he was a Freshman in college at Duke University when he became subject to the draft. But the reason I know this is more than liberal guilt is because I have inherited from my father the shame he carries surrounding Vietnam. I know I have – otherwise watching those China Beach episodes never would have affected me the way that they did. I was born just around the time the war ended! I didn’t personally lose anyone in that war, as most of my peers didn’t. And yet I know that my generation has inherited the shame and the guilt of that war. What it amounts to is a lot of sadness and that nameless uneasiness around Memorial Day. I guess we’re still figuring out what to do with it. This is just another theory, but I wonder if the generations getting successively more self-destructive has something to do with this nameless shame we’ve inherited. I don’t know.

I’m a sensitive person, so maybe I’ve just paid more attention to it. But I’ll never forget the day when my father and I were canoeing in a pond up in Wisconsin, on a very quiet serene day with no one around. I think I was in High School. Somehow we got on the subject of Vietnam. My father’s shame around Vietnam was made concrete when his roommate in college flunked out of Duke, got drafted, and was killed in the war. So he knows that he escaped a similar fate by the savior of education and being able to succeed at it. Sure there’s some liberal guilt in there, but it’s so much more than that. It’s survivor guilt; this stuff goes way deep into the psyche. It’s the trauma of losing thousands of peers. It’s trauma that goes beyond my comprehension, and yet I’m getting a taste of it watching all these young people die in Iraq.

There’s this song that my father knew about Vietnam, an a capela folk song by the artist Steve Goodman. He started singing it to me that day in the canoe, but he couldn’t get through it all the way because he had to cry.

The song is sung in first person as a young widow of the war. And I want to share it with you because I think one of the best ways to honor our soldiers who have died is to also acknowledge the families that so many soldiers leave behind. Young, just getting started families, young mothers and children. Their sacrifice should also be honored.

This song is called “Penny Evans.”

Oh my name is Penny Evans and my age is 21.

 A young widow in the war that was fought in Vietnam.

 And I have two infant daughters, and I do the best I can –

 now they say the war is over, but I think it’s just begun.

I remember I was 17 when I met young Bill.

 On his father’s grand piano, we’d play good old Heart and Soul.

 And I only knew the left hand part, and he the right so well –

 he’s the only boy I slept with, and the only one I will.

And it’s first we had a baby girl, and we had two good years.

 And it’s next the one a notice came, and we parted without tears –

 it was 9 months from our last good night the second babe appeared.

 It was 10 months and this telegram, confirming all our fears.

Now every month I get a check, from an army bureaucrat.

 And it’s every month I tear it up, and I mail the damn thing back.

 Do you think that makes it alright? Do you think I’d fall for that?

 You can keep the bloody money and it won’t bring my Billy back.

I’ve never cared for politics, and speeches I don’t understand.

 And like wives took no charity from any living man

 But tonight there’s 50,000 gone in that unhappy land;

 50,000 heart and souls being played with just one hand.

And my name is Penny Evans, and my age is 21.

 A young widow in the war that was fought in Vietnam.

 And I have two infant daughters, and thank god I have no sons –

 now they say the war is over, but I think it’s just begun.

– Steve Goodman

I’ve been scouring the Internet the past couple days, looking for stories behind the faces of the American soldiers getting killed in Iraq. I didn’t find as many as I thought I would. And again, I think this is to keep us numb. If we knew too many of the stories of the fine young men and women this country is losing, we’d have to feel that shame head-on.

I think I’ve driven my point home about the suppressed shame that the country is suffering, and the need for it to be expressed on a larger scale so we can be free of its clutches, so we don’t keep passing it on to our children. But I realize that it’s also just plain and simple sorrow that I share with my parents’ generation. The kind of sorrow that will always be with us.

I want to try to end on a positive note; I know this sermon is not uplifting. There’s just no way to sugar-coat what’s going on. But I hope being honest with ourselves can be uplifting, and offer hope for healing, for a healthier future. It’s not “this too shall pass.” What we want to have and work towards are sharing scars from these wars – wounds that have healed but still hurt when we touch them. We can’t pretend they’re not there. These wars, whether we’ve participated in them or not, are a part of who we are, they are a part of our American psyche, they’re a big part of our story. We need to try to integrate this truth into our national identity as well as we can – grow with it – and not ignore it at our peril.

Our soldiers are not victims. If they’re victims, then we’re all victims, and we’re not all victims. They are literally our warriors, they are survivors, they are doing the hardest job in the world. I am very proud of them and I support them as we all must. We’re here because of them.

Those wrinkles in time I mentioned, juxtaposing all our major wars – they’re not so much wrinkles – all those wars stand very close behind us, without the help of a wrinkle in time. The past isn’t nearly as far behind as we think. Vietnam was like yesterday; World War II a short 50 years ago. We are such a young country – just a couple centuries old.

At this time, I’d like to ask anyone here today in church who has served in a war to please stand.

I know it doesn’t sound like much, but it’s the most I can offer and I really mean it,

“Thank you for your service.”

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© Hanna Wells

May 2, 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Don Smith

I remember well the first time I announced to a group of people that I considered myself to be a Transcendentalist. The words had barely crossed my lips when that small – and usually reticent – part of my brain that demands a higher degree of specificity asked “Whatever do you mean by that?”

Well, I wasn’t sure. Maybe I had just been reading too much Emerson, but I doubt it. I don’t believe the things I believe because Emerson also believed them. In fact, there’s a pretty wide gap between my beliefs and Emerson’s on a great many things. Emerson would, no-doubt, say to me “You are no Transcendentalist.” But I also think that if Emerson were alive today a good many of his beliefs would be different.

I read Emerson because I agree with most of what he says about the way we should live – the proper approach to life and nature – and I enjoy the way he expresses the ideas that we share. A lot of the Transcendentalists’ thinking came from the philosopher Immanuel Kant. One of the principle ideas that Kant put forth was that certain knowledge is intuitive – it’s built into the structure of our minds–and is not the result of experience. Knowledge that is of an intuitive nature he called transcendental, thus the term Transcendentalist.

Kant said that we cannot know the real world because we see and understand it through our own perceptions and concepts. Our view of the world is distorted by the way our minds work. From there he, or at least his followers, went on to say that we form our world, and not the other way around.

Ayn Rand once wrote that “Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach.” This may be the case, but I find room in my rational worldview for a little mystery, and I celebrate that mystery as something that adds a wonderful dimension to my life.

If I’m designing a building that has an overhanging beam, I know that I must design for the inflection point – the point at which bending forces in the beam change direction and shear forces are greatest – and I know that I can employ the quadratic equation to find that point. But I never forget that the quadratic equation is no actual thing; it is merely a mental construct. To use Kantian language, there is no ‘thing in itself’ that exists outside our minds.

While I do not believe that the physical world is the product of my thought, I do believe that there is more to matter than it’s molecular and chemical composition. I believe that there are categories of knowledge that are outside the bounds of science, and that things have meanings beyond their physical reality, even if those meanings are created by us and are, therefore, somewhat arbitrary.

I’m comfortable knowing that there are bounds to human knowledge. Many of things that we would want to know are not knowable. I accept this and even embrace it. I choose to view life and the world we inhabit with a sense of mystery and wonder. I celebrate the transcendent things. That’s what I mean when I say that I am a Transcendentalist.

Beyond this way of viewing life – of celebrating the wondrous and the beautiful–I embrace the idea of self-culture as expounded by the New England Transcendentalists. Today we might say self-correction, rather than self-culture. This is a simple idea, really. I have ready work with the correction of my own faults and weaknesses, so I need not worry about yours. Surely there is nothing easier to do than to find fault with others, but easy tasks don’t provide much sense of accomplishment, no matter how well we carry them out.

Another point upon which I agree with the New England Transcendentalists is that we owe it to ourselves to go through life with our eyes wide open, alert to the world and to the ideas that are shaping it. A few weeks ago Dr. Loehr spoke from this pulpit of the concept of G’d as a man fully awake. Emerson lived a life of such mental intensity that Robert Richardson titled his excellent biography of him Emerson: The Mind on Fire. But Thoreau, who knew Emerson as well as any, and better than most, was still able to write in Walden that he had never known a man who was fully awake. “How”, he asked, “could I look him in the face?”

One could easily assume that these people we know as the New England Transcendentalists set the bar too high; that none could possibly reach it. But they were addressing the ideal, the fullest potential of humanity. Why should we not strive toward that goal? If we’re striving toward so high a goal – the goal of being fully awake to life – then it’s of less consequence if we fall short of our goal.

I enjoy living a simple life – a grounded life – even while dreaming of the infinite possibilities that we possess. If this sounds attractive to you, then there might be a little of the Transcendentalist in you too.

PRAYER:

Hannah Wells

As Spring hesitates before it turns into Summer,

let us consider our own hesitations.

Let us take time to confront our fears, and then discount them.

May we let our fears be washed away by a heavy Spring rain,

so we can wake up to a morning like this one, with our hearts calm,

our purpose clear, and the brilliant fire of our souls ready to work.

May we be washed of fears, anxieties, and self-concerns

because we wake up to a morning such as this and are certain that the world needs us.

For while we can notice the beauty that surrounds us,

the world is not only a beautiful place.

As wildflowers wilt in the sun, and bushes drop heavy blossoms,

so too are things falling apart in the fragile world we live in.

Rather than work to meet our needs, may we see that our own needs are met when we work for the needs of others.

May we enlarge ourselves to transcend the self.

May we become so big that our service in the world becomes

our center; our service becomes who we are.

On a morning such as this, after a much needed storm has replenished life, may we also be replenished so we can engage the beauty of the world, its poetry, its natural art.

May we be enchanted.

And may we see that the most poignant beauty of all lies in where the world is broken and hands are busy at its repair, many, many hands, quietly repairing what is broken.

May we find our hands among them, touching this beauty.

May our desire to improve the world and our desire to enjoy the world, become one.

May compassion become our rapture.

Amen.

SERMON:

Let’s begin this morning with a trip down memory lane. Do you remember that certain book you read, perhaps when you were 13, a senior in high school, in college, or early adulthood, that book that completely changed how you understood life and your place in the world? That book that you loved so much because you felt like it enlightened you, made you privy to important knowledge. What book from years ago do you still think about, refer back to, look at life through the lens of?

When I was 13, that book was J.D. Salinger’s Catcher In the Rye. It was so funny to me! Holden Caulfield, a young man, criticizes everything about society with sharp wit, particularly all the expectations of the upper middle class – doing well in college, social climbing, marriage. To him, everything and everyone was so phony. Yeah, I thought when I was 13, I agree. I didn’t want to have to work hard to be “popular” in school, I didn’t want to work hard to earn A’s in my classes either. Holden Caulfield was an awkward middle schooler’s HERO.

Holden Caulfield affirmed my teenage tendencies toward what sociologist Robert Bellah called “expressive individualism.” That was one of the other chunks of reading that left an indelible impression on me, which I read Spring semester of my Freshman year in college. I was a Sociology major, ready to learn how I could save the world, or at least look darn good trying to. Robert Bellah and his team of sociologists published Habits of the Heart in the mid 80’s, a reader-friendly book about how our American values of individualism are impeding on our sense of commitment to public life, to being responsible, civic-minded citizens, and how the kind of church we go to plays a role in this.

Bellah tore the Unitarians apart in this book, charging that there was nothing in this denomination that obligated one to serve the greater good with total commitment; there was nothing rooted in strong religious principles that instructed one to serve his or her community as equivalent to serving the ideals of one’s faith. I remember reading this, and thinking, “my God, he’s right! We Unitarians don’t hold each other to anything!” Bellah goes on to associate the Unitarians with the historical/cultural tradition of “expressive individualism,” and mentions figures like Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, who he said “put aside the search for wealth in favor of a deeper cultivation of the self.” But it was Walt Whitman, Bellah said, who most epitomized the American cultural tradition of “expressive individualism.”

Bellah wrote, “For [Walt] Whitman, success had little to do with material acquisition. A life rich in experience, open to all kinds of people, luxuriating in the sensual as well as the intellectual, above all a life of strong feeling, was what he perceived as a successful life.”

I have this quote hi-lited in the copy I still kept from college. In the margin, is an arrow pointing to it with the word, “Yeah!” I was all for Whitman when I first read this. I remember all the students in this class greatly resisted the ideas in this book, such as wanting a life rich in experience being questionable, as something to be reconsidered or discouraged altogether. We took it out on the professor, who we called a “stodgy nerd with bad breath.” I know that in those years, I wanted to do everything that reeked of Whitman’s definition of “rich experience.” I wanted to travel the world, learn about exotic cultures, back pack in the far reaches of the wild, fall madly in love, run in a field of wildflowers, swim naked in Lake Michigan – whatever was popularly qualified as romantic experience I went after, and did.

Thankfully, my sociology teacher was a gifted educator, and through his lecturing I finally got what the main meat of this book was trying to say: to be an “expressive individualist” is selfish! It’s self-serving, self-absorbed, but most importantly, it limits the actualization of the self since the self can only be actualized within community, within a broader mode of being and acting in larger society. What does this mean? It means that the smaller our scope of attention is in the world, the smaller our sense of connection to humanity becomes, and essentially the smaller we are. If I only focus on myself and what feels good, the less I actually participate in the world, in contributing to the common good, in serving what is larger than myself.

While all those things aren’t bad in and of themselves – the traveling, the hiking, smelling the flowers – I realized that this was only a small part of what life is supposed to be about, of what is truly challenging and enriching, of what is character-building. Those things are good for MY soul – but they have no connection to the WHOLE soul of humanity.

I didn’t figure this all out right away, but eventually in young adulthood I’ve come to realize that it’s only through serving the common good that my life becomes “rich in experience,” or “a life of strong feeling.” It’s only when I forget myself that I can finally become myself. We can only become our best selves in a community of people who know us and trust us and like us. We become known when we work with others toward the spirit of what is good for a shared community – I know now that this is the only way I can find authentic peace and wellness in my life.

If anything, we are the most miserable when we can’t see beyond our own wants and must-haves. People divorce as soon as they perceive that their “needs” aren’t being met. If you think about it, self-absorption is an evil force because it tends to break relationship. It pushes us into isolation. The only way to counter this isolation and separateness is to engage in my interpretation of Emerson’s “Oversoul,” which you read in the Responsive Reading this morning:

“Within us is the soul of the whole; the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One.”

Unfortunately Emerson stops short of being explicit of HOW one can engage this luminous reverence of life. He seems to imply that it is an individual experience. While undoubtedly we’ve all experienced individual moments of grace that seemed rooted in the divine, I would argue with Emerson that such experiences only scratch the surface of engaging what is at the center of the sacred.

Perhaps what is at the center isn’t blissful at all; no rapture, no ecstasy, no enchantment. Perhaps experiencing the divine is only found through a culmination of hard, quiet effort to make the world a better place, to keep life safe and sacred.

This is why the sacred is so elusive! It cannot exist in immediate gratification, it’s impossible. The Transcendentalists of the 19th century seemed to make the mistake that it is easily accessible, if only we paid better attention to our senses, our thoughts, and feelings. But nowadays, that’s the way things are, that’s the entrenched status quo – we are paying too much attention to ourselves. For us living in the post-modern world, the real challenge is to get our minds off ourselves, off our personal stresses and concerns. All this self-improvement seems to have led to a neglected society.

So I propose that Transcendentalism for today is to transcend our selves. How can we act in and experience the world beyond the self? Imagine that who you are can be represented in con centric circles. The small circle in the middle is you. The first circle around you is your family, the next circle your friends, the next circle your church community, the next your local community, the next circle your state, then your country, then finally the biggest circle is the world. It’s like rings in a tree trunk. When our lives act in those bigger circles, we become bigger, stronger, more wise. If we only act in the first tiny circle of our selves, we stay small; we don’t grow.

The American Transcendentalists of the 19th century got one very important thing right. They had faith in the highest ideals of our human capacities; they truly believed that we could successfully serve those ideals. They believed that life could be rich in experience, in beauty. But the problem is that what they defined as beautiful and sublime tended to not go past their noses. It was too self-contained. They trusted in their intuition, but whether their hunches were good or bad, right or wrong, made no difference in the world around them.

The health of our individual mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual states are all very important – I’ve preached many times on how it is essential to heal our wounds in those areas with courage and perseverance. But our healing isn’t complete or as relevant until we are able to give back to the world, or learn how to give for the first time. We work to heal for the same reason we take time to grieve – so we can participate in the world again. That’s when life is beautiful, when we can overcome or transcend our personal struggles to a place where we can give of ourselves fully once more.

The people who are so good at giving have healthy relationships with their egos – that is, they don’t think about their ego that much. They know that caring for their own hearts and minds and souls is an indirect process that happens primarily when they focus on how they can serve others.

Personal healing is important, but we probably don’t need to worry about ourselves as much as we do. I know I’m still trying to learn this. There is a concept in Buddhism called “not-doing.” It means that we let things take care of themselves, we don’t try to over do it, or try too hard. It’s having faith that while we continue to focus on living the best lives we can and be the best people we can be, that our personal issues and problems have a way of solving themselves. Finally we get to a point where we realize we don’t need to be solved – we don’t need to be “fixed.” Things tend to work out when we simply continue to participate well in the world. Our flaws and our so called “personal growth issues” don’t seem to matter as much when we become good at helping others.

When the Trancendentalists talk about trusting their intuition in terms of possessing knowledge that precedes experience, I want to say, ‘yes, that unconditioned knowledge is there, but I can only trust it if it doesn’t have to do with myself. I can trust it and follow it if it points to the highest ideals that serve humanity as a whole.’ I like to think of this trustworthy knowledge that we’re all born with as the knowledge of the Kingdom of God. I believe we all possess it, deep within our psyches, and life is about doing all we can to uncover it, to actualize it. We can discover that the Kingdom has very little to do with the self – the self becomes only a vehicle, a conduit for doing good in the world.

The Kingdom of God not only transcends the self, it actually saves us from the prison of self-absorption,the constant clamor of the ego.

One of my friends is studying the Kabbalah, the teachings of Jewish mysticism. He told me that his teacher explained to him that the constant yammer in our minds that keeps all our attention on ourselves is actually the devil speaking. The voice of our ego is the voice of the devil. I know that sounds heavy-handed, so let’s just use it as a tool of metaphor. I think it’s comforting – because what it means is that that voice of anxiety in my self isn’t my true voice; it isn’t the voice I need to listen to or act on. According to my friend, the Kabbalah teaches that it’s the voices within ourselves that are faint, that are hard to hear that we should be trying to listen to. The quiet voice that says something like, “maybe I need to go over here and see how I can help someone.” That is our true nature, not this ego-driven one.

If we’re going to pay any attention to our intuitions at all, they need to be the intuitions that come from this center, from this sacred center. Not the center of the self, but within those larger circles. Transcendentalism for today ought to focus on attending to what our center is to be; what is the circle of the largest diameter within which we can define ourselves? To what degree shall we transcend ourselves?

When we realize the extent of our power as individuals to act in the world, we come to understand what the Kabbalah teaches, and what some wise philosopher also concluded: that every act we do is either an act of creation or an act of destruction. For the sacred is not only elusive, the sacred is fragile – the Kingdom of God is difficult to access, we know that true moments of grace between human beings are rare. If we are the spiders and the sacred is the web, which connections with the world are we going to extend to? Which parts of the web are we going to repair, slowly, meticulously, but with great intention and purpose?

Sure life is beautiful! The Transcendentalists of the 19th century perhaps served an important historical function of their time – to counter an increasingly industrial mindset, to try to preserve nature against production and development, to uphold a mind set that dismissed an agenda of ruthless progress. That’s still applicable in today’s world. But we need to take more steps outward.

Today we know life has beauty to offer us; that is a given. And it’s well advised that we do recharge our batteries every now and then in nature, that we do spend time just being with ourselves, star-gazing, watching the ants work. YES, there is so much beauty in the world and we are well advised to notice it – God does get mad if we walk by the color purple and don’t notice it.

But what is really going to drive you to act in the best ways possible in the world? To what ideals are you so accountable that they transcend the need to serve the self, that serving these higher ideals becomes a priority, perhaps even your life’s work?

In the Spring of my senior year of college I had to present a final project to the Sociology department. They had given me permission to spend an entire quarter writing poetry, rather than do some kind of social service internship, because I didn’t want to just serve the world, I wanted to be a poet in the world, too. I remember I began the presentation to all my professors and fellow students with a favorite quote from E.B. White. He said,

“It’s hard to know when to respond to the seductiveness of the world – and when to respond to the challenge. If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between the desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world . . . this makes it hard to plan the day.”

May we transcend this quandary. May we discover that, after all – to improve the world and to enjoy the world are in fact the same thing.

May our joy be our service. May our service be our joy.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Hannah Wells

4 April 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Bill Reid

My name is Bill Reid. I have been a member of this church since 1973. For certain periods during this time I was very inactive. I have enjoyed being more involved over the last three or four years. I have become a member of the Worship Associate Program. In this program we suggest topics for the worship services and we participate in the worship services. I posed the topic for today: Where do Unitarian Universalists find absolution? What I mean by absolution is from my dictionary – it is to set free, or release as from some obligation, debt, or responsibility or from the consequences of guilt, sin, or penalty. It is forgiveness for an offense or shortcoming.

In posing the question, I am reminded of the Peanuts cartoon: Linus asks questions like: what is the meaning of life? Why are we here? What is truth? Lucy turns to Charlie Brown and says, “There are more questions than answers, so it’s better to be the one asking the questions.”

How this question arose. I was raised a Southern Baptist. I have since learned that not all Southern Baptists are fundamentalists and believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible. However, the branch I was in was fundamentalist, and I was an enthusiastic and unquestioning Baptist through high school.

Baptists believe that religion is a personal relationship between the human soul and God. The grace of Christ and the mercy of God are available without mediation of any priest or minister. For Baptists, the formal act of baptism is the closest thing they have to absolution. Baptists believe in Baptism by full immersion the way John the Baptist did it in the Bible. It is a public demonstration of faith. The old life of sin is washed away and a new life of faith emerges. Baptism was limited to adults, those mature enough to understand the meaning of baptism. I was baptized when I was about 11 years old. In the Baptist view, I guess I am carrying around all my sins since that time.

Baptists believe that each believer has a duty to proclaim his faith and urge others to accept Christ. This was one of the beliefs that first got me to thinking and doubting. I was supposed to bring others to Christ and the Baptist church, and if I (or some other Baptist) did not make that effort, then the poor unfortunate soul who had never heard of Jesus would die and and go to hell. This seemed like an overwhelming responsibility to me, and it made me feel guilty. Sometimes I would wonder about the Catholic Church and what it would be like to be able to go to confession on a regular basis and be relieved of all my sins by the priest. I did not pursue this.

In any event, I graduated from high school and left home for college and also left the Baptist church behind me.

I had nothing to do with churches for the next 14 years. Then in 1970, I was married, had two young children, had finished law school, and was working in Washington D.C. My wife and I joined a wonderful Episcopal Church and got involved in it. In that church, there are prayers of confession and absolution in the communion service. However, I do not recall a specific ceremony for absolution.

When we returned to Austin in 1973, we joined this church. Our own ceremonies do not include an express confession and absolution, although I have attended ceremonies in this building, such as the winter solstice celebration, in which letting go of old burdens was part of the ritual.

I suspect that nearly all of the world’s religions deal with this problem of how to obtain forgiveness or relief from our shortcomings.

The Lord’s Prayer from the New Testament includes the request for God to “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” I have found this prayer to be a very helpful mantra when I am seeking calm or relief from stress. Often when I am going to sleep, I just repeat the Lord’s Prayer. Whoever wrote it was very wise. I realize that it is in language that many here do not feel comfortable with, but I feel free to use my own definitions and it lets me remind myself that there is somebody or something–other than me–running the world, and that my part in it is relatively minor. It reminds me that I only have to deal with each day as it comes and “our daily bread” is all we really have to have. It reminds me that I have to acknowledge my own shortcomings before I can do anything about them or get help in dealing with them. The prayer helps me remember that it is just as important to be willing to forgive others as it is to ask for forgiveness. This very common and well known prayer helps me find some relief, or absolution. At least it is a start.

The question remains – How do Unitarian Universalists obtain Absolution? I am looking forward to hearing the sermon on this subject.

PRAYER:

God of many names, spirit of life, great mysterious:

 Forgive us our trespasses,

 as we forgive those who trespass against us.

 May we keep it that simple.

May we see that often our greatest sin is to not let our hearts

 receive the blessings that surround us;

 may we wake up to the present moment.

May we see that the more we give, the more we can receive, that to forgive ourselves is to enable us to give more freely to the world.

 In order to give, we must learn how to receive, first.

May we find the courage to distinguish our own sins from the sins of others. May we admit that sometimes it is easier to focus on the shortcomings of others, rather than our own.

May we recognize that our greatest peace lies in acceptance, that it is great wisdom to absolve ourselves of false power. May we recognize how little control we have over so much of what happens.

And yet, may we connect with the source of our true power, may we take action and make use of our greatest strengths.

 May we see the places in our lives where we can choose.

May we keep close to our hearts and our minds that forgiveness is a prime messenger of love, and that it requires no special occasion.

On a daily level, amongst our relationships both precious and incidental, may we contribute to the spirit of a more forgiving world by seeing past the faults of others to their beauty, instead.

Rather than listen for the judgements, we can listen for the beauty.

May we listen for the goodness in others, as others listen for the goodness in us. 

Amen.

SERMON:

I began one of my last sermons by talking about the psychic I saw last June. That seemed to work so I’m going to try it again. I felt like this woman gave me a lot of helpful information about my family. She said that people tend to inherit their parents’ battles, who inherited the same kinds of battles from their parents and so on. Certain subconscious beliefs are passed down through the generations. She told me about one that my family had, that she thought went back many generations, and was on both sides of my family, both my mother’s and my father’s.

She said that we harbor a very, very subconscious belief – deep within ourselves – that we cannot be forgiven. This rang true to me as soon as she said it. Of course the question arises, what do we think it is about ourselves that is unforgiveable? But that doesn’t matter. All of us do things time and again that we’re not proud of, that we experience shame over. If we believe we CAN be forgiven, over time we let go of those negative feelings about ourselves and are free to grow in character. But in my family’s case, according to the psychic and for whatever reason, we believe somewhere down deep within ourselves that we cannot be forgiven. And regardless of why this belief exists, what’s important to understand is what effect this belief can have on how we live our lives.

The reason I bring up this personal family business is because it’s a good way to frame what the heart of the matter is when we talk about absolution. Because I think that this subconscious belief that one can’t be forgiven is probably not unique. Perhaps I’m projecting here, but to be hard on oneself seems to be an archetypal American trait, going back to the stringent standards of the Protestant work ethic that this country was built on, that still runs it. Our earliest ancestors on American soil had to work very hard – and to this day, I think we hold ourselves to very high standards of hard work and accomplishment. It’s a very prominent source of our identity; many of us depend on it to tell us who we are. I know I do.

But what if you think you aren’t who you ought to be? What if you don’t think you measure up to the high standards you set for yourself? I suppose this might lead you to think that there’s something wrong with you, that you’re not good enough; that there’s something about you that can’t be forgiven.

So when we talk about absolution, we’re not just talking about forgiveness. Forgiveness is one of those loaded terms that can lose its integrity if it’s given or received too easily. Before we can be forgiven, what is at stake is whether or not we believe we are WORTHY of that forgiveness. We can throw the word forgiveness around all we want, but what’s really in question is whether or not we believe we DESERVE it. Underneath the fancy theological word absolution, and even underneath the more user-friendly word of forgiveness, is the very plain matter of self-worth.

Because we can’t receive anything that we don’t allow ourselves to receive. We are the gate-keepers of our own hearts. Things like love, compassion, and forgiveness – we only get as much of these things as we allow ourselves to, no matter how much is freely offered to us. Whatever we believe is true about ourselves has a tremendous effect on who in fact we are. Luckily we seem to have more control over the beliefs we are conscious of. But what about the beliefs we don’t even know we’ve already convinced ourselves of?

From thinking a lot about this matter of unforgiveableness in my own family, I’ve come up with some observations of the consequences of it. The effect of this subconscious belief seems to go one of two ways. The first is that you try to make up for it. You go through life with this deep dent in your self-worth and are constantly trying to compensate. You over-achieve, you work too hard, you’re rarely satisfied with what you do accomplish. You notice the flaws more than the victories. And what ends up happening is you do indeed accomplish a lot, and while you gain the respect and admiration of those around you, you have a hard time giving yourself the same credit. You think, well, I could have done this better . . . you end up doing so many different things all the time that there’s never really a chance to breathe and just be. You’re constantly on the go, and to sit idle becomes so foreign to you that it’s actually uncomfortable.

The second set of tendencies you have if you subconsciously believe you can’t be forgiven is to live life in fear. A self-fulfilling prophecy of penance unravels. You don’t try for fear of failure. You get stuck in places you’re unhappy in, but don’t have the courage to get out of. Of course the resentment and anger builds up over time where you forget you’re the person who made yourself angry in the first place – the anger spills over to those around you.

Perhaps what is most damaging about both of these mind-sets is that we are cut off from our spiritual selves. What is true for both of these is that we never believe we are good enough just as we are. Just as I am without one plea . . . there’s a reason that song is so powerful when Christians are called to the alter at revivals. What is damaging about being cut off from our spiritual selves is that we cannot think of ourselves apart from the outside factors that define us – factors like career success, material wealth, our reputation, our family’s reputation. We cannot think of ourselves beyond these things because WE DON’T KNOW WHO THAT PERSON IS. We are estranged from the part of us that makes us whole. Do you know who your spiritual self is?

There are lots of metaphors to describe the spiritual self. I’ve always been fond of thinking of my spiritual self as the child within me – that little girl who I think is good no matter what. It’s the part of you that you can just be with and not judge – not hate and maybe not even love – but just know is good.

I’ve always loved the beginning of Genesis – it’s probably my favorite part of the Bible. “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. God saw that the light was good . . . And God said, ‘let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear’ . . . and God saw that it was good . . . Then God said ‘let the land produce vegetation’ . . . And God saw that it was good . . . And God said ‘let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years’ . . . And God saw that it was good . . . And God saw that it was good” and on down through creation.

It’s a beautiful beginning to the Bible because it says that life is from goodness. After 7 days of making everything, including humans, “God saw all that he had made, and it was VERY good.” This story doesn’t have to be true for it to be true – in the same way that there doesn’t have to be a God to believe in God. All of us come from this – from this beginning, from this goodness.

I’m pretty sure this is close to what the early Universalists had in mind when they reclaimed the notion of universal salvation, the belief that everyone – no matter what – is saved. The modern translation is that we are held in love, and we return to love. AND – the reason this is so is because we are forgiveable.

But what if being forgiven by God has no meaning for us? I think this is what Bill had in mind when he came up with this topic. Confession seems like such an easy out; you can even do “virtual confession” on-line nowadays at www.confession-online.com. Baptism might also seem like play-acting and superstitious. But I have to admit when I read Bill’s affirmation of faith, his description of the ritual really struck me: “For Baptists, the formal act of baptism is the closest thing they have to absolution. Baptists believe in Baptism by full immersion the way John the Baptist did it in the Bible. It is a public demonstration of faith. The old life of sin is washed away and a new life of faith emerges.” I looked at Bill and I said, “Wow. What if it really was that simple?”

Again, it makes me wonder that such a ritual doesn’t have to be true for it to be true. That’s the power of ritual – we make a public statement, or perform a ritual in community with others, in order to affirm: this is who I am. This is what I believe is true about myself. If what we believe about ourselves becomes in large part who in fact we are, then again, it is this matter of self regard that we really need to hone in on.

Perhaps religious liberals such as ourselves have a hard time with simple rituals because we don’t want to admit that in fact it is that simple; it doesn’t need to be complicated. Maybe all our high brow talk and intellectualism is preventing us from admitting what is just simple and always true: that we’re all children of God, children of the universe. That in the beginning it was good, and it’s STILL good. That for all our faults, screw-ups, and shortcomings, nothing can change this and we will never lose the capacity to be forgiven.

Like the Baptists, the early Unitarians believed that the grace and mercy of God was available to us without the mediation of a priest or minister, and eventually we felt that it was available to us without the need of a God. We trusted that we ourselves could choose the correct path in life because humanity was endowed with free moral agency. In other words, we can empower ourselves “to do the right thing.” There’s a phrase that sums up the early theology of our forebears pretty well: ‘the Universalists believed God was too good to damn them, and the Unitarians believed they were too good to be damned.’

I think there are three things that need to be in place in order for us to find absolution. The first is what I’ve been talking about already, this business of making sure we are ready to receive it, that we really believe we are worthy of it. I guess this will come easier to some than others.

I think that when each of us reach a certain point of maturity, we can become aware of what the recurring theme is of our life. It’s like an entrenched script written on our souls that we find ourselves reading again and again. It creates the subconscious beliefs we don’t even know we are convinced of. Likely it does go back many generations. Do you know what yours is? Because that seems to be the first step and only way to ensure that we get to write our OWN scripts, and not the scripts that were passed down to us.

We have a choice in life – we can think of ourselves as warriors or as victims. As a warrior we know we have to take action. No one’s going to do it for us. We acknowledge our free will, that we get to choose, and we take advantage of it. So it is this first step of absolution that is up to us, that essentially we do have to do on our own, which can involve the support of others, but in essence begins only with ourselves. We have so much power! I don’t agree with the early Unitarians, that we can be trusted to act out of a self-initiated morality – that doesn’t ring true to me. I think we are too self-indulgent for that. I do, however, think that we constantly underestimate the extent of our own power to dictate the direction our lives take. As soon as we fall into victim mode, we give up this power.

The second thing we have to do toward absolution is make sure we understand what we need to be forgiven for. This is about boundaries. Often we take on guilt and remorse that isn’t really ours. We blame ourselves for the mistakes and shortcomings of someone else. We let our sense of responsibility for ourselves spill over to others where it doesn’t belong. The operative psych. jargon here is co-dependency. Sometimes we think it’s easier to take on the faults of others than to face our own. It does take courage to figure out whose sins are whose. In close relationships, we sometimes think we’re the ones who are doing something wrong, when actually we haven’t done ANYTHING wrong. Sometimes instead of seeking absolution we need to instead identify what could be emotional abuse. Sometimes we need disillusionment more than absolution. It’s interesting that both words share the same Latin root of the verb, lucere, to shine, be light, be clear, to be apparent. In both disillusionment and absolution, we are being led toward the light, toward the safety of awareness.

I think it goes without saying that, when we do really make a mistake, we must have willingness to admit to our wrong-doing, to seek amends. Anyone who seeks absolution has probably gotten that far. The third and final thing that has to be in place is very important, and it’s what saves us from our isolation and reintroduces us to our spiritual selves. As powerful as we can be as individuals, no absolution can take place without the aid of another human being. Our self-sufficiency has its limits. It doesn’t need to be a priest or a minister, but it can be. Whether it’s to make amends to another person, or to admit to another human being the nature of our wrongs, this exchange between yourself and another has to take place.

It’s an incredibly important part of the 12 step program of Alcoholics Anonymous, because it’s believed that if you don’t find the peace absolution offers, you will not be able to stay sober for any considerable length of time. Alcoholics can’t afford to have things like guilt, remorse, anger, and resentment troubling us because it will lead back to drinking. That’s why we learn to be more forgiving and let things go more easily, and make more amends than is probably necessary. “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Like Bill, that’s also my favorite part of the Lord’s prayer. It’s simple and uncomplicated. It’s a good way to live. And it’s not about the “Lord.” It’s just about being able to let go.

We can’t repair the relationship to our spiritual self alone – we need the help of others to do it. It’s give and take. It is just as important to forgive as it is to be forgiven.

So this is where we find absolution – when we reunite with the spiritual part of our world that makes us whole. This healing of relationship can only be done in community because the spiritual self does not exist in isolation – it is the part of us that connects to all of humanity – and it is “good.” It’s remembering this that reminds me that I am good – good enough, as I am.

I come from love, I am held in love, and I return to love. That’s the script I’m learning to follow. My soul re-writes and re-reads it all the time so I don’t forget.

What re-writing do you need to do? Re-writing our scripts in life is how we let go, it’s how we forgive. It’s learning to love. We cannot love unless we have accepted forgiveness, and the deeper our experience of forgiveness is, the greater is our love.

So let us go seeking peace, and offering love.

Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Hannah Wells

March 14, 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Two Poems By Herman Nelson:

Hold to that Breed (Kyrielle)

For all who hiked life’s rugged trail

to find new paths, triumph or fail.

A search for Truth, their only creed.

Hold firmly to that precious breed.

To those who bartered all to teach,

and sow their Truths in hope to reach

some mind to nourish fertile seed.

Hold firmly to that precious breed.

Those friends whom you can count in strife,

remain steadfast throughout your life,

such loyalty is rare indeed!

Hold firmly to such precious breed.

Our 49th

“Till death us do part!”

When young, in love,

those are only words.

It is not until they act,

you learn their meaning.

This 49th anniversary

of our wedding day,

without you,

I ruminate this knowledge.

I chew it up

unable to spit it out.

It is bittersweet

with the joy of you in memory,

the despair of living on and on

without your light to guide me.

I find solace in our children.

We mingle in their blood – ever –

and the blood of their children

and their children’s children

to the end of all eternity.

Sleep, now, my love, my lover,

and do not dream,

for dreams, spawn pain,

however pleasant.

You are eternal as atoms.

Wait for me.

Let us ride the stars together.

PRAYER:

The Ides of March are upon us, “beware the Ides of March!”

What have we to fear?

May we seek the wisdom of confronting our fears within ourselves, and not without. May we see that the fear we give permission to, can be asked to leave. May we not betray ourselves.

May we see that we can change our minds. That, even our most prized notions of integrity and self-reliance may in fact be the enemies of pride and separation, disguised.

May we know who our true friends are. May we know that humility and gratitude for life can be embodied in reaching out to these friends in our times of need.

May we see that the power to nurture what we choose to is in our own hands. We can nurture our fears, or we can nurture health and wholeness through actions, through initiative, through allowing ourselves to be known.

And may we see that it is in our power to ensure what is most important of all: that we do not have to be alone, that there are friends to make in unlikely places.

In a world that demands our attention, that demands our allegiance to icons that can seem hollow and distant, may we put our faith in what is in us and among us, and is most easily seen and touched:

Our intimacy and affection for each other – may we give it more freely, and when we are given it,

may we receive it.

Amen.

SERMON:

When I was very depressed at the beginning of last summer, I decided to go see a psychic who had been referred to me by a friend with very high recommendations. When you’re depressed enough, you’ll try anything! I thought she might be able to provide me with some hope and direction for the future – I figured even if she was a crackpot, I could still use the placebo effect!

I went to her house and we sat in her garden. She began by asking me questions “to get a feel for me,” she said. She asked me who were the dead people hanging around me, and I said I didn’t know, perhaps my grandmother. Already I eyed her suspiciously. She asked me why I was carrying so much pain in my body and I explained about the surgery on my left shoulder, and the slipped disk in my lower back. Then she asked me a question that absolutely knocked the breath out of me. She asked, “who sees you?”

Three simple words. It took my breath away because it got right down to the bottom of my loneliness. Who sees me? Meaning, who understands me? Who sees the REAL me? Not the me who tries to look good in front of others, or tries to please whoever I think needs pleasing, but sees me inside and out, all my passions, all my secret fears, all the bare, honest parts of me that show who I really am?

At first, because of the sadness and self-pity I was feeling at the time, I drew a blank. My god, I wondered, does anybody really see me? Am I really this alone? But then I smiled with relief because I remembered. Of course. I answered the psychic’s question, “my friends see me.” And then I added, “my friends keep me sane.” She laughed and said, “yes, that’s what friends are for.”

And so I want to begin this morning by posing the same question to you: “WHO SEES YOU?” Who is there in your life that you can let every single guard down for, with whom you can let your super-ego take a rest. Who sees the parts of you that so often seem to go unnoticed? And these don’t have to be the wounded parts of you – perhaps they’re the sides of you that you absolutely love but one would have to know you pretty well to see them. Maybe it’s the side of you who is sensitive to beauty, has a sly sense of humor, or cares very, very deeply about something. Who sees and understands where you are vulnerable? The parts of you where you lose your adultness, and become like a child again? Who can see all these things about you?

It is often not our parents or our children who can see these things. It’s because we can never be quite on the same level with them. We can never have the shared experience of living in the same generation. Have you ever imagined what it would be like to meet one of your parents as a peer, as the same age you are now? I’ll never forget my father’s reaction to the last scene of the Kevin Costner movie, Field of Dreams. In this scene, through a magical baseball field, a father comes back from the dead as the same age of his son, who is living. They are both in early adulthood, and the father is even a little younger than the son. Imagine meeting your parents even younger than yourself!

There had been ill will between the father and son, and it truly was a dream – to get a chance to reconcile this relationship with a simple game of catch. But what was truly dreamlike about this meeting was juxtaposing a father and son as peers. As two peers who could easily be friends. It was like Kevin Costner’s character couldn’t see the vulnerability in his father and have compassion and forgiveness for him until he saw him as he was as a young man.

I had never seen my father cry and I was in High School. He cried the whole way home in the car and my mother had to drive. I know that my father didn’t feel like he ever had much of a father-son relationship with his dad, let alone a friendship with him. My grandfather was still alive at the time, too, but it was obvious my father was mourning for what was irretrievably lost: to do the things that so many boys do with their fathers as they grow up. Just playing catch.

It’s important to make distinctions about age differences when we talk about friendship. At a senior lunch I attended recently at the church, Stan Hutchison and some others got on the subject of friendship. Stan said there’s a difference between the friends you make before you’re forty and the friends you make after you’re forty. I asked him later why he thought this was?

“Because when you’re younger,” he said, “there’s more energy for friendships, there’s more time and energy to get out and do stuff. There’s a bond in those older friendships. Those are the kinds of friends that you could drop in from out of town anytime without warning and knock on their door. But when you get older, you become more consumed by the relationships in your family.”

Many of us long to be friends with our parents and our children, and we are lucky when there is that semblance of friendship. But even when that is true, they are not the same as the friendships we have with our peers. It has something to do with what Jesus once said: “A prophet is not rejected except in his own town and in his own family and in his own house.”

What does that mean exactly? No, we are not prophets, but each one of us has a ‘prophet-part.’ Basically what this means is that there are parts of us that our families of origin will never “get,” because there are parts of us that have to grow away from them. Try as they might, our parents and our children will never see exactly who we are. The gulf of difference between children and parents is actually supposed to be a kind of soaring grace, and Kahlil Gibran picked the perfect metaphor to describe it in his poem of The Prophet. He talks about not being able to understand your children because they belong to the future “which you can never visit, not even in your dreams.” Then he compares parents to the bow and children to the arrows. He says to the parents, “The Archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and bends you with might that the arrows may go swift and far. Let you bending in the Archer’s hand be for gladness.”

What an image! That the effort of parenthood produces a soaring arrow! It is this prophet-part of us that is one of the greatest distinctions between childhood and adulthood. It is the part of us that, once actualized and known to ourselves, marks a milestone of differentiation from our parents. No matter how much love there is between children and parents, there’s always going to be parts we don’t see. And this goes both ways – our children will never see us completely, either. As human beings, each one of us could not possess such a unique spark if we were so easily understood by our families.

To me, this is the absolute spice of life, this is humanity’s most enchanting quality – that we are each so different. What this means is that one of life’s greatest challenges is to understand others and to be understood. I don’t think we can overestimate the importance of being understood.

In a sermon about friendship, it’s important to talk about loneliness. It is strange how, as the population grows bigger, more people live alone and feel isolated. And when family life fails us, we can feel isolated in a home full of people. I am convinced that the number one ill effect of modernity is isolation. So much of modernity contains this dehumanizing side effect, whether it’s technology or increased competition in a market society – it is all compounded by one of the most foundational American values: self-reliance. Emerson meant well, but it is an inflated emphasis on self-reliance that can serve to keep us isolated from one another. There are times when we can’t and shouldn’t rely on ourselves alone. When you’re feeling bad, how good are you at asking others for support? Do you hesitate and try to figure it out by yourself, first?

They say that’s what friends are for, and that is absolutely true. We cannot be understood unless we allow ourselves to succumb to times of weakness in our lives. Times when we need to confide in another and say, “I don’t know.” Whether it’s with partners or friends, we need this intimacy in our lives to come to our full humanity, to understand and to be understood. Paula Weisner, a member of this church who has been a mentor to me, has a certain way of describing intimacy: intimacy, means ‘in-to-me-see.’ It’s only when you allow others to ‘in-to-me-see’ that this very human emotional need can be met.

There are many different kinds of friendships with different levels of intimacy – but what’s more interesting from a spiritual point of view is how friendship functions as nourishment for the soul.

One thing I’ve noticed in my studies for ministry is that friendship seems to be overlooked as an essential part of our spiritual lives. Where in the Bible does it talk about friendship? There are not too many places. Did Jesus have friends? Followers are not friends. Did Jesus ever talk about the human need for friendships? Not according to the authors of the gospels. One thing that is quite overlooked when people talk about Jesus is the fact that Jesus himself needed salvation, that he himself was in search of it, and that much of his teachings come out of a deep drive to be loved himself, to be understood. I believe this is true because I believe he was merely a human, like you and me.

In liberal religion, we tend to speak of salvation as worldly, and I believe very strongly that one place we find this salvation is in our friendships – to be profoundly understood is a kind of salvation. Salvation in friendship can come about in two important ways:

The first is what I have been speaking of – to be seen, to be known, to be understood in all our complexity and vulnerability and beauty. The second has very much to do with the conventional theology of salvation: to be forgiven. To be forgiven, despite our faults and our mistakes, despite our ‘sins.’ I don’t think most of us buy into the traditional theology of absolution – that Jesus died for our sins. I don’t think most of us are consciously concerned with whether or not God forgives us. But we do care that our loved ones forgive us, we do care that our friends forgive us for our mistakes, we do care that our friends accept us as we are.

Because as you know, friendships can have as many ups and downs as any other kind of close relationship. All of the aspects of love – passion, tenderness, separation, anxiety, anger, disillusionment, even triangles and unrequited affections – essentially all the emotions that render us human – emerge in friendship.

I know who my best friends are – they’re the ones that no matter how badly I screw up they’re not going anywhere. There’s nothing I could do that would make them stop loving me. It is a lot like ‘God’s love’ that traditional Christianity speaks of. It’s unconditional. Personally, I can find salvation in God’s love. However, quite frankly, I prefer the love of my friends over the love of a God who can seem abstract and distant. I know God is in me and loves me and has much to offer and teach me – but I need the down-to-earth, laughing, crying, hugging love of a friend more. It means more to me to talk with my close friends than to talk with God.

That has a classic heretical ring to it, doesn’t it? But it’s because life is for the living! For now! On this earth, in this present moment! It’s the people we can touch with our hands, hear with our ears, and see with our eyes that matter the most. I’m a Universalist – I already know God forgives me, that’s a done deal! But it is in and among the living where I seek unconditional love. It is within human relationship where true salvation comes to pass in this life. That is the Kingdom of God Jesus spoke of.

It is the kind of salvation Frodo experiences when Sam Wise doesn’t give up on him, even though Frodo cast him away toward the end of his dangerous journey. Sam Wise knows that his friend is going through a rough time, a rough patch – and he knows his friend well enough that he didn’t really mean what he said – he knows his friend still needs him and he stands by, and forgives Frodo without a thought. And quite literally, he saves him. I realize that’s not how it was written in the book, but nevertheless it’s comforting that these kinds of friendships are being modeled in our mainstream media.

And what about the unlikely friendships in our lives that turn out to be some of our greatest blessings? There is a story in the Bible that speaks of this well. The Book of Ruth. Ruth, who is of a different ethnic background than her mother-in-law Naomi, and has no incentive to follow her back to Judah, where people of Ruth’s kind are hated, says this: “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go, I will go, and where you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.” It’s amazing what good can come when we don’t burn bridges! There is a definition of evil that says evil is the rupturing of relationship. So the opposite must be to salvage relationship. Perhaps the opposite of evil is not “good” – which is such a subjective term, but simply ‘relationship.’

I interviewed Herman Nelson for this sermon because I wanted to hear about his wife Helen, who died just over a year ago. Davidson remembers vividly the memorial service held for Helen at the church. “There were droves of people!” he said, and with some reflection he said, “I think it was because Helen was a good friend. She had many, many friends.”

Herman confirmed this and said Helen was always honest, straight-forward with everyone, and that she cared about people. He could not stress that point enough, how much she really cared about others. When she was ill, some women at the church here made her a lap blanket, and when she received it, the first thing she did was make a list of other people in the church who could use a lap blanket. She really paid attention to the needs of others.

She was a good listener, “which was lucky for me!” Herman said. Helen was good at keeping in touch with people – she loved to write very newsy letters to her friends who were far away from her. But perhaps the quality that attracted friends to her most was this: she could overlook their faults. And as Herman put it, “you dismiss the faults of others because you know you have your own.” Forgiveness is a natural, mutual extension of friendship, and Helen seemed to know this. When she heard the news that she had pancreatic cancer, the first thing she said was, “It’s been a good life.”

Talking about Helen brought up many memories for Herman. But it wasn’t until we’d already been talking for a half an hour that he paused, and held tears at bay to say, “it wasn’t just love! We were friends.” I asked him what he thought the difference was between love and friendship, and while sometimes there can be differences, after a few minutes we concluded that there can’t be true love without friendship. So it is friendship that is the foundation love is built on.

I would like to share a friendship story of my own. It’s my favorite one. When I was a freshman in High School, I met Erin, who had just moved to Illinois from Texas. Erin was different – she dressed different, she was a bit rebellious, and I thought she was very cool. We had lots of fun together. But Sophomore year brought personal crisis into Erin’s life and one of the results was dropping me as a friend. I was devastated! It was my first broken heart. I was sad for months about it, but slowly it turned into an uneasy hatred, and even though we had classes and worked as waitresses at the same retirement village together, we did not speak to each other.

The last thing we did together as friends was go to the local aquarium to buy fish for our fresh water fish tanks at home. That day I bought a beautiful creme colored Angel fish, that when the sun light shone on its scales, they turned iridescent colors. I LOVED that fish, and I let this fish have the whole fish tank to itself, because that’s what Angel fish prefer, anyway. Whenever I entered my bedroom the fish would greet me by coming up to the corner of the fish tank. That fish stayed alive almost throughout the rest of High School, well into the Spring of my Senior year. One day I noticed the fish tank’s heater had become unplugged, but for some reason, I didn’t plug it back in. I was too distracted by senior year.

A day or two later the fish died. And I held myself responsible for not plugging the heater back in. How could I? I felt terrible. I remembered I had bought that fish with Erin and I thought the only way I could feel better was if I called her up, even though our estrangement had gone on for two whole years. I guess I figured I had nothing to lose.

We talked for two hours. And toward the end of the conversation, Erin told me that she was a lesbian. It was the first time anyone had ever come out to me. It made sense, then – she had figured it out around our Sophomore year and didn’t know how to handle feelings she was having for me, for other girls in our group of friends she had abandoned.

We graduated a few weeks later after that telephone conversation, and it didn’t happen right away, but eventually we became very close friends again. She was just here with her partner and their new baby at Christmastime – they listened to me preach in the cry room. And you may have seen them recently on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, as they just got married in San Francisco and have received a lot of media attention with a very cute 8 month old baby.

Erin and I often wonder if we would still have become friends again if I hadn’t called the night my fish died. How else could she have safely come out to me, how else could we have begun to build our trust in each other anew? I realize now that in the same way I gave the fish space to herself, that was what Erin had needed too – she had needed space for herself. And even though I loved that fish, I am so glad that it died!

There’s a song I learned in Girl Scouts that is sung in a round: Make new friends, but keep the old, one is silver and the other’s gold. Stan is probably right – that the friends we make before we’re forty are different from the friends we make after we’re forty. Even at 30, I’m finding fewer opportunities to make the kinds of friends I have from High School and College. But this is a product of what kind of lives we have – we can choose to reach out more. We are never too old to make new friends.

And no matter how many years have passed – I assure you this never matters – we can track someone down and rebuild. Or we can rebuild the broken friendships that are nearer to us. It’s never too late to make the ‘dead fish call.’ When we give a friend who has hurt us another chance, we are doing sacred work because we are giving permission for relationship to bloom once more.

If it is true, as I believe, that the Kingdom of God Jesus spoke of as among us and in us is the salvation we find in human relationship, then to heal and nurture our friendships is sacred work. And to make an unlikely friendship possible is radical sacred work – when we choose to make the conditions possible for such an unlikely friendship to sprout in. We are surrounded by seeds of potential friendships!

I need to help the good seeds grow, until they’re close enough to “in-to-me-see.” Because I need that “in-to-me-see.” I’m betting that you do, too.

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© Hannah Wells

15 February 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Noelle Davis

In the fall of 2000, I moved to Texas to make a fresh start. A few months later I began attending this church, returning to my Unitarian roots. One of the first Sundays I attended the public forum and the topic was drug policy reform. I had never heard of drug policy reform. I sat on edge while the speaker answered questions I had never thought to ask. As soon as he stopped speaking I went to volunteer. I was so excited that there were other people, in Austin, who wanted to change the drug laws. People who understood the laws and could help me understand how I could help change them.

I had never understood why alcohol is legal and marijuana isn’t. I’ve watched alcohol destroy several of my friend’s lives while the people I know who occasionally smoke marijuana recreationally don’t suffer any adverse affects. In fact, most of the pot smokers I know are well educated professionally employed contributing members of society with no criminal record.

I started reading books and researching on the Internet about the history of the war on drugs. I learned that just as the prohibition of alcohol was being repealed, because it hadn’t worked, the prohibition and demonization of other drugs, and certain classes of people, was just beginning. I learned that Nixon officially declared the war on drugs in the early 70’s with the goal of eradicating all illegal drugs from our society and the planet. Conveniently he neglected to mention how this was going to happen and by when. I studied surveys of junior high and high school students compiled over the last 30 years since the war began and noticed no significant change in the rate of student drug use. I read my pocket constitution and realized that current drug laws were blatantly unconstitutional by the time I finished reading the preamble. And the best part of this journey was when I discovered that there were thousands of people from all over the world working to spread the message that drug use should be addressed as a public health problem, not a criminal justice issue. I decided it was, and still is, my moral obligation to join them in calling for compassionate harm-reducing policies – no matter how long it takes till we are heard.

I began to volunteer with local drug reform groups, helping to organize rallies and tabling at events and conferences. In July of 2001 I helped to organize and promote the Tulia Freedom Ride. We raised money in order to take two busloads of Austin area and national activists up to the panhandle town of Tulia, to participate in the Never Again Rally, which marked the two-year anniversary of the now infamous drug sting. For those who are not familiar with what happened, in the summer of 1999, police arrested 43 people, 12 percent of Tulia’s Black population, on charges of distributing small amounts of cocaine. The arrests were based solely on the testimony of a white undercover deputy who worked unsupervised on the streets and had no photos, sound recordings or witnesses to back up his allegations. Only five of the accused had a previous criminal record but the juries handed down sentences ranging from 20 to 300 years. Thankfully, this past summer Governor Perry finally pardoned the sting victims.

The Never Again Rally turned out to be a great success. I had never felt so empowered, so connected to the world. I was proud of my work and began trying to figure out how I could get a job that fulfilling.

Well here I am, two and a half years later, happy to say I figured it out. Last fall my partners and I wrote a grant with the goal of starting a new organization whose mission it would be to guarantee that seriously ill patients have safe and legal access to medical marijuana under their doctors supervision. We plotted a strategy that would enable us to identify, educate and inspire Texans to embrace this mission and influence their elected officials to vote for medical marijuana legislation. We received the grant, so I am now the director of Texans for Medical Marijuana.

I decided to focus my energy on educating people about the need for safe and legal access to medical marijuana because for many this medicine is the difference between life and death. And while some patients can advocate for themselves, others are to sick. And many people I have spoken with are afraid to come forward because of our zero tolerance policies. There is no mercy in the war on drugs, a war on people. There is no room for compassion, only prosecution, and that just doesn’t sit well with my heart.

I have been blessed with a healthy body and a persistent mind. I choose to advocate for others because it is my way of giving back, of saying thank you for my gifts. I dream that people will learn about our campaign and contact us so they can participate. I don’t expect anyone to feel the passion for this issue that I do. We are all called to support different issues. But I do dream that during this next year people will care enough to sign our petition, write a letter of support or make a phone call to their elected officials, and let others know about our mission. Sometimes it only takes a little time to be the change you wish to see in the world.

PRAYER

Did we get enough love yesterday, on a day designated to express love? Does everyone we love, know how much we love them?

May we see that every day is a day to freely express our love, for all we have is today.

If you are lonely, if your heart suffers, remember you are never alone. The creative force of the universe never stops moving, never stops loving you. You are held in love.

If you are afraid, if your spirit suffers, remember the reserve of courage deep in the pit of you is waiting to be tapped. May you hear this call of your own courage, which tells you that fear is the invitation to change and rebirth.

And if you are in pain, if your body suffers, remember you do not have to be strong. You may do what you must to relieve your pain, you may surrender to your body’s natural instincts, which crave health and healing, and an end to pain.

May our minds listen closely to the call of our hearts, and may our hearts listen closely to the call of the spirit, or that which is so mysterious to us. May we remember that often things are so not what they seem.

We are not separate from each other; that is an illusion. Our minds, our bodies, and our spirits are all connected. Your suffering is another’s suffering, and the pain of another is also your pain.

May the truth of our connectedness sit firmly in the front of our minds, so that the stirrings of our hearts may be confirmed. May we ensure that the right thoughts can precede the right actions of compassion.

May compassion blossom from thought to action.

Amen.

SERMON:

The Case For Medical Marijuana: A Human Rights Issue

Just a few weeks ago, I met Vanessa in Oakland, CA. Vanessa is an executive administrative social worker, about 40 years old. She has Lupus, several herniated disks in her lower back, and rheumatoid arthritis. A few years ago, she had to get around in a wheel chair, and was ready to end her life because she said her life wasn’t worth living. “I was serious about checking out,” she told me. She had looked into what her family would receive from her life insurance policy, and she figured out the right combination of pills to take for a lethal dose. She had a lot of pills to choose from.

Each day her doctors had her take an arsenal of pharmaceutical painkillers: 2400 milligrams of Neurontin – a drug designed to block nerve pain. “2400 milligrams is the highest dose you can give someone without killing them” she told me. 40 milligrams of Oxycontin on slow time release; another 40 milligrams of Oxycodone to wait for the Oxycontin to take effect. Oxycontin is the drug Rush Limbaugh became addicted to. 50 milligrams of Methodon – another highly addictive drug which brittles the bones; 80 milligrams of Paxil, an anti-depressant drug which also serves as a pain blocker, 40 milligrams of Valium, and Deladid as needed, the pharmaceutical equivalent of heroin. All this, each and every day, in addition to fibroid medication.

“I can cut all this in half,” she said, “and sometimes by two thirds if I have medical marijuana.” Vanessa came to the Bulldog coffee shop in downtown Oakland in December of 2002. The Bulldog coffee shop is one of the better known medical marijuana dispenseries in Oakland, in the heart of what is fondly known as Oaksterdam, a spin off of the famous European city Amsterdam, where drugs of all kinds have been legalized for many years. From the street, Bulldog looks like any other stylish urban coffee shop, and anyone can order a hot tea or double cappuccino once they’re inside. If you were a tourist, you actually wouldn’t know that it’s anything other than a coffee shop. But if you have an ID that says you have permission to obtain medical marijuana, you can go in back through a door to a small room that has a booth where sandwich bags of marijuana are sold to patients. You can only get a medical marijuana ID if a doctor has recommended marijuana as a treatment.

Vanessa doesn’t need a wheel chair anymore. She can get around on her own two feet, and she was able to return to work within a few months of smoking marijuana on a daily basis. “There was no way I could work on all those pharmaceutical drugs,” she said. “They turned me into a zombie.”

Not only did all those painkillers render her unable to work, she told me they didn’t even work that well for what they were supposed to do. They are supposed to relieve pain. But as Vanessa pointed out, the side effects of these drugs added too many other kinds of pain to her life – mental, emotional and spiritual pain.

This sermon is about smoking marijuana. Weed. Pot. Grass. Ganja. Wacky tobacky. For those of you who have never smoked pot, you may think this sermon is for the people who are younger at heart sitting in the sanctuary today. But it’s not. This is a sermon for those people, of fewer years or many years, who have become older at heart because of illnesses and conditions that make severe physical pain a daily part of their lives. Chronic pain ages us quicker. I’ll never forget what my best friend Blake told me after he broke his spinal chord and became confined to a wheel chair for the rest of his life. He said, “I feel like I’ve lost my youth. I’m only 25 and suddenly I’m an old man.” This is a sermon for the survivors who fight cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis, paralysis, and any condition that causes chronic pain. It’s also a sermon for the people who love them.

Last week Davidson talked about compassion. Compassion, which means “to suffer with.” He made the honest point that it’s not so hard to suffer with the people we are closest to, the people we love and who have been a part of our lives for many years – our closest friends and family. It’s harder to suffer with people we don’t know, like the homeless, or like the people starving in the countless corners of the world, the people dying of AIDS every day in Africa.

It’s true that compassion comes more readily to us if it’s for people we know and love who are suffering.

But let’s look at the nature of this compassion for our loved ones who are in chronic pain. Yes, it comes easier to us. But how long can we sustain it? How long can we watch a loved one suffer without our compassion wearing out? No matter how much we love someone, watching a person we love suffer is exhausting.

Vanessa explained to me, “I was ready to end my life because the pain had turned me into something bitter. I was mad at God, I was mad at everybody. And I also knew that my family was wearing out. Sure, they have always been there, but family members burn out after too long. My pain was starting to kill them, too.”

Pain is a very powerful force in the realm of human suffering. It can destroy the spirit. It can turn the most caring and hopeful people into people who are enraged, into people whose loved ones can hardly recognize them anymore.

Have you ever had to go through this with a loved one? Have you ever had to watch someone you love suffer day after day? How did it make you feel? How did it change your relationship with that person? What if there was something that could help, that could provide effective relief? A drug that did relieve a significant amount of pain, without the side effects? Without the risk of narcotic addiction? Wouldn’t you want your loved one – or yourself – to have legal access to this drug?

I don’t think I need to convince many people here today that medical marijuana works – it’s proven effective for the majority of people who try it for medicinal purposes. For AIDS and cancer patients, it helps them to eat. The treatments for these illnesses can cause unimaginable nausea and vomiting. Even if the treatments are working well against the tumors or the virus, if a person can’t eat, they won’t last long regardless. Being able to eat helps the body’s natural resources to heal itself. Even if you’ve just been ill enough to not be able to eat for a whole day, you know how weak this can make your body. Imagine not being able to eat for long stretches of days and weeks.

You may ask, what about the pill form of marijuana, called Marinol. The main problem with a pharmaceutical version of marijuana is that a pill doesn’t do any good if you can’t keep it down. No, the quickest and most effective administration of marijuana is to inhale it. Marinol may be suitable in many cases, but not all cases. The vast majority of medical marijuana users prefer to inhale it. They can control the dose themselves this way, and it’s the quickest. Nowadays there are devices called vaporizers which allow the patient to inhale a much less harmful vapor into the lungs, rather than the smoke.

With 27 states that have some version of approved medical marijuana use in their laws, I don’t need to convince you that the beginning stages of fighting for this human rights issue have already been won. In most polls, usually at least three quarters of the votes approve the legality of medical marijuana use. The battle to win hearts and minds on this issue has already made great headway. What you may not know is the diversity of uses this drug offers, and just how long our species has employed its use.

“There was a time in the United States when extracts of cannabis were almost as commonly used for medicinal purposes as is aspirin today.” So began a 1971 book entitled Uses of Marijuana. In fact, according to Robert Randall, this country’s first legal user of medical marijuana for the treatment of his glaucoma (which saved him from becoming blind), the history of marijuana’s medical use predates the written word.

“Every civilization since the dawn of man has employed the unique therapeutic properties of this plant.” The Chinese were medically using cannabis 28 centuries before the birth of Jesus, recommending it for a variety of disorders including rheumatic pain and constipation. In cultures widely separated by geography and time there are consistent reports of marijuana’s medical benefits in easing digestive upsets, enhancing appetites, relieving muscle spasms, and reducing melancholia.

British physician William O’Shaughnessy is credited with reintroducing cannabis to Western medicine in 1839 with a forty page article called “On the Preparation of the Indian Hemp or Gunja.” O’Shaughnessy was traveling in India and noted the use of cannabis there for treatment of convulsive disorders, as an analgesic, and as a muscle relaxant. It was this latter quality that led to one of the most famous therapeutic applications of cannibis: the use by Queen Victoria to treat menstrual cramps.

How did such a helpful natural remedy become so demonized? This is where the political aspects of this issue become relevant. Again, we are brought closer to home when we talk about our ability to trust our own government. Not only does the war in Iraq serve the administration’s ulterior motives to secure the control of oil reserves and the lucrative contracts of Dick Cheyney’s post-war rebuilding company, it also very conveniently serves the purpose of moving our attention away from domestic issues here at home. It’s been easy to lose our trust in the government where foreign policy is concerned. But at home, uncovering the truth about the Drug War has made it even easier.

Most of us know about this already. We spend millions of tax dollars each year to arrest drug dealers and users. Meanwhile, as Noelle pointed out, there are no noticeable drops in abusive drug use. The prisons are swelled to the brim with non-violent drug offenders.

Some of these prisoners are sick people who have been arrested for growing or possessing marijuana for their own medical use. Police raids in full SWAT gear barge into people’s homes, search for and seize their pot, and haul them off to jail.

It’s true that marijuana can be abused as a recreational drug. It can serve the need of an addict’s mind to ‘escape,’ much like alcohol can. I would know, I used to be a pot-head. For a long time, it was my drug of choice, but I had to give it up because I liked it a little too much. Marijuana can become the focus of one’s life to a point that is a problem. However, marijuana is not physically addicting, but rather psychologically addicting. The side-effects of withdrawal are quite benign.

This is why it is such an important alternative to the highly addicting pharmaceutical painkillers. Becoming addicted to painkillers harms the spirit and the heart of a person to the point that life may not be worth living. As Vanessa pointed out, being sick is bad enough. There’s already the underlying shame and stigma associated with feeling less than whole. But then to make it impossible to work, to be a contributing member of society, just serves to isolate and depress a person further. “My experience,” Vanessa told me, “is that the vast majority of the medical community just want to give you drugs that you become dependent on. But I don’t want to go on disability, I don’t want to be dependent on drugs or monthly government checks to get by in life. I want to be independent, I want to keep working. Medical marijuana allows me to keep participating in the world.”

There is another reason why medical marijuana is a religious issue outside of the obvious issue of compassion. A big part of the War on Drugs has been lots of government issued propaganda, as is the case in any big war. The buzz word we so often hear is “evil.” The terrorists are ‘evil,’ drug use is ‘evil.’ The word ‘evil’ is a religious term. For centuries it has been closely related to the word ‘sin.’ Millions of people have bought the story that so much of government and right-wing religion have sold them – that drugs are evil and people who use them are sinners.

In October of 1989, a man named Steve was dying of AIDS in a hospital in San Antonio, Texas. He had been arrested for marijuana possession, and in the course of his trial he had won the legal right to use medical marijuana. But the DEA delayed his first legal shipments of marijuana for weeks and Steve ended up back in the hospital. The delays made no sense until the very end of December, DEA administrator John Lawn formally rejected the judge’s recommendation that marijuana be rescheduled for medical use. In Lawn’s view, marijuana had no accepted medical use in the United States. He said, “ending the medical prohibition would unleash sin upon the land and send the wrong message.”

Such sentiments have been repeated in similar circumstances ad nauseum. I assume when they say ‘sending the wrong message’ they are talking primarily about sending the wrong message to our youth. Again, the assumption must be that pot is evil, those who smoke pot are sinners, and clearly to legalize it in any form would send the wrong message to our youth.

But in liberal religion, the wrong message is that which delivers false information, that which is not true. Youth are VERY smart – this morning Davidson is working with some of the brightest 8th graders I’ve ever met for the Coming of Age program. They can handle the truth, which isn’t that scary after all. They need to know the truth so they can make the best decisions for themselves – because kids know when they are being lied to and they will find out for themselves what the truth is. Let’s send these kids the RIGHT message by telling them what is closest to the truth.

What’s closest to the truth is that any drug has the potential to be abused. But the people who become addicts are not sinners, they are not evil – they have a disease. Addiction is a disease of the mind, body, and spirit – it attacks all three of these things. And it doesn’t make sense to call drugs evil, as so many of them are derived from plants that grow naturally on the earth. Most drugs are designed to be medicines. And for some people who are very ill, the marijuana plant is a medicine.

The truth is that marijuana is a God-send for thousands of suffering people and their families. For so many illnesses, the only meds that can be prescribed are pain meds – there is no cure. And there are so many sick people who believe the propaganda, who fear the social stigma – even liberal folks – that they won’t give medical marijuana a try. And why should they if it’s illegal? Vanessa herself said, “I don’t do things that are illegal.” Most of us don’t want to break the laws of this land. So quite simply, it’s time for the laws to change.

The atmosphere at the Bulldog cafe in Oakland, California is one that has been profoundly influenced by new laws that make better sense. There was an energy of hope and healing in that room. Vanessa told me that in addition to the marijuana, it was the community she found at the Bulldog cafe that also helped her to heal spiritually and emotionally. “They know us all by name here, and that is very nurturing and reassuring.” It is changing the laws so this kind of wholistic healing can take place that is so important. It’s time that we stopped segregating conventional medicine and alternative healing methods into separate categories. Nothing in life is so simple, or so binary. We’ve reached a point where we can take advantage of the best of both worlds – we can make use of modern western treatments as well as homeopathics and natural remedies. Legalizing the medical use of marijuana is also an excellent example of how we could begin to regain trust in our federal government.

“Since I’ve started coming to Bulldog, the quality of my life has improved 1001%” Vanessa said. Before I ended the interview, I asked Vanessa what she would want to say to the congregation who was going to hear this sermon. She looked me straight in the eye and said,

“The people who come here are disabled. Even if it’s not visible, they have a disability of some kind. And essentially, as we get older, we get more disabled. So if you still have judgement or disdain for the use of medical marijuana, research it. You too might be in the position some day where you don’t want to take narcotics that leave you slobbering, that leave you spiritually bankrupt. You too might want legal access to an herbal remedy that allows you to continue to have a life.”

So is marijuana a God-forbidden thing, or a God-send? Is it sin or is it grace? For many people in pain it’s salvation, it’s comfort and it’s rest. But it’s not enough to agree here, to say we have compassion. It’s not enough to just “suffer with” people. Finally, we need to act. If our religion is one of love and compassion for all people, especially for those who suffer, for those whose souls are drugged and numbed, and for those who can be freed from their unnecessary suffering when our citizens are freed from the ignorance that is an accomplice to this suffering, then we should ask what our faith demands of us.

Paul Tillich, a great 20th century theologian, once described “justice” as “love from a distance.” All human rights battles have been won through the realization of justice, through enough people loving enough from a distance. This is no different. Let your voices be heard – talk to your friends and family about the importance of legalizing marijuana for medicinal purposes.

You can tell them that your faith demands it.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Hannah Wells

4 January 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

As a new year begins,

let us reflect – gently, but with conviction, with courage.

We have so many selves, and we must consider:

Which one lived the most last year? Which part of our selves was given the most permission, the most air time, the most control?

Are we living our lives the way our best self would choose?

Though it is fearsome, let us listen to the nagging voices in our minds that ask us to consider new ways of living, to consider changing habits, to consider changing how we think about ourselves.

Do we know who we are? Do we really have a sense of our place in the whole extended family of humanity? Can we see how much we share with each other and how we are different? Are we comfortable with the story that is unique to us? Can we see how our story is in fact, not unique?

Let us love our selves in the story we find ourselves in. We each have a story, and may we see that our mistakes are as important as our victories, because we can learn from them. May we forgive ourselves and with calm intention may we let our hard lessons become blessings.

May we let the voice of our better self be heard. Where there is regret, where there is fear, and where there is shame, may we acknowledge it and discover ways of integrating these difficult emotions that make us so human. May we see that it is wise to not ignore the darker parts of who we are, but to listen to them, to let them guide us toward change.

May we see that we are never alone, and may we see that the greatest resolution we could make is simply, with ourselves, to be honest.

Amen.

SERMON

You might be expecting to laugh a lot during this sermon – but the pressure to make that happen was too great for me so I’m going to try to make you cry instead. Of course, trying to get you to cry is a lot of pressure too. But that will be the joke. You are expecting to hear something light hearted and funny, but instead I’m going to talk about the sad truth. And that is the main point of this sermon – let’s just get that out of the way. I don’t want anyone to think too hard this morning, including myself. What’s funny in life and what’s sad in life can be very closely related to each other, closer than we realize. Laughing and crying are two sides of the same coin – that coin we spend as the currency of healing.

When I went on the net to research the phrase, Spirituality of Humor, I found myself in an ocean of information – of jokes, of musings, of profound philosophies and theories of the interfaces between spirituality and humor. Even so, there was evidence that this is a field that is just beginning to come into its own. There’s a site called integrativespirituality.org, and the subject link titled “Spirituality of Humor” reads that it is “under construction.” Serious interest and attention to this topic is only beginning. I believe that the spirituality of humor will actually be a key player in our human evolution. Humor will help us to discover the means to world peace because there is such a tremendous need for the world to heal.

But I really don’t want to get too esoteric with this topic – remember we are trying to not think too hard today. It’s too early in the morning, it’s too early in the year. We’re going to keep it simple.

Besides, our hope of future world peace isn’t very interesting. We’re more interested in the here and now. There are many takes on the spirituality of humor that I could present to you today, but I want to focus on how humor is healing.

Although crying and laughing are two sides of the same coin they are not interchangeable. It’s more like they each make the other one possible. We all need to grieve from time to time. But if we repress our grief to an extent that is dangerous for our souls, our laughter becomes in-genuine. It is not so much of a healthy release as it can be an expression of bitterness. If grief doesn’t come out in tears, it finds other ways to come out – through anger, through a nameless discontent. As the Buddhists point out, life is about suffering – suffering caused by losses, by frustrations, by life’s inevitable changes. “The only thing that stays the same is change.” But just as the good periods in life don’t stick around, neither do the bad. We’re familiar with the saying, ‘this too shall pass.’ We also know the saying, ‘some day you’ll be able to look back on this and laugh.’

And it’s here that I want to make a disclaimer, to make something abundantly clear: there are some losses and tragedies in life that we will never be able to laugh about. There’s nothing funny about them and there never will be. These losses are like scars – they will always hurt when we touch them. There are many tragedies and losses in which the only means to healing is lots and lots of crying. In a sermon about humor, this is the most important point: WE HAVE TO CRY. There’s a lot of things none of us get enough of, and one of them is giving ourselves permission to weep. It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman, adult or child, the tears we shed over losses are specific to the need to heal.

When we cry enough, we can still cry some more. I have often convinced myself that my grieving was over, when it wasn’t. I wanted it to be, but I was fooling myself. Even when you think you’ve done enough, do some more. Even if the loss happened years ago, it’s never too late to take care of the unfinished business of grieving. At some point we come to accept that this kind of grieving will continue to revisit us throughout our lives – and this is okay. There are some things we will never “get over” and we’re not supposed to. Once we accept that the scar is here to stay, it’s okay when it gets touched. This grief is particular to us – it is ours – and we can allow it to shape us in ways that strengthen our character.

It’s so important that we cry when we need to because otherwise the weight of that unexperienced sadness detracts from our ability to experience joy. I can’t share the good news with you all of laughter – unless I assertively drive home the point that you must embrace the bad news of hard truths. No, I don’t want you to think too hard today but I want you to think about feeling hard. There’s a huge difference. It’s hard and necessary work to let our minds surrender to what we are carrying in our hearts.

And this is how crying enough makes laughing possible. It’s not that eventually we can laugh about the loss. It’s that the grief makes healing possible – and being healed allows us to experience the goodness of life again. We can get our sense of humor back. We can laugh again – that genuine, full-throttle, belly-laugh. When we permit ourselves to cry enough, we also permit ourselves to return to the other side of the coin of suffering – that life is a gift and we are supposed to enjoy this gift as much as possible, despite the tragedies, despite the losses.

There are many aspects of life in which humor and healing do go hand in hand. There are many difficult situations we find ourselves in that, under a certain light, we can see the irony or humor in it. It’s a blessing when we can laugh momentarily in a serious situation. It’s of spiritual significance because it’s a saving grace – it’s a break from the solemnity that weighs on us. When we can laugh at ourselves, we surrender to our humanity and our humility because we realize we don’t need to take ourselves so seriously. It is often in situations in which we see that we are not alone. We see that our problems and weaknesses are not unique, but rather a part of the human condition.

Almost all of us have a personal issue, a personal problem that we either allow to continue and worsen, or we decide to take steps towards changing so we can have a better life. If you think you are one of the lucky ones who is issue-free, I would say, are you sure? There’s nothing you need to work on? We all have our vices, or things we do compulsively that get in the way of our health and wholeness. Or perhaps it’s what we’re NOT doing and avoiding that is causing anxiety in our lives. Or maybe we’ve just lost or ignored a little part of us that we love and we miss. Now’s a great time to do some exploring around this, as it is New Year’s Resolution time, which is rather a joke in itself as I believe the statistic is that a whopping 90% of new year’s resolutions are not followed through. So don’t think of it as a resolution, think of it as steps towards having a better life, towards “progress and not perfection,” as they say in 12-step meetings.

Up to this point, I’ve been fairly abstract in this sermon – describing emotions but not being terribly concrete. I want to be more grounded in a subject that is too esoteric, too philosophical. As I was writing I realized I needed to bring myself into this in a real way, to describe my own situation of tears and laughter, to tell you a little bit of my own story. And I realized that it had to be through alcoholism – because I am an alcoholic in recovery.

I’ve been attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for almost two years now, and I can say that I’ve never seen a better example of the ways humor and healing can intersect. You get a group of drunks together who have some years of sobriety under their belts and you will be amazed at the amount of hilarity they can produce with each other. When you first get into recovery, nothing is funny at all. You’re terrified, you’re in despair, you may have lost your job or your family, you’re disoriented, you’re suffering the effects of withdrawal. Mostly you’re just terrified because you don’t know if you can really quit drinking or not. You’re on the cusp of hope and hopelessness.

But if you’re willing, one thing that keeps you coming back to the meetings is seeing that the people who have stuck it out are able to laugh at themselves. At first, you’re kind of jealous and resentful of this – how dare they be happy when I’m so miserable. But then you think, I want what they have. It’s the fellowship and camaraderie that is so integral to the healing process. Part of what makes the laughter possible is discovering that you’re not alone – that there are thousands of people like you, and if you made a joke about your alcoholism – about how bad it used to be – they would get it. You’re one of them! The jokes are funny because you used to be in that awful condition where you didn’t have control in your life, but now you can laugh because the demon no longer has a hold on you. All the ugliness and embarrassment of it doesn’t define you anymore.

At a meeting I went to on New Year’s Eve a woman shared the story of her moment of truth that finally got her into recovery. She had been using for over 30 years, both alcohol and speed, since she was 12 years old. She ended up in jail finally, and said what a blessing that was, because she was forced to sober up. But when she got out, she was faced with the choices of her freedom. Looking back on her life of addiction, she realized she either had her head in the toilet, was in prison, or was facing death. Or, at this point in time, she could choose God and begin her recovery. She paused for a second, then she spewed out the litany of her choices in short order, “it was toilets, prison, death, or God! Toilets, prison, death, or God!” And in the first moment of clarity she ever had in her life, she said, “I chose God.” Nearly everyone in the room could see both the truth and humor in that and we all laughed. Most of us had been there ourselves.

This sense of humor in recovery – any kind of recovery, I believe – is so important because most of the time it is really hard and scary work. Even with the help of fellowship, it can still feel lonely. I know I have found for myself, that I have to go easy on myself, that right now, there’s a lot of shame and anger that I’m just beginning to learn how to work through, because for so many years I covered these things up with drinking. This is serious stuff! So when I find a moment where I can laugh at myself, when I can see the humor in the midst of the struggle of this disease, I welcome it because it’s an indicator that some healing has happened. I’m getting that much closer to accepting myself, alcoholic and all.

Whether we’re laughing at ourselves, or a joke someone sent us on e-mail, or even a dirty limerick, the immediacy of laughter is worth noting because it’s a part of life that we easily take for granted. I know I am living in the present when I am consumed by laughter or when I get the giggles. If you’ve never experienced the uncontainable giggles in church, you’re missing out. Maybe that sounds immature or disrespectful, but we’ve got to let the child out sometimes. We can’t always be proper, we can’t always be serious. I do believe our laughter is a link to the divine because there is such an element of spontaneity and presence to it. It’s childlike. What if we could trust the divine as easily and quickly as we are able to laugh? What if that innocent and childlike faith could be ours again?

We get closer to that when we heal, when we learn how to accept ourselves and the people we love, flaws, follies, and all.

There’s a web site I recommend called spiritslaughing.com. On the page titled “Something Serious About Humor” it says,

“What is spirituality? It is living one’s life in a personal God-orientation. What is humor? It is a slice of life that produces some level of laughter by the way it is uniquely set apart from everything around it. Spirituality equals life. Humor equals a slice of life. Each works best when operating within the same life at the same time. . . Our spirit has been given the capacity to laugh, and it can operate at full capacity only when it is enriched by the presence of humor . . . if we insist on having one without the other, we end up with neither. A spiritually dead person without a sense of humor does not need to check their bags because they are going nowhere, and no one wants to go with them.”

I have another personal testimony about humor and healing. Like so many alcoholics, I come from an alcoholic family. Yet I am the only one on the path to recovery, I am the so-called ‘interrupter’ of the family system. It’s very lonely and frustrating at times, and I’m only beginning to accept one of the cardinal conditions of recovery – that just because I will get better, that doesn’t mean anyone else will.

One thing I realized I lost at the very beginning of recovery was the ability to connect to my brother, who is a couple years older than me. We’re very different and, ever since we were teenagers, the only time we could really connect on an emotional level was when we got drunk together. We could talk about real things then – we could talk about whatever worries we had about our parents, we could talk about our fears and regrets and disappointments in life. We could talk about some of the struggles of growing up, our most embarrassing moments, our mistakes. We could even say that we loved each other.

My guess is that my sobriety now is threatening to him because he knows he’s an alcoholic too, he has admitted as much in those drunken moments of truth. So we stopped connecting at all. But last summer I decided to make an effort – I said, let’s go out one night just the two of us. We did that but it wasn’t the same. He didn’t open up and I didn’t know how to, either. So we went home and were sitting in the car in front of the house we both grew up in. I remember thinking, I have nothing in common with my brother anymore.

But then we started talking about my parents – the one thing we’ll always have in common. We started reminiscing about all the things that were funny about growing up with our mom and dad. Even the things that weren’t funny at the time seemed funny to us then. We laughed about their habits and how Dad would buy some kind of mid-life crisis sports car then sell it because Mom wouldn’t have it. That happened about three times. We realized we could document each phase of our family history by which cars were in the garage. We laughed about how our Dad’s mother used to drive our mother crazy. Then we started joking about the peculiarities of our grandparents and all the silly stories that happened when we traveled with them. We started laughing so hard, we joked that we could make a fortune if we started a brother and sister comedy act and went on tour.

My brother didn’t want us to get out of the car and go inside because we would wake up Mom and she would freak out – this was another regular occurrence for us growing up. We laughed and joked about our childhood for over an hour and finally I went inside, and he drove home to his young family. There was no recognition of how things are different now. We didn’t connect in any serious way, but we connected through our sense of humor. It was something; it was a start to a new brother and sister relationship.

Whenever we hear of abstract themes like tears and laughter, we can only make them real by attaching them to real memories from our own lives. That was the only way I knew how to make this theme real, by connecting it to my own story. But please understand, I don’t want or mean this to be about me. I want you to find the ways that you relate to the notion of healing through tears, through laughter, and how closely related these can be. All our stories are different, but we’re all in this together. It’s kind of like a dance where we take turns taking steps. I took my shoes off this morning, and maybe I’ll get my toes stepped on.

But you dance too. Think, this week, this first full week of the New Year, of something you need to grieve some more, some more healing work you need to do. What about it makes you want to cry and what makes you want to laugh. We’re all trying to learn how to be the best selves we can be – and you don’t need to think too hard about it. Just dance. Just feel.

I’ve always liked the phrase, ‘if I don’t laugh, I’ll cry.’ Many of us have a sadness that runs so deep it goes beyond compensation. But if we can accept that it is particular to us, yet not unique, we can find a means to heal, to forgive, to move on to what else life has to offer us. Let a sense of humor and laughter be a part of this.

As Rumi says, your cup of joy is only as full as your cup of sorrow – so take a drink.

Take a drink.