© Davidson Loehr
October 14, 2001
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
OPENING WORDS
From our many private lives and as many individual worlds we gather here for a hundred different reasons. There are people who are mostly curious or who could use some new friends, people with the vague feeling that there could be more to life than there has been, and those with the very strong feeling there could be more. Some who bring hungry minds and want questions and answers, and others who bring hungry hearts and want comfort.
Some here are young, hoping for direction for the life which lies mostly ahead. Others are closer to the end of their journey and do not want to be ignored just because they are old.
There are parents missing children, students missing home, lovers, ex-lovers, and those who would be lovers. There are those in whom life is bubbling up and others over whom dark shadows may have crept, who wonder how to go on.
We’re here for all the obvious reasons and for some secret reasons known only to ourselves. Everyone who has come here hopes for something from this morning. And perhaps we shall find it, for this is a good and a safe place to be. I’m glad you’re here and I’m glad to be here again with you, for
it is a sacred time, this,
and a sacred place, this:
a place for questions more profound than answers,
vulnerability more powerful than strength,
and a peace that can pass all understanding.
It is a sacred time, this.
Let us begin it together in song.
CENTERING
There’s a story about two Buddhist monks, an old master and his young student. There had been a heavy rain the night before, and what had been a tiny creek had become by morning a raging torrent of water more than a foot deep.
Standing by the edge of the new river was a young woman. She clearly wanted to cross the river, but she was very frail, and was unlikely to survive the swift current.
The young student looked away from her because this order of monks had sworn strict vows against ever talking to a woman, let alone touching one. The young monk had learned his lesson well, so he ignored her. The older monk, however, walked over to the young woman and asked if she would like help crossing the river. The astonished woman nodded yes, surprised that he would even acknowledge her. “Then, please, climb onto my shoulders,” said the monk, “and I will carry you.” She did as he asked and he carried her across the river. On the other side, he set her down, bowed silently to her, and went on his way.
The young monk followed along behind his master in angry silence for several hours, but the farther they walked the angrier he became. At last he couldn’t control himself, and he confronted his teacher with his bottled fury. “How could you? How could you touch her? What about your holy vows? How could you touch that woman?”
The old man looked into the angry face of his student, and at last he said quietly, “My young friend, I set that woman down three hours ago. Are you still carrying her?”
This is, among other things, a time to set down loads we’ve been carrying too long. Angers, resentments, grudges, accusations, and a whole host of furies that can both possess and cripple us. If we cannot let go of them, they will not let go of us. We’re all carrying loads, small or large, that have outlived whatever usefulness they may ever have had. It would be a shame for us to leave here with the same heavy loads we came in with.
What are you still carrying that you ought to set down?
Think of those things, name them to yourself, and you may be halfway to setting them down. Let us become more aware of those angers and fears we have carried too long. In these quiet moments I invite you to turn them into prayers or turn them into flames in the candles of memory and hope.
SERMON
(The following was a kind of loud and angry dramatic tantrum. It was shouted, screamed, accompanied by a furious expression and the violence of hitting chairs, pulpit, and walls – hard – with a rolled-up magazine).
“NO! By God, no son of mine is going to do anything that stupid!”
“As long as you live under my roof, you’ll do it my way. Aagh!”
“You may be my daughter, but you’re an idiot!”
“Son, no real man would have been such a wimp.”
“And, , you wouldn’t behave that way if you were a bit more feminine! Aagh!”
(flinging the rolled-up magazine across the stage, then sitting on the stool, holding the microphone.)
Recognize that?
Everyone here knows that voice. And that face. We’ve done it or had it done to us. We’ve seen and felt it. We seem to be hard-wired for it.
Years ago I read a study done with some monkeys, juvenile monkeys that had never seen an male monkey of their species. They’d been raised by their mothers. When they were several months old, they were shown a movie of an male monkey doing his anger face, his fear face, with his screaming and gesturing just about like I just did. All of the young monkeys who had never seen an male monkey before in their lives shrieked and ran terrified to hide behind their mothers.
We seem to be programmed to know how to control others through anger, and how to be controlled through it. It seems to be absolutely natural. Being natural doesn’t mean it’s good. Revenge and greed are also natural. And I have read that revenge and greed are the two emotions that produce the most stress in our lives. Anger is full brother to both revenge and greed. Like them, it’s concerned with keeping things our way, inside ourboundaries, ourcomfort levels and our beliefs. It’s absolutely natural.
So it’s no wonder that anger turns up in a list like Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ list of the five stages that humans tend to go through in grieving the loss of something. She wrote the book in 1969 about terminal patients who had to come to terms with the one fact that they didn’t want to come to terms with at all – the fact that they were going to die. But since then many others have realized that this is a that works in a tremendous number of cases. These are stages we recognize in going through the loss of a religion, of a belief system, of a world view, of a relationship, of anything we once trusted and believed was the way things should be and which we have to come to terms with losing.
The first stage we go through is avoidance or denial. This is the “ostrich” school, where we stick our heads in the sand and our fannies in the air and look silly to everyone but ourselves – trying to pretend that nothing’s really changed. Everything’s the way it was. It’ll be okay. I don’t have to worry about this.
When that doesn’t work, the next thing many of us try is anger. And the anger is used to say, “Look, I really mean it! Get back in line! Stay the way it’s supposed to be! Don’t make me change my world!”
We use anger when a person, or a belief system, or a world, or a god, has become bigger than we know how to be comfortable with it being and bigger than we are willing to permit it to be. It’s immensely powerful, this anger stuff.
Now, there is legitimate anger. There’s anger that can be a very healthy sign. There are many kinds of anger. Those would all be different sermons. Today I only want to talk about anger that’s used to control people, and how anger controls us.
It seems to happen at two levels, in two ways. First it happens as the “fear face” and the shouting and the threats help to control us by creating fear. There is a threat of violence. Someone that angry could do God-knows-what to you. And if they’re bigger and stronger than you, you should be afraid. But some of the fear that anger can create will stay with you forever. It’s awful.
And that’s the second way that it works. It works first through creating fear, and it works secondly through infection. We get infected with anger, and we carry it with us, sometimes, for the rest of our lives, unwilling and unable to let loose of it, like the young Buddhist monk in the story.
I know people, you know people, who went through this in religion. They had a religious experience in their past, in their youth, whenever. Some idiot taught them about an angry, hateful God, and taught them only that. Someone told them about a religion or a God that wouldn’t allow them to be who they really were and needed to be, whoever that was. The religion wouldn’t respect their questions, and it wouldn’t respect their souls, and it wouldn’t respect them, and they are angry as hell – still. I have met people sixty years old who are still angry over something they heard in church with force when they were ten. If anger infects us, it can last an entire lifetime.
One of the most famous sermons – not the best, but one of the most famous sermons in American history – is still, from about 250 years ago, a sermon by Jonathan Edwards. This was an amazing man. He enrolled at Yale University when he was thirteen years old. This was one of the most brilliant minds in American history. Some have called him America’s most original theologian. He’s influenced a tremendous number of horrible religions. Jonathan Edwards was a Calvinist, and the sermon that’s so famous – and I’ve read it, and it’s terrifying to read – is called “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and if you ever are tired of watching “Halloween, Part Thirteen,” find that sermon and read it, it’s amazing.
He draws pictures of how hateful we are to God. He says, “Imagine, we’re more hateful to God than a spider. This was apparently not a man who loved arachnids, either. Imagine, he said, God is holding us between his fingertips like He would hold a hateful spider by a thin silken line, over the flaming pits of hell. There’s nothing about us that’s attractive or lovable, and the only thing that keeps him from dropping us into hell is the fact that he’s God.
You can get infected with that notion of a hateful God in ways that can keep you infected forever. It’s absolutely powerful stuff. And it doesn’t only happen in religion, as you know.
About ten or twelve years ago I was the theme speaker for a week-long Unitarian summer camp at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. That’s about 500 s and 300 kids and teenagers who were there for a week, and the theme speaker does a sermon each morning, so you can develop a theme over the five programs.
I didn’t know many people there. They come from all over the country to this camp. But since I was the most visible person there that week, I got hunted down a lot and was surprised at the number of people who wanted to confess something that week. I listened to a fair number – five or six – confessions that people just needed to make, things they needed to feel that they had somewhere safe to talk about.
The most memorable was a woman, one of the angrier people I’ve seen, who was talking about her ex-husband – who, if he had a soul, it was evil. She went on for ten minutes in detail so rich, so vivid, almost so bloody, it was clear that this wound was absolutely fresh and dripping. It was horrible to hear. I don’t know what any outsider might have really thought of the relationship if they’d seen it, but it was clear how it affected her, and she hated it and was still furious. And finally I said, “When was this over? When did this happen?”
“Ten years ago.”
Ten years ago, and she’s still so infected by anger she cannot live. Ten years. It’s astonishing.
And it can be worse than that. It can be cosmic. There are, if you think about it, a lot of things to be angry about. Life isn’t fair.
On September 11th a whole new generation learned that life cannot be made safe. Friends desert you. Governments murder and lie. Partners, lovers, wound up being who they were instead of who your needed them to be. And you won’t forgive them for it. It can happen anywhere, and you can hate an entire world for it.
The most classic version of this story, still one of the best to read, is the story of Job. It’s a little boring to read; you just kind of have to read through it fast and then tell the story to yourself in less time, and it gets better. Now, since I suspect some of you have not been reading your bible this week, or this year, I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version:
Job is a righteous man, a good man. He’s never done anything wrong. Probably even his butler loved him. He has a wife and children and land and money and everything. And God and Satan are up there? whoever wrote this story have God and Satan sitting up on a cloud somewhere looking down watching this, and they can see it pretty clearly. And God is saying, “Look how faithful Job is.” Why he loves me with all his heart.
And Satan says, “Of course he does. You’ve been good to him. He’s got everything. Of course he loves you. Start taking stuff away. See if he still loves you then.”
God said, “Oh no, his faith is pure.”
Satan said, “All right. Tell you what. You let me mess with him, and we’ll see how long he keeps loving you.”
So God says, “All right.”
Satan starts messing with him. And the man loses everything. He loses his land and his children, his family. They die. He loses everything. And throughout this, his faith is certainly tested. And it comes to the point, which for some people is the most famous line in the story. I know that in the seventies I heard some feminists say it was the only character in the story worthy of respect. Job’s wife’s line is, “Curse God and die!”
Now, let’s take this out of mythic language. Otherwise we’ll have this cartoon picture of someone yelling at a cloud and some lightning bolts making him dead and so on and so forth, and whoever wrote the story didn’t think that’s the way the world worked. “Curse God and die? is something that today we would say differently. We might say, “When life is unjust, curse life, curse it to its core.” And if you do that, you will find, something inside of you dies. Something in your spirit will die. Something in your ability to greet life with joy will die. Curse life and die. That’s one option.
Job took the other route. He said, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Now, you can make that sound like Job was just a pious wimp. But take that out of mythic language too, to understand what that sounds like when you say it in real life. This is someone saying, “Life is hard. It is a mess. It is a mixed bag. It’s been just awful. I’ve lost everyone I loved. I’ve lost everything I thought I had. I’ve lost all the things that I thought were the real blessing of life.” That’s the package life comes in, and you don’t just take it or leave it. If you just take it, like a rotten deal but the only deal you’ve got, you lose your verve and your joy. You become cynical. You don’t just take the gift of life, you bless it. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Not “I’ll put up with him because he’s the only god whose name I know.”
You don’t just accept this miserable, rotten life. That’s the gift that’s offered. That’s the package the miracles come in. It also hurts. You bless it. The miracle in the story of Job that’s not commented on often enough is that what Job succeeded in doing was in transforming anger into gratitude, and gratitude is the antidote for anger.
The studies that say that greed and revenge are the most stress-producing emotions we have also say that gratitude is the most stress-reducing emotion we have. The only durable escape from anger is gratitude, and it is one of the hardest transitions we are ever asked to make. After every great loss we have to learn how to choose life again, and it’s hard.
I saw the Job story played out, actually played out in reverse. In Job everyone died but him. I saw this story nineteen years ago. It’s one I’ve never used in a sermon before.
I was doing my chaplaincy training in the summer of 1982 at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in downtown Chicago, and I chose the leukemia ward for my assignment. I wanted heavy work. I wanted real work. And when I got on the ward the first day and went to the staff meeting to introduce myself, the nurses said, “Oh, so you’re the new student chaplain.”
“Yes.”
“Good! You go see the woman in Room 11.”
“Why?”
“Cause it’s your turn. We can’t stand any more of her. You go see her. Oh, and welcome to the ward.”
This didn’t sound like the introduction to something pleasant, and it wasn’t.
I went into Room 11 and saw the angriest human I have ever been around, with one of the saddest stories I’ve ever heard. It was a 29-year-old woman who was dying of leukemia. When I came in the room, she said “What are you?”
I told her I was a chaplain. I can’t repeat a single word that she said. The fact that I was a chaplain was such a vile, vulgar betrayal of any notion that there could possibly be a God, that she spent ten minutes telling me what a vile, miserable, slime-ball (these are the kind words) I was. I remember thinking during that ten minutes. She has used every profane and vulgar word I’ve ever heard, and she’s even used them in some creative new combinations I’d never thought of. It wasn’t pleasant. I also thought, I have no idea how to respond to this woman. I agree with everything she’s saying.
It is a miserable story. She’s 29. She and her husband had had some rough years, but then they worked it out, and for the last half dozen years they’d had a wonderful marriage. They had two young children who were delights. Life had finally settled in to being absolutely idyllic. And then four months ago she’d been diagnosed with an extremely aggressive kind of leukemia. And she was dying, and there was nothing that could be done. And she was so furious. There weren’t enough things in the world to absorb the hate that she had. I listened for ten minutes, looking for some way to get out of the room and finally found it, and I got up to leave and she said, “You’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ll page you. You’ll be here every day ’til I die, and you’ll listen to this story every day until I die.”
God, No!
She paged me the next day and the day after and the day after and every day the story got angrier and louder. The nurses closed the door as soon as I went in the room. It was very painful. I never knew what to do. It was my very first assignment as a student chaplain, and it was clear that I had failed absolutely, completely at every part of it.
I thought about it over the weekend and on Monday I took it to our chaplains’ group and I confessed. I told the story I’ll admit it was fun using all those words. And I said, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to go back there again.” John Serkland was the chaplain who taught this – he’d been a chaplain 25 years; he was really quite gifted at it – John said, “Do you want me to save you?”
And I said, “Save me? Hell yes, John! I have no shame left. You save me and I’ll bow at your feet. I’ll worship you. I’ll put up an idol of you at home in a little shrine. Anything you want.”
And he said, “All right.”
I said, “Do you honestly think you can do something here?”
“Yes.”
Part of me wanted to see him fail. Part wondered what “succeeding” might look like, and whether he or anyone could really do it in Room 11.
John went with me the next day. He said he had to get in costume. He wore his chaplain collar, so there’d be no mistaking what he was. We walked into the room together the next day, and this woman spotted immediately what was going on. How I wish I could tell you the words she really used. But the gist of it was, “Well, this young fool has failed, so he’s brought the old fat fool.”
I closed the door. John sat in a chair near the head of the bed, and she let him have it. For ten minutes, the same story, which had become much more polished, much more violent, much more vulgar, even much more angry than it had been the week before when I’d heard five performances of it. And at the end of the story, John sat there – he had never taken his eyes off her – and he said just three words: “You expected more.”
She tried to answer. She’d form words and grit her teeth and go through six emotions, and words wouldn’t come out, and she’d form more words. The words wouldn’t come out.” And finally tears ran down both of her cheeks.” She looked at John and quietly said, “Yes.”
And he reached over for the first time and took her hand and said, “Yes. I’ll come back tomorrow.”
I think that’s the most magical moment I’ve ever seen. Those three words broke the spell. There wasn’t anything to add. There was no need to insult the woman’s intelligence by saying there isn’t more. Any idiot could tell that. That’s what was so frustrating and infuriating. She expected more. Of course she expected more. She’s 29 years old. She’s got a marriage that had just become healthy and good in the past couple years, and she expected to grow old and wise together with this man she loved. She’s got two little kids she expected to watch grow up and have kids of their own. Of course she expected more. There wasn’t more. There’s just that. Die in anger or find a way to pull off a miracle.
She died about two weeks later. But from that afternoon, from that Tuesday afternoon on, she was a different person. At least she was a different person for me. Her husband and kids said that she was the person they’d always known. She was loving, she was caring, she was kind. It became terribly important to her, in her last few days, to tell the people she loved how much she loved them.
I had a short talk with her three days before she died. She was getting weaker, and we all knew that it wouldn’t be long. I said, “How do you sum it up now? I know how you summed it up two weeks ago. How do you sum it up now?”
She thought about it, then smiled and finally said, “With gratitude. Compared to infinite, she said, this wasn’t much. Compared to the 85 years I thought I’d have, it wasn’t very much. But this is what there was. The gift was for 29 years, with some trouble, some pain, a lousy ending way too soon, a lot of love, two amazing children, and more miracles, more miracles than anybody could deserve. I am so grateful for the chance, for the gift.” We held hands and cried together – not in anger, but in gratitude.
Blessed be.
