He: A Salvation Story for Men

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16 March 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

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Prayer

And a man said, Speak to us of Self-Knowledge.

And he answered, saying:

Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.

But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart’s knowledge.

You would know in words that

which you have always known in thought.

You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.

And it is well you should.

The hidden wellspring of your soul must needs

rise and run murmuring to the sea;

And the treasure of your infinite depths

would be revealed to your eyes.

But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure;

And seek not the depths of your knowledge

with staff or sounding line.

For self is a sea boundless and measureless.

Say not, “I have found the truth”

but rather, “I have found a truth.”

Say not, “I have found the path of the soul.”

Say rather, “I have met the soul walking upon my path.”

For the soul walks upon all paths.

The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.

The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.

– On Self-Knowledge – Kahlil Gibran

SERMON: He: A Salvation Story for Men

The myth of the quest for the holy grail began in the 12th century, the time many identify as the beginning of the modern world. One famous quote says that the winds of the 12th century became the whirlwinds of the 20th century, so this story may not be as foreign to us as you might think.

It’s the story of the wounded Fisher King, of Parsifal’s search for the Holy Grail, of fair and Hideous damsels. It’s a kind of salvation story, especially for men, a story of what’s wrong, where modern men find themselves, and a prescription for what to do about it. It is a spiritual story, with deep roots into what we today call depth psychology of existential psychology.

I want to talk with you about this old myth. I’ll move back and forth between real life and the old myth, kind of tying them together from the inside out. It will be a little like walking the Chartres labyrinth, where we start way out, seem to move quickly toward the center, then get directed away from it, winding up a long way from the center before finally reaching home.

When a boy reaches adolescence, he discovers a new world, charged with power he hadn’t been aware of before. He is drawn to it as though it were part of who he must become, and in a way it is. But he’s far too young to handle it, and the experience of this new supercharged world makes an impression and issues a call that may be part of the rest of his life. The question of what must be done with that power will be with him until he resolves it.

It can happen emotionally, if he gets involved with a girl or woman he is in no way prepared for. My favorite movie about this was “The Summer of ’42.” Newer films include “Something About Mary” and a hundred others about boys falling all over themselves the first time they feel the feminine presence and realize both how powerful it seems, and how foreign, how far beyond their power. This is the Fair Damsel, who awakens his desire to become a man. In the Summer of ’42, it was a 15-year-old boy who was seduced by a woman ten years older who had just received a telegram saying her husband had been killed in the war. She was in such shock and grief she may not even have realized she was seducing him, and when he woke in the morning she was gone, he was never to see her again. There’s an initiation into a supercharged world that can stay with a boy, and will stay with a boy, his whole life.

Or the world of power may not be sexual, just very macho. An action hero, a video game that creates an imaginary world supercharged with deadly weapons, evil villains, mortal combat, and the thrill of the kill. You can watch this one being played out all over the country, every day. These boys are being seduced into a world with more power, and a different kind of power, than they’ve ever experienced before – especially when experienced through the haze of their new hormones. As video game designers know, they can barely tell the difference between the fantasy world on the screen and the real thing. Here, they’re a hero. Here, they have unbounded power over life and death. It’s so intoxicating that many boys withdraw into these fantasy worlds for hours at a time, day after day.

You can see boys practicing the bantam rooster activities of the quest for the Holy Grail everywhere, not just in the television shows of gangs and punks acting tough. You’ll see it in sports, both amateur and professional. That’s where our boys slay a lot of their dragons. And you see it in business behaviors. That’s why you see books on business strategy with titles talking about how to swim with the sharks, or Attila the Hun as a business model (I read this: it’s really dumb). You watch some of these guys as they progress, and you’ll feel the testosterone. They are learning what power is and how to use it.

In the myth, the King is a deeply wounded man. He can’t really live, but can’t die. He just suffers. He lacks the creative power he needs to find authenticity in the real world. His relationships are often a kind of role-playing, acting out, posing in costume.

Every night there is a solemn ceremony in the Grail castle. The Fisher King is lying on his litter enduring his suffering while a procession of profound beauty takes place. Fair maidens bring in a procession of wondrous things, until finally a maiden brings the Holy Grail itself which glows with light from its own depth. Each person (except the king) is given wine from the Grail and realizes their deepest wish even before they voice that wish. The king is barred from the essence of beauty and holiness when just those qualities are right in front of him. We can be disconnected and incapable of perceiving beauty, it happens easily.

The court fool had prophesied long ago that the Fisher King would be healed when a wholly innocent fool arrived in the court and asked the question “What does the Grail serve?”

The Grail is the symbol of the power of life itself: the power of God, shared with all, sustaining all. The king’s wound means that for all his efforts, he really hasn’t gotten it. He really isn’t partaking of the transcendent power of the universe as it is meant to be used. He has power, but it’s a kind of reflected light, not a light emanating from him. The light is from God, from the power of life, the powers of the universe. All the power there is loaned to the Grail by life, God, the universe, everything transcendent, from the whole tapestry of which we are a part.

The king would think he’s got control of that power. After all, he’s a king. He’s the star of the football team, the CEO of the company, the head of his unit, the studliest stud in his fraternity. He’s The Man.

But he doesn’t own this power, and he has not yet found his connection to it. That’s his wound, that’s why he suffers. In spite of his crown, he’s still an adolescent, playing adolescent games that he thought would make him a man, make him whole, bring him salvation. But they don’t. That takes something else, and he hasn’t found it.

The hero, the one who could save the king, is named Parsifal, which means “innocent fool” or “he who draws the opposites together” – like the meaning of the Chinese word Tao. Parsifal is another part of the king, of us. The king has power, but he can’t put the whole picture together, the picture of him and his world, including that transcendent power that he uses without owning. That’s what he can’t do, and only the fool, the innocent part of him, might do it, and only if he can learn to ask the magic question: What does the Grail serve?

In other words, the Grail that contains some of this transcendent power, and we who contain come of the transcendent power of life, the world, the universe – what do we serve? What is the point of our lives, and of having this power? A man’s search for that answer is his quest for the Holy Grail.

The myth came from a time when only men would be knights, or CEOs, or scholars or lawyers or even preachers, so these were men’s problems. Today, many women are playing these roles, are finding and using this power. And so today, many women are also struggling to put their power into a transcendent perspective.

Until we can do it, we’ll keep slaying dragons outside of us, fighting battles in the bedroom or boardroom or on the playing field or in the courtroom, in search of the Holy Grail, in search of that source of power.

This quest drives much of our economy, and fuels much of the advertising industry. Sexy sports cars, SUVs pictured in ads with people driving up remote mountains to do extreme sports, while the vehicles are sold to families, 99% of whom will never drive off-road anywhere. Or those $50,000 Humvees, those rough-terrain military vehicles, for your family’s assault on the shopping mall. Or $30,000 diamond bracelets. You can sell a man almost anything if he thinks it’s the Holy Grail, the source of the power of reconnection he needs.

All of these products are being sold as Holy Grails, as things that possess that kind of transcendent power we’re seeking. The advertisers are saying “Come on, buy this and you’ll have made it, man. You’ll have arrived. You’ll be saved.” And as long as we keep looking for salvation through outside things we’ll keep buying them, filling our garages with them, charging them on our credit cards, then forgetting about them because, somehow, they just didn’t give us that power after all.

The quest for the Holy Grail is the price we pay for remaining adolescents, for staying in a cartoon world. It’s a world, like the world of video games, of pure good against pure evil, where the answer to conflict is to destroy the opponent, to win the victory. And it defines more of our world and our economy than you can measure.

Right now, we have a president who speaks in terms of good against evil, where there are only two sides, one must be destroyed, where a massive bombing that will slaughter thousands of innocent women and children – and a few soldiers – in Iraq is referred to as an evening of “Shock and Awe.” Not violent, bloody murder and dismemberment, not the slaughter of the innocents, people who never harmed us – or the thousands of “human shields” who have now flown to Baghdad from all over the world. No, our government is describing the slaughter of these innocents in the adolescent language of video games: an evening of Shock and Awe. That is the quest for the Holy Grail, on the national level. The quest for power over people, for peace through pacification rather than through peaceful means, the quest for the power to invade any country at will, without provocation, and the feeling that this will lead to the ultimate kind of power – this is the quest for the Holy Grail, by wounded kings and wounded nations who have not understood and have not asked What does the Grail serve?

Well, they do ask it, and we ask it. But we think the answer is us: that the power serves whoever grabs it, however they get it. We think we are the center of the world, if we can compel or destroy all who oppose us. That’s the kind of power video games and action movies are about. It is not the kind of power the great myths are about. It is not the kind of power great religious insights are about. And it is not the kind of power than brings wholeness or salvation, only blood, terror, and retribution.

But the wounded kings do not know it.

I’m not taking liberties with this 800-year-old myth. This is what it is about. These are the dynamics of people seeking the wrong kind of power that the myth is about. And it insists that the salvation we seek can only come through asking the question no one is asking: What does the Grail serve? What does the power of life, God, the world, the universe – what does it serve? For the power must be reunited with what it serves, or the wound will remain and we will remain anxious, the most depressed nation on earth, the nation with the highest youth homicide rate in the world, the highest rate of imprisoning and executing our own citizens.

The quest for the Holy Grail, the drive to succeed, to control some of this power in some way, defines the adult lives of most men. It isn’t all bad. It motivates men, makes them work hard, succeed, provide a decent living for their families, offer some of life’s finer things to those they love. It isn’t all bad at all.

But there comes a time when men wonder if it’s enough.

In the old myth, the bubble is popped by a character called the Hideous Damsel. She brings the questions neither the king nor Parsifal have wanted to address their whole lives. She asks what they have done with their lives, why they think their lives have really been worth anything. She questions the worth of all their achievements, asks if this hasn’t just been a kind of game, without any real purpose.

These are the questions that today we identify as the male mid-life crisis. After working for twenty years and succeeding, men are plagued by the questions of whether they have really succeeded at all, or just spent their life chasing shadows. These questions are an invitation, finally, to bring the struggles inside, to do the self-examination needed to find whether this is, in fact, the kind of life they wanted. Hard questions. We’ll do almost anything to avoid them.

This is the time when many men, not surprisingly, try to find a new Fair Damsel to take their minds off the Hideous Damsel. Maybe if they can convince themselves they’re still young, they can start again with a new wife, a new family, and somehow take a path that won’t run into the questions of the Hideous Damsel down the road.

The role of the Hideous Damsel doesn’t have to be a woman, or even a person. Yes, it could be the man’s wife or mother, but it could also be his son or daughter, his best friend, a preacher or a therapist. Or it may have been a character in a movie he saw, like the movie “About Schmidt.” These are the events that play the role of the Hideous Damsels, asking the questions of what meaning his life had, and they suddenly hit him, and he realizes that he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know.

My own father turned this story into farce in his determination to avoid life’s hard questions. He married seven times. The last two Fair Maidens were mail-order brides from a magazine called “Foreign Women Who Want to Meet American Men.” His last marriage came at the age of 68, to a 28-year-old woman who wanted, perhaps desperately, to leave the Philippines. They had two young children together, now teenagers, which she raised alone after he died eleven years later.

But if men keep trying to relive their adolescent dreams, they never become whole. Salvation eludes them. What a frustrating labyrinth!

So what’s the answer? It’s really one answer, though it comes from many directions, many cultures. The subject, after all, is the same: the human condition, and what to do within it.

About 170 years ago the great Frenchman de Toqueville observed after his visit to America that we have a misleading idea at the very head of our Constitution: the pursuit of happiness. One can not pursue happiness, he thought; if he does he obscures it. If he will proceed with the human task of life, if he can relocate the center of gravity of his personality to something greater, outside himself, happiness will be the outcome.

Psychologist Erik Erikson wrote that as we get older, we must find a way to give back to the world, that our power and our work must finally be grounded in something transcendent like life or the world.

And where is this transcendence, this source of power, to be found? Again, one answer, many versions. A wonderful and unusual medieval Christian proverb says, “To search for God is to insult God.” A Chinese story tells of a fish that heard some men talking on a pier about a miraculous substance called water. This “water,” they were saying, could do everything: support you, transport you, nourish you, and it was abundantly plentiful. The fish was so intrigued! “Water,” it bubbled to itself, “why, I need some of that stuff!” So he called his fish friends together and announced he was going in quest of this wonderful water stuff. A few years later he returned, long fish beard, and his old friends gathered around him. “Well,” they asked, “did you find it? This “water” stuff: did you find it?” The old fish sighed. “Yes,” he said, “Yes, I found it. And you wouldn’t believe it, you just wouldn’t believe it!” And he swam slowly away. And the most advanced teaching of Hinduism is “That art Thou” – we are one with all that is, and our efforts and our lives need to serve it.

What does the Grail serve? The myth of the Holy Grail is Christian, so in their language they say the Grail serves God, that eventually all our power and all our efforts must be put in the service of God or we will never be whole, never find salvation.

But there are many other ways of saying this. We would agree with Tocqueville that the object of life is not happiness, but to serve life or the world. The creative powers of the universe, of life, created us, and we do not find our completion until we find a way of reconnecting, returning. The stardust wants its connection to the other stardust. The stuff of life wants to become one with life again. Hindus have another wonderful story of the salt doll who was also in search of this “water” stuff and made its way to the ocean. Now the salt doll was made entirely of salt. When it reached the ocean, it just waded right in – and began dissolving, of course. Just before it had completely dissolved, the last sound it was heard to make was a quiet “Aaahh!” We must return the power to its origins. The power serves the whole, not the parts.

This same motif appears in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, now a major motion picture nominated for several Academy Awards. The power must be taken from those who would exploit it. In the Grail myth the source of power is given to the representative of God. In Tolkien’s myth the ring of power is taken from evil hands that would use its power to destroy the world and is put back into the ground from which it came. Current myths often speak of returning power to the earth before we destroy ourselves. Jesus said “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do also to me.”

This isn’t mythology, it’s real life stuff. Bill Gates, the world’s richest man, has now put about twenty billion dollars into a foundation to help some of the weakest, poorest kids in the world. Why? Not for a tax write-off, I think, but because at some level he may know what the Grail serves, and is trying to find his own completion by serving it too. Former Austin resident and UT graduate Rene Zellweiger, who was just paid $10 million for her Oscar-nominated role in the movie “Chicago,” was on television the other day saying we must protest the injustices she feels our country is threatening to inflict on the world, and said she knows she will be arrested for these actions, but doesn’t care. She has gained great power and seems to know already that it is seductive, that she can’t be whole when the world is not. I do think many women see this sooner than most men.

I suspect this is the real motive behind a lot of philanthropy: the need to feel connected with the mysterious powers of life that created us, sustain us, and will claim us in the end.

We have a model of the famous labyrinth from France’s Chartres Cathedral in our social hall today. Millions of people have found walking the labyrinth to be a deeply spiritual experience. In a way, the plot of the labyrinth is the plot of the quest for the Holy Grail, and of this sermon. You start walking, and soon feel that you’re getting nearer and nearer to the center. Then suddenly you’re taken in the other direction, and are soon in the furthest ring from the center. This is like hearing the questions from the Hideous Damsel, wondering what your life has been about and whether it’s worth it. It’s easy to get depressed, or to want to start over and see if there isn’t a quicker route. But when you stay with it, the path turns toward the center and, with one detour, you’re suddenly there.

You don’t have to do it over again. You don’t have to start your life all over again, even if you could. You can do it from where you are right now. You just have to relocate the center of gravity of your personality, to put your soul in the service of that which is truly transcendent, ultimate, and enduring. This is what the great religions have always said. Always.

When you do it, return the power to the service of life, God, the world, when you re-center your soul’s quest around that, you’re suddenly home. It can be just that quick, just that quick: in the labyrinth, in life, and even in this sermon.