Hermits or Husbands

June 17, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

Mystery of many names and Mystery beyond all naming, this morning we are here in celebration of among other things – fathers. Some of us have negative images of what fathers can be because some of us have had lousy fathers. Others see fatherhood in a positive light because their personal experiences are positive ones. In some sense many of us wish, as my wife, Viv, does that we had Atticus Finch as our father. Harper Lee’s image of fatherhood as portrayed by Gregory Peck in the Oscar winning Christmas Day 1962 release still brings pangs of envy – if only we could have been that way with our kids.

But more than simply parenting we are talking this morning about husbanding – the ability to spend or use economically, or simply the ability to live gracefully without a lot of fuss.

This world and the harbingers of news don’t want us to imagine that anything is easy. The world speaks in the language of labor. Count, if you will, how many times people tell you how hard something is going to be, or with what difficulty something may be accomplished. There’s a bit of self-fulfilling negativity there.

Think instead of the watercourse way – the fact that water effortlessly finds its own level. Lao-Tzu’s Tao Te Ching suggests that we take the watercourse way that we flow into life, giving where giving seems appropriate and receiving when things come our way.

I’m thinking of the scene in To Kill a Mockingbird where Atticus Finch finds the town drunk harassing Atticus’ children who are waiting in the car. Atticus comes out of the house where he’s been visiting and simply approaches the car. The town drunk spews vitriolic profanities at Atticus, but Atticus never responds, never lashes out at the man. Atticus knows that it is his presence alone that is making the statement that needs to be made. He is his children’s father, and his economy causes the drunk to slither off away from them.

We pray for the good sense and certitude to know when we are doing what needs to be done by simply suiting up and showing up. There’s an art to life that isn’t often taught, and isn’t often recognized. Give us the insight to see those artists of life that don’t fit the mold of society, those pushed toward the periphery because they don’t match definitions of success and worldly honor.

Mostly, this morning we search for an economy of being. May we forgive ourselves when we use a hammer when a thumbtack would have done the trick. Great Spirit give us the power to know that more often than not we know, from the inside, what needs to be done, and what needs to be ignored.

Minding the breath, minding our heartbeats let us move through this life like the guests that we are, honoring the earth and all sentient beings that inhabit it.

We pray this in the name of everything that is holy, and that is, precisely, everything.

Amen

Affirmation of Faith

Monty Newton

Reading:

(From Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper

He came out on a high bald knoll that looked over the valley and he stopped here and studied it as a man might cresting a hill and seeing a strange landscape for the first time. Pines and cedars in a swatch of dark green piled down the mountain to the left and ceased again where the road cut through. Beyond that a field and a log hogpen, the shakes spilling down the broken roof, looking like some diminutive settler’s cabin in ruins.

Through the leaves of the hardwoods he could see the zinc-colored roof of the church faintly coruscant and a patch of boarded siding weathered the paper-gray of a waspnest. And far in the distance the long purple welts of the Great Smokies. If I was a younger man, he told himself, I would move to them mountains. I would find me a clearwater branch and build me a log house with a fireplace. And my bees would make black mountain honey. And I wouldn’t care for no man. He started down the steep incline – Then I wouldn’t be unneighborly neither, he added.

Sermon: Hermits or Husbands

Introduction:

We heard from Monty Newton our Worship Associate. You may be asking yourself, “What does a seemingly misanthropic old black man have to do with Father’s Day?” Good question. By the end of this sermon that question should be laid to rest.

Something I’ve noticed through the years. Men tend to isolate. You ever notice that? Yes, it’s true, men do have friends, but how many men do you know who have kept in touch with those friends throughout the years? And even if they have what do men have friends for? Do men call each other and complain about their kids? Do men commiserate when they aren’t getting along with their wives? What exactly is the role of friends when it comes to men? I’m not pretending to know the answers to these and other questions about men. After all, I’m a man, and it goes without saying, almost, that I’m writing this sermon in order to learn something about myself and other men.

Recently, I got a questionnaire from a parishioner of this church and the questions concerned my role as a father. The questions were good, but to tell the truth all I could write back to this parishioner was that I felt that I had been a failure as a father. When my son was three years old I left he and his mother, and when the papers came for my son to be adopted by another man, I went down to the lawyer’s office and I signed the papers without thinking twice. When my daughter was ten years old I left her and her mother, my second wife. True, a few years later I had my daughter for a couple of summers, but when the third summer rolled around, my daughter chose a new set of tires for her car rather than coming out to Dallas and spending time with me, and my third wife.

How did I feel about that? First, I thought it was a choice that my daughter shouldn’t have had to make. It was my summer and whether my daughter needed tires on her car or not, she owed me that summer, right? In the end I did nothing more than complain. Viv and I didn’t see Isabelle that summer, and in a way, it was a relief. The first summer Isabelle had come to visit us; I’d spent half the summer running between Viv and Isabelle asking them if everything was all right. Finally, Viv and Isabelle came to me one day and told me to stop trying to fix something that wasn’t broken. Who knew? Certainly not me.

I’m sixty years old and to me women might as well be a different species. Yes, I get along with my wife, my sister and her friends, the female parishioners in this church, but the concerns of women are not the concerns of men. Women are from Venus and Men are from Mars as the book title reads. I haven’t read the book, but the title seems perfectly clear to me.

Lawrence Durrell, the British Novelist and Poet, once said concerning the Mona Lisa that “She has the look of a woman who has just dined off her husband.” Even when reading that quote I’m not sure, “Could that be a good thing?”

Eric Berne the Psychiatrist is reported to have said, “No husband is a hero to his wife’s psychiatrist.”

Since husbands are more often times than not, men, perhaps it would behoove us to take a look at some famous quotes about men.

Mark Twain wrote, “The noblest work of God? Man. Who found this out? Man.”

Twain again, “Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.”

And finally, Twain during his Letters From the Earth phase, “Man is a museum of diseases, a home of impurities; he comes today and is gone tomorrow, he begins as dirt and departs as stench.”

Perhaps you think the last a bit too harsh, that perhaps Mark Twain’s closeness to the subject has made it impossible to be objective, after all, familiarity does breed contempt. But Twain added to that old adage; “Familiarity breeds contempt – and children!”

But it’s another definition of husband that I would like us to look at today. We’ve been dealing with the meaning of husband as in a woman’s spouse, the man to whom a woman is married.

But there’s also the transitive verb, to husband. The meaning of that verb is to be thrifty with something: to use something economically and sensibly.

What would it mean in the wedding ceremony if when I pronounced a couple husband and wife, it was this definition of husband that was being thought through? What would marriages be if the job of one of the two partners was the job of making sure that what was used by the couple was used in an economic, sensible and thrifty manner?

And it is these ideas of thrift, sensibility and economy that lead quite easily into our discussion of the hermit.

When we become overwhelmed by the world and our lives seem to be nothing more than one continuous activity, it might just be that it’s time for a retreat. Sometimes these retreats are religious or spiritual in nature.

Gautama Buddha abandoned his family and went on a spiritual quest. His wife didn’t send the county sheriff after him for non- payment of child support. The nature of this quest was the discovery that outside the walls of Buddha’s father’s castle the rest of the world was lost in suffering. In truth, the very foundation of Buddhism is the fact that suffering is universal and that if human kind is to persevere in this life then they must deal with suffering. Suffering is unavoidable and to live this life one must not ignore it, push it out of consciousness, nor pretend that it is not the ultimate fate of all who live.

The solution to this problem is in the very nature of how the Buddha saw the self. If it is true that we all suffer, then who is it that is suffering? Buddha discovered that there is no permanent self, and this discovery led him inexorably to the conclusion that even though suffering happens, it is made worse when this suffering happens to somebody. If, in fact, the lights are on, but nobody’s home, then suffering is still present, but the self that keeps score, the self that knows it’s being wronged, the self that holds grudges, the self that wants revenge this self is an illusion. Suffering is just what is – take note of it and move on. This taking note and moving on is called enlightenment. If there is no self, then scores aren’t kept, wrongs don’t need to be righted, grudges become mote and revenge becomes the boomerang that won’t come back.

The Chinese Book of Changes, the I-Ching, counsels us thusly; The wise person rises above the inferior man. The wise person is like the sky above the mountain. No matter how high the mountain is, it can never touch the sky. The wise person keeps their distance because the mountain can never reach them, neither in a psychological nor physical sense. The wise person’s retreat is not motivated by hatred or anger but by dignity.

The image of the lake is often used in Asian philosophy. Everything is reflected in the lake, but nothing is held there. The moon in the lake is perfectly reflected, but to jump into the lake in order to get to the moon would gain us nothing but a bath. The forest fire is reflected in the lake, but the water is not burning.

Now we seem to be returning to Monty Newton’s story of Roosevelt the man with a mirror for a front door. Those who live in Abilene might think that it’s quaint for Roosevelt to have a mirror for a front door, and perhaps even Roosevelt thinks nothing more than it’s convenient. But on a deeper philosophical level the person who approaches Roosevelt’s house will see themselves reflected in the entrance to that house.

In much the same way Roosevelt himself is nothing more than a calm lake, a clean mirror. If you approach him with fear and trembling, then it is fear and trembling that you will see reflected there. If, like Monty, you approach him as a man among men, and talk to him like you would anybody else, then miraculously, he responds in kind. Imagine that?

Perhaps then it isn’t a question of either being a husband or a hermit? Perhaps the real deal is in being a husband in the sense of someone who is cautious and economical in their dealings with the world, then it follows quite naturally that drawing back, retreating, abandoning the fight when, and if, it’s really nothing more than a fight between entities that don’t exist, then perhaps the paradox between either being a husband or a hermit is resolved, or held in a state of suspended animation?

The Tarot deck has as one of its Major Arcana the card known as The Hermit. The manner in which this card is displayed in the Waite-Rider deck is much like the manner in which saints are portrayed. He is wearing a monk’s robe. He carries with him a staff and a lantern. He is not a beggar, nor one who seeks only isolation. His long white beard, staff and lantern suggest that he is out and about in the world, not lost in idleness, nor seeking only isolation. The lantern is the light of the world shed precisely for the enlightenment of others. This hermit is a sage, not simply searching for truth and justice but bringing truth and justice to the people. He’s like The Fool in the Major Arcana, he will go to all lengths, walk to the edge, but unlike the Fool he knows his boundaries, will not step over the precipice, is not on an adventure, but rather walking about the world in hope of spreading light to those who need it.

The hermit is an unsettling image for us in Western society. This hermit is outside the context of daily living – he’s not worried about the kids and their soccer game – and he is not subordinated to the authority of the age. He is, in fact, modeling for the rest of the world, and this modeling can lead to his being ostracized and scapegoated by the culture within which he lives, but quite amicably refuses to take part in.

Hence the image of Roosevelt, the black man who lives off the fat of the land, the man who shows the rest of Abilene that the rules and constrictors of the society in which they live may not be as solid as they would like to believe.

On some level we all wish to be comforted by the societal rules by which we play, but the truth is, these rules are arbitrary and potentially meaningless. We are reminded of that when there lives one among us who ignores the rules but not only gets by, but in a deeper sense flourishes.

The morality of the wandering hermit tells us that what is right and what is wrong knows no place and time.

We wish there were answers to life’s big questions. Are men hermits or husbands? What is the truth of our being?

The poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, wrote “Try to love the questions themselves – Live the questions now. Perhaps, then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing, live your way into the answers.”

And yet we should not expect the world to always understand what we are up to. Even with the best of intentions we who would be husbands – persons who would use judicially those things with which we are entrusted – we husbands must not expect the world or those in it to realize what we may be up to, or accept what we think we have to offer.

I will close with a story that illustrates this perfectly.

There was once a farmer – a man who husbanded the land – who kept his fields completely to himself. His crops were his main interest and he prided himself in keeping the birds and animals away. He built fences around about, and didn’t even like the idea that when he harvested he might be leaving even the least little bit in the fields for the mice or other scavengers. Then, one day he got sick and almost died. When he recovered he was changed. He realized now that he was lonely. He’d been so successful in his efforts to keep those at bay – that he wanted at bay – that although he was a rich man, his riches did not fill the space in the middle of his chest. In a flash he realized he needed other beings. Immediately he when out and took down the fences that surrounded his fields. He walked into the fields and stood there with his arms outstretched to receive in loving kindness all who would now visit him. He stood there night and day his arms opened in love. Much to his surprise no animals came to eat his crops, no birds landed to enjoy his grains. The truth was they were all terrified of the farmer’s new scarecrow.