© Davidson Loehr
20 May 2001
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
I remember, some years ago, hearing a grand old preacher describe almost all religious literature as “love-talk.” He didn’t elaborate, so it’s been rattling around inside since then. It seems like a way of understanding religious expression that makes it easy to plant fantastic thoughts in a down-to-earth life with integrity.
SERMON: Love Talk
This sermon title comes from an 89-year-old preacher who is a friend of mine. I heard him use it during a sermon on Christmas, in which he spoke of all the miraculous and mythic stuff – the virgin birth, a Son of God, a savior – and said it wasn’t meant to be fact-talk; it was love-talk. That’s all he said about it, but those two words stuck with me. That’s the “key” I want to play this morning’s sermon in: thinking about other kinds of “love-talk,” and how they differ from the way we usually talk. You can find examples everywhere.
I hear a Christian friend say “God has led me in warm and wise paths.” At first, I may think “Well, I’m not sure you were led. You’re looking back on it and finding positive rather than negative patterns according to the stories of your faith.” Then I think, “Well, their words sound a lot more comforting and warm than mine do!” I was talking intellectual talk; they were talking love talk.
Or a young man comes in, wracked with guilt because at 32 he knows he’s a failure. He knows he’s let down everybody he cares about, and that he will never amount to anything. Apparently, there is a story I’m not aware of that says unless you have it all together by 32 you’re worthless. He needs a better story, because that one doesn’t give him many options or any respect. But he doesn’t need scientific data about his “Success Quotient.” He needs a better way of talking to himself, a way that has some warmth and acceptance about it. It can be the difference between saying, “She’s an idiot!” and saying. “She certainly sees things differently than I do!”
It’s easy for 50, 60, or 70-something folks to listen to the wild-eyed scheme of a 30-something, and to think, “Those young people think they can do anything! They haven’t lived long enough to know that life is tough.” A more honest response, though, would usually be something like, “I feel intimidated and old by their optimism and courage, because I remember, years ago, when I had it. I wonder what happened to me? I wonder if I could learn how to trust again if I paid attention to them?”
The first kind of talk is self-centered, exclusive talk that shuts others out because it restricts everyone’s possibilities to the limit of our understanding and trust. The second kind of talk assumes that the other people are our moral equals. Or, to put it poetically, that we are all children of God, all limbs on the body of humanity, that we’re all temporary vehicles of life’s precious gift to itself. There’s a warmth to the second that is not in the first. The first wants to stand on cold hard facts; the second wants to establish warm, living connections. That’s a big difference.
150 years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a few paragraphs about someone who was led from the first way of talking to the brink of the second. The story has been in my mind since I first read it maybe 15 years ago, though this is the first time I’ve ever used it. But see how it fits here:
“The monk, Friar Bernard, lamented in his cell on Mount Cenis the crimes of mankind. Rising one morning before day from his bed of moss and dry leaves, he gnawed his roots and berries, drank of the spring, and set forth to go to Rome to reform the corrupt [people there]. On his way he encountered many travelers who greeted him courteously; and the cabins of the peasants and the castles of the lords supplied his few wants. When he came at last to Rome, his piety and good will easily introduced him to many families of the rich, and on the first day he saw and talked with gentle mothers with their babes at their breasts, who told him how much love they bore their children, and how they were perplexed in their daily walk lest they should fail in their duty to them. “What!” he said, “and this on rich embroidered carpets, on marble floors, with [expensive] sculpture, and carved wood, and rich pictures, and piles of books about you? [You’re rich Roman pagans, not even Christians! How can you be good people!”]
“Look at our pictures, and books,” they said, “and we will tell you, good Father, how we spent the last evening. These are stories of godly children and holy families and sacrifices made in old or in recent times by great and not mean persons; and last evening, our family was collected, and our husbands and brothers spoke [sadly] on what we could save and give to others in the hard times.” Then the men came in, and they said, “[Greetings, good brother!] Does your monastery want gifts? [Let us share with you.]” Then the Friar Bernard went home swiftly with other thoughts than he had brought, saying, “Their way of life is wrong – [they are not even poor, and they are not Christians!] Yet these Romans, whom I prayed God to destroy, are lovers, they are lovers; what can I do?” (Emerson, “The Conservative,” in The Oxford Book of Essays, p. 181)
Friar Bernard has a couple choices. He can try to forget what he’s just seen and felt, and return to his comfortable beliefs, or he can realize that his beliefs are too small to hold life, or even to serve it in a way that isn’t a curse to others. What does it take to let go of small certainties and grow toward larger but less certain understandings? How do we learn to trust rather than doubt, to hope rather than fear? Or to put it in terms of another metaphor, how do we shift gears?
I’m thinking about shifting because I just bought a bicycle yesterday, and this thing has 24 gears. Last time I owned a bike, a ten-speed was tops, so 24 sounds like a lot. It means this image of all that gear shifting has become a metaphor that I can’t get out of my mind today. So it’s like shifting gears while bicycling up a hill, and suddenly you’re moving slower but you’re climbing the hill you could never have made it up in your original gear.
For me, that’s a little like changing my way of thinking and talking. When I have moved from an attitude of certainty like the Friar’s, an attitude that shuts out everybody not like me, into a more optimistic and trusting attitude, it’s usually come through something happening that shifts my gears. A couple years ago in Albany, I was impatient and angry with a waitress who wasn’t refilling my coffee, wasn’t around when I needed her, and didn’t pick up the money I left with the bill for five full minutes. So I paid the bill and don’t leave a tip. That felt better. Then as I left I saw her in the hallway back by the kitchen. She was crying, another waitress was holding her, and I learned that her father was dying. I snuck back to the table to leave a tip, with an anonymous note saying, “I overheard you telling the other waitress that your father is dying. I’m so sorry.” The service didn’t get any better after I heard that, but the waitress did. And the tip wasn’t for being a waitress; it was for reminding me that she was a human being.
It seems that stories are the best way to talk about the difference between closed attitudes or open caring, between judgment talk and love talk. Here’s another one:
A preacher is riding the city bus on a Saturday, thinking about his sermon, trying to concentrate. The bus stops in front of a big hospital and several people get on. Among them is a man with two young boys. The man sits down, and the boys begin running up and down the bus, screaming and yelling. The father just sits there, doesn’t even lift a finger to control his bratty kids. The preacher tries to be patient, but my God the kids are brats, their father won’t act like a responsible parent, this is a city bus, the preacher has this sermon to write, and enough is enough! So he walks across the aisle and leans down near the man, then says quietly but with a distinct edge, “Sir, I wish you would control your children!” The man looks up at him, kind of dazed, and says, “Oh yes, yes, I should. My wife, their mother, has just died and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.”
Suddenly, you can hear the sound of about twelve gears shifting at once. The preacher’s first reaction was fair. It was a public space, the kids were out of control, and it is fair to expect parents to teach their children to act respectfully toward others. He wasn’t wrong. But he forgot that in this world sometimes people die and those who loved them don’t know what to do with it. Now he suddenly recognizes that man and his sons as people just like him, who bleed when they’re cut and cry or come unglued when they’re devastated. It can happen as quickly as that, the shift from rejecting to accepting, from judging to empathy and caring. It can happen as quickly as that.
“Love-talk” is a clumsy title for a sermon, I know. I mean by it a warmer and more accepting way of seeing ourselves and others, a way that moves us from being against others to feeling among them, a way that replaces cold hard facts with warm living ones.
To put it in the terms of children’s stories, it’s like shifting from Chicken Little, who lived his life sure that the sky was falling, to The Little Engine That Could, who dissolved his doubt and fear by deciding that he thought he could, he thought he could, and he did.
And the point I am trying to make is that we get caught up in our cold hard factual views so easily and so often that we can completely miss out on the chance to be part of something bigger and warmer. Like Friar Bernard and those noble Romans, or the preacher and the grieving, shattered kids and their dad. It isn’t just that we owe this kinder self to others, it’s that without that genuine regard for others we lose out too.
This reminded me of another story that has been in my head since I read it over a decade ago, but which I had also never seen a way to use in a sermon before. It’s a short piece with a surprise ending, by the science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin. See if it sticks to you the way it’s stuck to me:
In the humid New England summer the small cooling plant ran all day, making a deep, loud noise. Around the throbbing machinery was a frame of coarse wire net. I thought the bird was outside that wire net, then I hoped it was, then I wished it was. It was moving back and forth with the regularity of the trapped: the zoo animal that paces twelve feet east and twelve feet west, hour after hour; the heartbeat of the prisoner in the cell before the torture; the unending recurrence; the silent, steady panic. Back and forth, steadily fluttering between two wooden uprights just above a beam that supported the wire screen: a sparrow, ordinary, dusty, scrappy. I’ve seen sparrows fighting over territory till the feathers fly, and [flocking] cheerfully on telephone wires, and in winter gathering in trees in crowds like dirty little Christmas ornaments and talking all together like noisy children – chirp, chirp, chirp chirp! But this sparrow was alone, trapped in wire and fear. What could I do? There was a door to the wire cage, but it was padlocked. I went on. I tell you I felt that bird beat its wings right here, here under my breastbone in the hollow of my heart. I said in my mind, Is it my fault? Did I build the cage? Just because I happened to see it, is it my sparrow? But my heart was low already, and I knew now that I would be down, down like a bird whose wings won’t bear it up, a starving bird.
Then on the path I saw the man, one of the campus managers. The bird’s fear gave me courage to speak. “I’m so sorry to bother you,” I said. “I’m just visiting here at the librarians” conference – we met the other day in the office. I didn’t know what to do, because there’s a bird that got into the cooling plant there, inside the screen, and it can’t get out. The noise of the machinery, I think the noise confuses it, and I don’t know what to do.”
“I’ll have a look,” he said, not smiling, not frowning.
He turned and came with me. He saw the bird beating back and forth, back and forth in silence. He unlocked the padlock. He had the key.
I watched the open door, “I saw the bird fly out and fly away.”
The man and I closed the door. He locked it. “Be getting on,” he said, not smiling, not frowning, and went on his way, a man with a lot on his mind, a hard-working man. But did he have no joy in it? That’s what I think about now. Did he have the key, the power to set free, the will to do it, but no joy in doing it? It is his soul I think about now, if that is the word for it: the spirit: that sparrow. (“The Sparrow” by Ursula K. LeGuin)
That’s a story almost guaranteed to trouble ministers! We try to do what we can to be of service to others. We have to keep checking to make sure that we aren’t doing it mechanically, that it is still giving meaning and joy to us. But of course it isn’t true only for ministers, it’s something we can all fall into. It’s an old commandment; you’ve all heard it, to “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” That love needs to go both ways: to the neighbor, and to yourself. Why is that so easy to forget?
At the beginning of all our services, I speak of “questions more profound than answers.” I think that life’s most enduring questions are more profound than answers. They can pry open a door of our awareness, or shift gears for us, so we leave here seeing things a little differently, perhaps asking different questions of ourselves. Today, I’m going to leave you with questions, because I can’t tell you what kind of love-talk you need to hear, what picture of the world you need to live in that brings you life rather than just adding time.
But I do have one more story, to set up the questions. It comes from my favorite philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. He was trying to respond to someone who thought what was most important was knowing the truth. Wittgenstein gave him this story to think about. Imagine there was this man who lived at a certain time. He was a very religious man, and believed all the teachings of his particular faith. They gave him a sense of living in a blessed world, and through these beliefs, he lived and died at peace, a happy man who loved others and was loved by everyone who met him. Then, just two weeks after he died, one of the sciences suddenly discovered that everything he believed had been false. Very well, his beliefs were false. But could you say his life was false? And if not, then just what is the role of truth in the task of living fully, lovingly and well?
