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© Emily Tietz
May 27, 2007
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.
Prayer
There are voices that would call us to remember to see what is valuable in each other and ourselves. To act in ways which add life to life. This takes more courage and more consciousness than one might expect.
And there are voices that would call us to take the easier and less conscious path. The one on which we don’t take care to notice or acknowledge value in whomever or whatever is before us.
The voices are within us and without.
Let us listen to the higher ones.
Because when we don’t it is all too easy to imprint another with fear. It is all too easy to be the heavy foot that silences another’s hope. And it is very easy to live out of whatever fear we ourselves have been imprinted with.
But life doesn’t have to be like that.
Let us create a world in which even the smallest of us can trust that our words will be heard and welcomed. Let us create a world in which no one around us – not even us – has to be afraid even in silence.
Let us listen to the voices of our higher selves.
Amen.
Sermon: One Inch at a Time
A few months ago Davidson told a Hindu story about the god, Krishna as a boy?
One day his teacher saw him chewing in class and asked what he was chewing. Kids weren’t allowed to chew gum in class. “Nothing,” he replied, and kept chewing.
You can imagine this made the teacher a bit irritated. It was very clear that he was chewing. She marched to his desk, commanded him to stand up, then said, “Now open your mouth and let me look inside!” The boy opened his mouth and when she looked in she saw a thousand million galaxies. That got me to thinking, what would life be like if we remembered to see the thousand million galaxies inside of each other.
When I was in college I took a class that dealt with domestic violence. One afternoon, the professor cited a study that really stuck with me. The purpose of the study was to determine what factors made a difference in how the life of a person who was abused as a child played out.
The researchers interviewed two groups of adults. One group was adults who had been abused as children and who continued destructive patterns in their adult lives – self-destructive or otherwise. The other group was adults who had been abused as children and were able to step outside of destructive patterns.
After interviewing all of the participants, the researchers found that it wasn’t the severity of the abuse, or the kind, or the duration that noticeably made a difference in the trajectory of the individuals’ lives. What made a difference was this: the people who had been able to move beyond destructive patterns could all point to at least one person whom they believed – really believed – in them. The individuals in the other group could not.
It could have been a teacher, best friend, a neighbor, or even just a one-time and brief encounter. It didn’t matter who the person was or how long they knew each other. It simply mattered that someone had shown them that they were whole and valuable.
That’s powerful stuff.
What would this world be like if we remembered to see the thousand million galaxies in each other?How we choose to live in relationship either adds life to life, or diminishes it. Throughout human history we’ve explored questions of how to see each other and how to see ourselves; how to treat each other and how to treat ourselves. We call the endeavor sacred. We attribute holiness to whatever is at the core of the quest. On our innermost level we recognize that recognizing the holy brings life to a higher level. So we incorporate into our religions codes for higher living. To be admittedly simplistic, we say that if we get it right, we spend eternity in heaven; if we get it right, we achieve nirvana; the more we get it right, the higher a being we come back as in the next life.
It’s powerful stuff.
What would this world be like if we remembered to see the thousand million galaxies in each other?
Robert Fulghum offers some thoughts in his book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.
He writes “In the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific some villagers practice a unique form of logging. If a tree is too large to be felled with an ax, the natives cut it down by yelling at it. (Can’t lay my hands on the article, but I swear I read it.) Woodsmen with special powers creep up on a tree just at dawn and suddenly scream at it at the top of their lungs. They continue this for thirty days. The tree dies and falls over. The theory is that the hollering kills the spirit of the tree. According to the villagers, it always works.”
Ah, those poor naive innocents. Such quaintly charming habits of the jungle. Screaming at trees, indeed. How primitive. Too bad they don’t have the advantages of modern technology and the scientific mind.
Me? I yell at my wife. And yell at the telephone and the lawn mower. And yell at the TV and the newspaper and my children. I’ve even been known to shake my fist and yell at the sky at times.
Man next door yells at his car a lot. And this summer I heard him yell at a stepladder for most of an afternoon. We modern, urban, educated folks yell at traffic and umpires and bills and banks and machines – especially machines. Machines and relatives get most of the yelling.
Don’t know what good it does. Machines and things just sit there. Even kicking doesn’t always help. As for people, well, the Solomon Islanders may have a point. Yelling at living things does tend to kill the spirit in them. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts.
There is a saying that goes, “We give ourselves away one inch at time.” I think it’s also true that we chip another’s spirit away one inch at a time.
What would life be like if we remembered to see the thousand million galaxies in each other?
One night I was flipping through television station and landed on PBS for a while. The motivational speaker whom they were featuring, and whose name I didn’t catch, told a story about a certain tribe somewhere in Africa. When a person commits a crime, large or small, they bring the person to the center of the village. Then all the rest of the villagers surround the person. One by one, they begin to tell the person things they love or admire about them. The session is not over until everyone says at least one thing. This can go on for a long time. When they are finished, the person is welcomed back to the community. The speaker finished by noting that the need for such interventions is rare.
Notice that this is not a practice of “turning the other cheek” or letting destructive behavior go. The tribe takes immediate action. They directly acknowledge what the person has done and that it must not continue. They then address it by calling the individual back to his or her higher self.
And the need for such interventions is rare.
We may chip another’s spirit away one inch at a time. I think we also help restore it one inch at a time.
What would this world be like if we remembered to see the thousand million galaxies in each other? I’d like to find that out.
