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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 30, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Poet Adrienne Rich says in her poem Transcendental Etude, “no one ever told us we had to study our lives, make of our lives the study, as if learning natural history or music…” How might we go about studying our own lives?
Call to Worship
TRANSCENDENTAL ETUDE
by Adrienne Rich
No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history or music, that we should
–begin with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on-trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy become one with the daring
to leap into transcendence,
–take the chance
of breaking down the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
And in fact we can ‘t live like that: we take on
everything at once
before we’ve even begun to read or mark time,
were forced to begin in the midst of the hardest
movement,
the one already sounding as we are born.
Reading
THE TRANSFORMATION OF SILENCE INTO LANGUAGE AND ACTION
by Audre Lorde
What are the words you do not yet have?
What do you need to say?
What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence.
Sermon
Do you feel like your life is just flowing by? Do you wish you had time to notice yourself? Do you sometimes feel like you don’t even know yourself or do you know yourself so well you’re a little bored? Are there things you might like to say that you are keeping silent about? Are there stories inside you calling out to be told?
I want to talk about a spiritual practice today. It can calm and soothe, and it can turn fierce and educational.
“No one told us that we should make of our lives a study,” writes Adrienne Rich. In Unitarian Universalism we don’t have one scripture that contains our truth. We can study and respect the Scriptures and stories of all religions. We can respect, study and look for revelation in poetry, art, nature and the lyrics of songs. In UUism, we don’t only find inspiration in the Bible. We draw from the following sources. This is from the UUA web site, a gold mine of information about this faith.
“Unitarian Universalist congregations affirm and promote seven Principles, which we hold as strong values and moral guides. We live out these Principles within a “living tradition” of wisdom and spirituality, drawn from sources as diverse as science, poetry, scripture, and personal experience. These are the six sources our congregations affirm and promote:
- Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life;
- Words and deeds of prophetic people which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love;
- Wisdom from the world’s religions which inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life;
- Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves;
- Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit;
- Spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.”
But our own lives? Make of our own lives a source of revelation, truth and wisdom? I think so, if we pay attention in the right way.
On the simplest level, you can write about your day, about what happened along with your story about what happened and the meaning you make out of it. For example: a friend long ago and far away had a housefly infestation. She wondered if it meant she’d been cursed. She found she just needed to keep the cat food dishes cleaned out. To examine your stories about what happens to you is to understand that a different story could perhaps be told.
Make of your life a study.
Study your life for pattern recognition. If you find yourself asking “why does this always happen to me?” With people, or money, or bosses, try to figure out what part is yours, which is the part most easily changed. Reading the journal of a young woman from the 1800s, I saw that she spent an inordinate amount of time resolving to “improve the shining hour.” I’m not sure how she was wasting time. There was no TV then, and few novels. She was running the family home, ordering servants around and having a social life. Her life was so far from mine, I couldn’t relate at all. I read over my journals and realized I wasted a lot of time resolving to lose weight, grow out my fingernails and get a tan. When I put that energy into other things, my life got better.
Study your life. Maybe just make lists. Things I’m afraid of today. Things I’m worried about. Things I want today. The person I want to be today. The people who make me feel better. The people who make me feel worse. Things I feel guilty about.
Or, if you want to go deeper, you can start with questions.
Questions to start with: what was an early spiritual experience? I might write about the experience I had in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, when I was fifteen. They had a whole room where someone had pillaged a Hindu temple from its home and reassembled it at the museum. I was alone in the large room, my footsteps echoing on the flagstone floor. Stone pillars rose up on either side, in two rows. Walking through, I thought I heard a deep note resonating. Like the lowest register of an organ. It filled me up and stopped me in my tracks. Beauty. I made my way to the next room, which was a reconstructed Japanese tea garden. Water played softly from a bamboo pipe onto a stone, into a little pool. The sound was so peaceful, and the white walls of the tea house were quiet, the floor was quiet, there was a tea pot on a quiet table. I went home and put all of my shelf decorations and memorabilia into boxes, wiped off the shelves and left them empty. The space had more effect than the things.
What was an early spiritual experience for you? Not necessarily an experience in a church. Something that touched and changed your spirit.
A spiritual autobiography is writing that might give you an idea of the shape and color and weight of your spirit, its movement, its longings, its wisdom. Your spirit is where your truth is, and putting it on a page or on a screen can help you have a relationship with it that is different from the relationship you have with your truth when it just stays in your head. You may have a truth inside you that you are hesitant to let out, just write it down first. In a computer file named Rosemary or Boots, or something that won’t awaken anyone’s curiosity.
Do not resolve to write every day. This is a set up for failure. Just write now and then, something you’re sad about, or trying to figure out, or mad about, or scared to say out loud. Our silence will not protect us, says Audre Lourde. Some of us who identify as white are trying to become more competent about being aware of our whiteness.
When was I first aware of my whiteness? Or when did I first realize the color of my skin would affect the events and relationships of my life? When did I first know about race in this culture?
Back to the question I asked after the affirmation of our mission: When have I felt like I belonged? When have I felt like I didn’t belong? What might have helped me feel I belonged? What could someone have done to help me?
Inside most of us is a deep sadness. Inside most of us is a powerful rage. I’ve talked to many people who are afraid that if they open the door to their sorrow, if they take the lid off their rage, it will overwhelm their lives. Audre Lourde’s daughter said “‘You’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.’
Children in cages…. What I really mean to say is….
You are where you are. Do you want to stay where you are? Are you curious about who you could become? Do you feel settled and satisfied? What could you be better at? Spiritual growth, I think, means you grow more loving, more patient, kind, good, gentle, and self controlled. That’s from the middle eastern wisdom of the Christian Scripture. Maybe we would say our spirit needs to be more courageous, more clear, more hungry for the liberation of others, more empathic, more resilient for difficult conversation? What do you think are the symptoms of spirit growth? There’s another good question to wrestle with on the screen or the page. Blessings on your learning. Blessings on your cognitive humility, knowing you don’t have it all figured out to an A+ level yet. Blessings on your curiosity..
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