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© Davidson Loehr
9 March 2003
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
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INVOCATION:
We come to seek beyond sight,
to listen beyond sounds,
to be opened to life
at levels sometimes comforting
and sometimes disturbing
but always in that neighborhood
where our minds, hearts and souls
find their common ground,
and their common purpose.
It is good to be together again, for
It is a sacred time, this
And a sacred place, this:
a place for questions more profound than answers,
vulnerability more powerful than strength,
– and a peace that can pass all understanding.
It is a sacred time, this:
Let us begin it together in song.
CENTERING PRAYER:
I want to share with you a short prayer, a Yoruban prayer from Africa. Prayers often sound funny to many modern people, kind of foreign, as though they are talking to an imaginary friend up above the sky. This prayer can also be heard that way. But I invite you to let it get inside of you by asking to whom or to what, for you, could this prayer be addressed? It’s very short, I’ll read it twice:
O Divine One! I give thanks
to You, the one who is as near as my
heartbeat, and more anticipated than my
next breath. Let Your wisdom become one
with this vessel as I lift my voice in
thanks for Your love.
O Divine One! I give thanks
to You, the one who is as near as my
heartbeat, and more anticipated than my
next breath. Let Your wisdom become one
with this vessel as I lift my voice in
thanks for Your love.
Amen.
SERMON: The Soul’s Code
We need a fresh way of looking at the importance of our lives. We need better stories, more interesting plots to live out.
I don’t say this only because I recently spent four days in Lubbock, though it is related. I gave four talks there, one on a theological argument for abortion to an audience of Texas Tech students where I got over an hour’s worth of questions, almost all of them hostile. Lubbock doesn’t permit sex education in its public schools. It also has the highest teen pregnancy rate in Texas, which has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the U.S., which has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the developed world. So it’s not surprising that they are living out of some pretty sad stories.
One young man told me that it didn’t bother him that some local 15-year-old girls were having their second child, or that Lubbock led the nation in births to teen-aged girls who can’t care for the babies, because “If even one of those babies comes to know the Lord, it will have been worth it.” Worth sacrificing thousands of human beings who, in his story, just don’t matter.
In some ways, this is a problem of organized religions, which have been in denial since the loss of the supernatural world. When God can be no more than a concept, the concept has had trouble competing with other, sometimes better, concepts, and stories to live by.
But it isn’t just organized religions that have trouble coming up with adequate stories. Yesterday I read in the new issue of Newsweek about a 52-year-old French chef who committed suicide because his restaurant lost its three-star rating. What was that story about? And the suicide rate of America’s teenagers is the highest in the developed world; so we have a lot of people without a story worth living by.
In some ways, the most important human question we have is “How do I put the pieces of my life and my world together into a coherent life? How do I find a story worth living out?”
Now consider this: What if we already carry within us a kind of dynamic force that can help lead us toward the kind of life story we need? What if the style of our integrity comes into the world with us, and we just need to learn how to hear it and listen to it?
What if you had a kind of guardian angel that was always with you? That knew your soul, that could help guide you toward authenticity? And what if it had a kind of invisible presence and power that could help you, hold you on course, help you be true to yourself, if you just stayed in touch with it?
This picture is what billions of people for thousands of years have believed was the true order of the universe. It isn’t quite the world of the gods, it’s more ancient than the gods. It’s the world of the invisible powers within our lives, both individually and collectively.
Since ancient times, most people have believed this is really the case. The Greeks spoke of the daimon that comes into the world with each person, and can guide us toward the kind of life we must lead. The Romans called this our genius. It didn’t have anything to do with I.Q., it had more to do with the word “genie,” from which it came. Our genie, or genius, was a kind of invisible spirit that’s a part of us. The great geniuses of history are people who have followed the lead of their most amazing genies. I’ve known just a few geniuses, and found them to be very driven people. They didn’t really have a choice, they had to do what they were doing. Those I knew did it better than almost anyone alive. The genie that drove them also blessed them. But we can all be blessed by our daimon, our genie, our soul.
Christians have this notion too, though it isn’t as intellectual. For centuries, Christians have written about our guardian angel, who acts just about like the daimon or the genius. And both Hindus and Buddhists talk about our karma as that invisible force that seems to contain our script, to point toward what we must do and how we must live.
A few years ago, this ancient theory was given another look by the Jungian psychologist James Hillman, in a book called The Soul’s Code. That code is the invisible sort of message we carry with us that can point us toward who we must try to become. Our soul, you understand, isn’t a kind of little bag of gas. It isn’t a “thing” in that way. It’s more like a moving style, the way we are, the way we need to be in order to be true to ourselves.
Though Hillman seems to dart in and out of supernaturalism when he writes, there is nothing spooky about this. A few weeks ago I talked about the fact we’ve all observed, that each animal, including us, comes into the world with a unique sort of character or style, and they always try to live in that style. It’s true with dogs, cats, horses and humans, nothing spooky about it, and that’s what the ancients were calling the daimon or genius or guardian angel though I don’t think dogs, cats and horses are presumed to have angels in Christianity.
James Hillman calls all this his Acorn Theory, which holds that each person has a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived. (p. 6) That’s the sense in which our character is our destiny. That’s the soul’s code.
Since this soul or genius is easiest to see in the really exemplary people where it is most dramatic, Hillman uses stories from some of their lives to make his theory come alive.
Consider this event. Amateur Night at the Harlem Opera House. A skinny, awkward sixteen-year-old goes fearfully onstage. She is announced to the crowd: “The next contestant is a young lady named Ella Fitzgerald. “Miss Fitzgerald here is gonna dance for us”. “Hold it, hold it. Now what’s your problem, honey?” Correction, folks. “Miss Fitzgerald has changed her mind.” She’s not gonna dance, she’s gonna sing.” Ella Fitzgerald gave three encores and won first prize. (10)
Or take the story of Golda Meir, who led Israel during the 1973 war. Her career was launched by her soul’s calling while in fourth grade in the Milwaukee public schools. She organized a protest group against the required purchase of schoolbooks, which were too expensive for the poorer children, who were thus denied equal opportunity to learn. This child of eleven rented a hall to stage a meeting, raised funds, gathered her group of girls, prepped her little sister to declaim a social poem in Yiddish, and then herself addressed the assembly. Was she not already a Labor party prime minister? (20)
When you see a story this dramatic begin to unfold, it is just mesmerizing, though I think many of us experience something similar, if less dramatic. The highlight of my four days in Lubbock was a young woman who may well belong in this kind of company. Her name is Shelby Knox, and she spoke very boldly and articulately about the need for sex education in public schools. In fact, she presented her speech to the National Education Association two years ago, followed by a camera crew from HBO, which is filming a documentary on her because two years ago when she delivered that speech, she was fourteen.
My hosts invited her to a dinner with some of us, and I had a chance to experience this girl first-hand. She knows exactly who she is and what she must do, and has absolutely no doubts that she will do it. She has a 4.0 grade average, and after she graduates from high school in 2005, she plans to attend either New York University or American University and begin to learn how to change the direction of politics, our country, and perhaps the world. I wouldn’t bet against her.
She reminded me of the theme of this sermon, so I talked with her about this acorn theory, and she identified with it immediately. Before she knew who she was and what she must do, she said she was confused and scared. But then after she turned eleven, everything became clear. She discovered an inner beacon that shines like a laser beam.
She reminded me of the story of the greatest of all Spanish bullfighters, Manolete. As a child, Manolete was timid and fearful, delicate and sickly, interested only in painting and reading. He clung so tightly to his mother’s apron strings that his sisters and other children used to tease him. He rarely joined other boys’ games of soccer or playing at bullfighting. This all changed when he was about eleven, and for the rest of his life, nothing else mattered much except the bulls. (15-16)
Don’t let this sound spooky. We live among a throng of invisibles that order us about: family values, self-development, human relationships, personal happiness, and then another, more fierce set of mythical figures called Control, Success, Cost-Effectiveness, and the Economy. Were we in old Florence or ancient Rome or Athens, the invisibles would have statues and altars, or at least painted images, like the ancient invisibles called fortune, Hope, Friendship, Grace, Modesty, Persuasion, and the rest. But our task here is not to restore all the invisibles but to discriminate among them by attending to the one that once was called your daimon or genius, sometimes your soul or your fate, or your acorn. (96)
In ancient times, the world had been permeated with invisibilities, a condition that Christianity called paganism. (111) Throughout history though, in almost all cultures, people have had ways of relating to the invisible forces that help guide and inspire their lives. That’s what prayers are really about, too. At their worst, prayers sound like selfish petitions for supernatural powers to do favors for us. Sometimes, they’re just poetic thanks for being alive. But at their best, I think prayers are our efforts to stay in touch with the powerful but invisible dimensions of life that seem to know our name, know our story, have our best interests at heart, and hints of our best kind of future.
That’s what I think the African prayer was about that I used this morning. If I think of it as referring to somebody up above the sky, it makes no sense. But if I think of it as trying to communicate with my own soul, with the angels of my better nature, with the source of wisdom inside of me that knows my name and who I need to be, then suddenly the prayer becomes real and honest in a new way.
Listen to it again in this way, as a way of your speaking to whatever it is that you do count on for the wisdom, the direction, and the courage to guide your life, and see if it doesn’t speak to you:
O Divine One! I give thanks
to You, the one who is as near as my
heartbeat, and more anticipated than my
next breath. Let Your wisdom become one
with this vessel as I lift my voice in
thanks for Your love.
Amen.
