The Thinking Reed – The Nobility of Impermanence – First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin

August 20, 2006

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, here we are again, gathered together as a covenanted community, sitting side by side, some with eyes closed, some not, sitting and being quiet.

In the quietness of this moment we think of those places in this world that are ravaged by war, famine and strife. We thank our lucky stars that in this place tanks are not making their way down major thoroughfares, that armed soldiers are not posted on street corners and that when we fall asleep at night it is not with a symphony of bombs in the background or the thought that in the middle of the night we may be awakened by an air raid.

Being in gratitude is but our initial response to the world’s situation, which seems always to be desperate. In our vision for this church we have vowed to be an inclusive religious and spiritual community, to support each other’s search for meaning and purpose and to join together to help create a world filled with compassion and love.

Viewing the news and reading the newspapers of the past few weeks it seems inconceivable that we can help to create a world filled with compassion and love, yet just by joining together this morning, by taking the time to seek peace in our own hearts, by putting aside our petty differences, by sitting here in the stillness of this sanctuary, we are, in fact, helping to increase the peace in this world.

Thich Nhat Han said that true peace begins in the heart, for when we are at peace with ourselves, with our significant others, friends, children, and extended family we are a center of stillness, which reaches out to other centers of stillness and peace.

Together we at First Church Austin have a chance to teach peace to the rest of the world. We, gathered here today, are about as disparate a group as you can get. Yet, we have covenanted together to support one another to find meaning and purpose in a world filled with meaningless death, and purposeless destruction.

May we gather from one another this morning the will and desire to go forward into a world that does not expect us, does not necessarily support us, and will definitely be surprised when we show up. Being here today is part of that showing up. We build here today the peace we will carry in our hearts for the coming days.

May that peace reach out to other peace and may peace and meaning fill our hearts and the world. We pray this in the name of everything that is holy, and that is precisely everything.

Amen.

The Rule of St. Vonnegut

– Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

“Hello, Babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies you get about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies – God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

SERMON: The Thinking Reed – The Nobility of Impermanence

What’s the essence of a good scary story? I imagine a wintry evening – it’s not hard to imagine, it’s more like wishful thinking in this hot August weather, isn’t it? – so I see a blustery wintry evening.

Outside is fit neither for man, nor beast. Ah, but inside, there is a fire roaring – hopefully in the fireplace, yes, it’s in the fireplace, and the warmth it gives can warm your front or your back, but not both at the same time. The shadows from those sitting around this huge fireplace are thrown against the walls of a large room with high ceilings. Victorian furniture postures itself throughout the room, and above the fireplace is an oil painting of a man in a uniform.

You’re not sure – it could be a Civil War uniform, or maybe a uniform from an earlier European campaign. The look on the man’s face is pensive, as if he were contemplating his life as he posed for the artist, contemplating the time he has left, once he leaves the artist and goes back out into the world that has given him this uniform, not to pose in pictures, but to wear as he gallantly rides into battle facing canon and grapeshot alike, bullets whizzing overhead like bees determined to make a hive out of his head.

And you wish the lights were on in the big house, but the storm that’s blowing through has taken down the power lines, and the only light that reflects off the faces of those gathered there is the dancing firelight. It is at this moment that someone says, “I have a story to tell everyone.”

And chances are it’s not a story about blue skies and rainbows, because on a night like this one we want a scary story, a story that will delight us in its telling, raise the little hairs on the back of our necks, and afterward, when we’ve taken a candle up to bed, it will be the kind of story that haunts us in our dreams.

We gather this morning beside our chalice. There on the wall is the large representation of the flame, and here on the pulpit the literal reminder of its essence.

Religion is a funny thing. It’s organized so that we might have peace in the face of the abyss, but make no mistake it is the abyss that inspires it and us.

And so here this morning, gathered around our firelight, and I wish to tell you a scary story. It’s the story of our impending doom. It’s doubly scary because it’s a true story.

Oh, the details will be different for each of us, but the end – the end, my friends, will all be the same. Death awaits each and every one of us. And death cannot be bargained with, or thwarted, or put off. When death is on death’s mission there is only one thing that will satisfy it, and that is the fulfillment of its mission – to bring death, to end life, to have the breathing and heartbeat stop, cessation of all life functions.

There is a sense in which death can be seen as a monster. It will succeed and it cares not whom it comes to. The child you adore, the elder parent, yourself; they are all in line for death’s services.

Most of the time we are in denial about death. Oh, we know it happens, but hopefully it happens to others and when it does we breathe a sigh of relief, and say, “It’s not me. I’m alive. I’m still here!”

Blaise Pascal, the gifted mathematician and physicist of the 17th Century said, “Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him. Because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this?”

Old Pascal, that pesky Frenchman knew what he was talking about. He didn’t even live as long as Elvis. He died after a long illness at the age of 39.

But Pascal had an advantage over us today. In the 17th Century death was omnipresent. People died at home. Persons who died at home were prepared for burial at home. Laid out on the same table on which they had taken their meals the family washed the body, dressed it, and prepared it for internment. The moveable feast continued, but now it was the worm’s turn.

Today we are protected from death. That is, we are kept away from those dying. Hospitals are there to prolong life even past the point of absurdity. Those who have died are whisked off to mortuaries, where they are drained of vital fluids, embalmed with noxious chemicals, dressed in their Sunday best and propped up in outrageously expensive oblong boxes for viewing.

When my father was a young boy, there was a man in his neighborhood in Bluefield, West Virginia who died one afternoon in his hammock. No one knew he was dead until his wife called for him, for the third time, to come to dinner. She did think that was odd. This was a man who enjoyed his feedbag, and was not known to be late to the trough. When she walked out in the twilight of the summer evening she found him peacefully asleep – forever.

The morticians had a time with his body. The body had become stiff with rigor and he was stuck in a “U? shape. They corrected this malady by tying him to a two by six that they laid in the bottom of the coffin. They were pleased with the work that they had done and on the day of the service delivered the body to the church for viewing. Members of the family and those from the neighborhood filed by and looked for the last time on the visage of the dearly departed.

After the viewing the top of the coffin was shut, but not fastened. The Minister at the Bland Street Methodist Church climbed into the pulpit and was, he thought, doing a fabulous job of eulogizing the deceased and bringing the living perhaps just a bit closer to their creator.

It was during the climax of his eulogy, when he was warning those there present that the time of one’s death was unknown and encouraging them to remember that death could come unannounced and take them, that the 2×6 broke. The top of the coffin popped open and their neighbor and friend sat up so abruptly that the whipping action of his resurrection caused his hair to fly about his head as if he were nodding in agreement to the preacher’s warning.

My father said that when the dust settled there were but a handful of those who had been there still in attendance. The old, the infirm, the feeble, and the curious were there to hear the benediction and marvel at the dead man’s acrobatic abilities.

There is the story of the Zen priest who was asked to the home of a nobleman. The nobleman had a son who was incorrigible and it looked very much as if he would be a wastrel and waste his life in pursuits of pleasure and adventure. The nobleman asked the Zen priest if he would talk to the boy. The monk came to the house one morning and he and the boy disappeared into the early morning fog. The boy was gone all day, and when he got back, he ate his supper and went immediately to bed.

The next morning, he got up bright and early, did the chores that had always been expected of him, but never really accomplished, then went to school and studied until it was time to go home. He never talked back to his father, or mother again, and it looked very much like he was going to be a different young man. Not able to stand it, the nobleman walked to the temple to see the priest. “What,” demanded the father, “had the Zen priest done to accomplish this transformation?”

The Zen priest was sweeping the sidewalk outside the monastery and he leaned on his broom, and smiled. It’s very simple, he said, we walked to the village on the other side of the mountain where I showed him the dead body of a young man his own age.

“Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him. Because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this?”

The Tibetan Buddhist monk, Milerepa, sat in a cave for years and meditated on his impending demise. In the midst of his meditations horrible monsters visited him. But instead of fleeing the cave and his chance for enlightenment, Milerepa sang to the monsters. “Isn’t it wonderful you monsters came today. You must come again next week. From time to time, we should converse.”

How many of us when we have what we consider a bad thought, simply try to push it from our minds? Or if we have a nightmare from which we awaken in a sweat look forward to going back to sleep in hopes of reentering the bad dream?

Perhaps we have been mistaken in our judgment of death? Perhaps death is, as Don Juan tells Carlos Castaneda, our ally, on our left and an arm’s distance from us at all times. Unaware of this boon, we treat death as a monster when all along it could be a wise and discerning friend.

In her book, Kitchen Table Wisdom, Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen has a story entitled “The Wood-Of-No-Names.”

Just before she meet with Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Alice (of Alice in Wonderland fame) enters the wood-of-no-names and encounters a fawn. Neither the fawn nor Alice can remember their names.

No matter. They walk a ways together, “Alice with her arms clasped lovingly around the soft neck of the Fawn, until they come to the edge of the wood. Once there, the fawn suddenly remembers its name and looks at Alice with horror. “I’m a fawn!” it cries out, “and, dear me! You’re a human child!” Terrified, it runs away.

Dr. Remen continues, As a child I spent many summers alone on a deserted beach on Long Island, gathering shells, digging for little clams, leading a far different life than the city life I led the rest of the year. Day after day I watched everything, developing an eye for change in all its subtlety. The rest of the year in New York City, I did not look directly at anyone I did not know and did not talk to strangers.

There was great peace in those summers and a new ability to be without people and yet not alone. I have many good memories of that time. Every morning the sea would wash up new treasures – pieces of wood from sunken boats, bits of glass worn smooth as silk, the occasional jellyfish. Once I even found a pair of glasses with only one lens left in them.

Some of the most vivid of these memories concerned the beautiful white birds that flew constantly overhead. I remember how their wings would become transparent when they passed between me and the sun. Angel wings. I remember how my heart followed them and how much I too wanted wings to fly.

Many years later I had the opportunity to walk this same beach. It was a great disappointment. Bits of seaweed and garbage littered the shoreline, and there were seagulls everywhere, screaming raucously, fighting over the garbage and the occasional dead creature the sea had given up.

Disheartened, I drove home and was halfway there before I realized that the gulls were the white birds of my childhood. The beach had not changed. The sacred lives beyond labels and judgment, in the wood-of-no-names. The sacred lives beyond labels and judgment, in the wood-of-no-names.”

What am I trying to tell you? I’m telling you your death can be your friend – you need to get to the wood-of-no-names and there in the privacy of your life reach out to your death – embrace it. It has been with you since the beginning.

We stigmatize it, but we forget – companionship is companionship regardless of the source.

Besides, death teaches us. Through the death of our animal friends it teaches us, through the death of our grandparents, our parents, brothers and sisters, and unluckily even the death of our children – we are constantly in the classroom and the teacher is Death.

With us from the depths to the heights – never judging, just there – our own personal death.

Death is no enemy. Fear is the troublemaker. Death without fear is homecoming.

“But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him. Because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this?”

I have a friend, Brent Michael, that’s a recovering alcoholic and he’s been one for over 30 years. Many years ago when he was a practicing alcoholic, Brent was speeding his way through part of West Virginia on his way to Washington for a big meeting. He’d been drinking, but that wasn’t unusual.

This particular afternoon it was raining quiet heavily and he’d finished the bottle of Vodka that he had, and was disappointed until he realized that he had put a brand new pint of Vodka in the glove box a few days earlier. He leaned over to open the glove box, and that leaning was just enough to send the car veering off onto the right shoulder.

He knew he was going off the road, but the bottle was caught behind a map, and instead of looking up, he kept fumbling with the pint until he’d fished it from the glove box. When he looked up he was about 30 feet from a bridge abutment and before he could react, he ran smack dab into it at 60 miles an hour.

The rest of what he remembers he remembers from a height above the accident. He says he can see himself in the smashed up car and the steam rising from the crushed radiator, and now a car has pulled up behind his wrecked car. The man in the car gets out and fearing that Brent’s wrecked car might explode he pulls Brent from the wreck and lays him on the road, in the rain.

For some reason the man is concerned that Brent’s head is laying on the road so he grabs the dry cleaning from the hook in the backseat of Brent’s car, and wadding it up, pushes it under Brent’s head so that at least he looks more comfortable.

Now, the entire time, Brent is out cold, but seeing this from above, like so many who have had near death experiences. And Brent is mad, mad as hell, because he’d just picked that dry cleaning up and it had cost him a bundle.

The next thing my friend remembers is standing in a tunnel of light not sure where he is, or what it is he’s supposed to do. Then out of the darkness surrounding the tunnel a child’s hand, lily white, is extended toward him, palm open. He takes the hand and together they begin walking toward the light. Then, the owner of the hand speaks. It is the voice of a young girl. “Would you like to go into the light, or would you like to go back?” They have stopped walking toward the light and are just standing there. The voice continues, “If you go back, you’ll have lots of pain, and you’ll have to change your ways, but if you go forward into the light, you will be at peace forever.”

The next thing Brent remembers is awakening in the hospital, bandaged and in a great deal of pain. That was the beginning of his sobriety. Is it possible that death for my friend Brent Michael was a young girl with a lily-white hand?

In the wood-of-no-names anything is possible.

Conclusion:

We will all die. Everyone. But death may be something other than the onerous ending of our lives.

Buddhists do no believe in a permanent self. They see the apparition we call self as the mere resemblance of outward form recognized by memory.

Those grasping around us – thieves, robbers, politicians, generals, presidents, everyone who is out just for themselves – they are dead while still living. They gather around themselves wealth, power and imagine that, that will keep death at arm’s length and ease the pain of their eventual disappearance.

How much better would it be to see through the fiction of self and simply disappear in each moment – disappear into breath, disappear into watchfulness, disappear into the non-anxious presence, disappear and be reborn as passers-by, reborn with the heart that never dies.

How can death be the enemy when we have walked with it, our arm lovingly thrown around its neck through the wood-of-no-names?

The next time you have the feeling of your impending doom; I want you to do yourself a favor. Instead of turning away, or turning on the television, or picking up the telephone to call a friend, I want you to sit down and have a heart to heart talk with that unnamed entity that has been with you since your birth. And perhaps, just perhaps, within the wood-of-no-names, you will share your finitude with that which will bring it about. Don’t be surprised at what you find out. In the wood-of-no-names all are kindred spirits.