A Life Worth Living

September 2, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave, Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Sermon

The blizzard of the world

has crossed the threshold

and it has overturned

the order of the soul.

Leonard Cohen

The joy of the music that we have been singing and the bleakness of that quote may seem out of place in the same sermon. But I believe that a life of integrity, a life worth living holds all of that and more. I’ll even go so far as to say that it may even be imperative that our lives be lived in that dynamic, uncomfortable, but ultimately creative state in order to be more fully ourselves and more fully useful in the world. And I believe that we are compelled as religious liberals to just that kind of life.

The blizzard of the world – surely we can understand that one. The onslaught of bad news of the dangerous state that our world is in is can be overwhelming.

It is so easy for cynicism, depression, increase in some of the illnesses of body and mind, and the loss of the will to reflect and then act in the world to be the responses to this. Parker Palmer, a noted educator and writer, in his book: The Hidden Wholeness writes that on the Great Plains farmers used to run a rope from the house to the barn when a blizzard was likely to happen, so they would not get lost and die mere yards from their house in the whiteout conditions that blizzards produce. He suggests that we need an equivalent measure in this time for the impact of the blizzard of the world on our souls.

First, he gives us a definition of “soul”: Other names from many traditions that can and have been used are: identity and integrity (humanism), spark of the divine, true self, inner teacher or inner light, original nature or big self are some of them. Palmer further suggests that the soul is that quality of ours that refuses to define human lives only as “biological mechanisms, sociological constructs, psychological projections, and/or raw materials for whatever society at the moment. As useful as these concepts can be to us in working with the complex reality of being human, I believe that to see only through those lens is to diminish what and who we are and to diminish our potential impact on this troubled world. For me the soul is that which has never given up, even when it has appeared to me and to others that I have done exactly that. It cuts through all the posturing that I ever did in various times of my life when I “knew” exactly what I was doing.

In my childhood there were plenty of reasons to deny my original nature or soul. I lived in a small rural town in the California desert in the late 40’s and early 50’s, especially before rock and roll came to shake things up. The restrictions of that time and place were doubly hard on the extroverted, exuberant self that I was born as. When I was about 8 or so, a schoolteacher was leading us through some dances. To my delight she was bring movement from the outside to the inside, where it was usually not welcomed. The one I remember distinctly was the one where you had to go “Put your little foot, put your little foot.

Some of you may know the one. (Sing and demonstrate with turns) I was having one of my increasingly rare extroverted moments when I declared that that was so boring, and then demonstrated some wild and exuberant dance to show what could be done. (demonstation). I was quite pleased with myself.

The teacher was a kind one, but still firm in that tradition of what was right to teach so I was promptly put in my place and the dance as it was continued. There it was in a nutshell. We were being taught to put away the whole of ourselves. Some of our most prized possessions of selfhood had to be denied. They had to be grown out of. Even at 8 years old we had to “grow up.”

For years, as an adult, I occasionally dabbled in dance classes, always doomed to be not able to follow the forms and declared myself useless and even worse, stupid for having this impulse to move freely to my own dance that never really went away. Eventually, there came a time in midlife when I really could not stand it any more. I began to free dance anywhere that I could get myself to do it. At first that was only in the safety of my own home. Later, I frequented street fairs and happily danced away. I remember seeing a woman once who was about my age watching the dancers. It seemed to me that she was watching me in a very wistful way and the seed was planted for a ministry: why should we give up activities that are precious to our soul, our true self, if they hurt no one? And is it possible that we may have more impact on the blizzard of the world if we do keep more than our culture allows for?

I understand now that there are difficult places for all of us no matter where or when we grew up. And each of us has our own selfhood, our own combination of precious gifts that we have to share with ourselves and others. One important question for me has been: how do we know what to keep and what to let go of from everything that we got from our childhood, from our families, from our culture, and, these days, from the relentless onslaught of media information that is nearly impossible to escape. Even impulses from within may be anything from fearful overreactions from the past, to addictions of body and mind (for myself, I include caffeine, chocolate, and online mahjong solitaire to that list), as well as the authentic voice within which has valuable wisdom to share. So how do we navigate this confusing reality?

One of the things that has helped me a great deal in my life have been the special people who reached into whatever self absorption that I was in and shook me up by going against all my assumptions about how the world worked and who I was. One of the first was my mother’s mother, a staunch Southern Baptist, who told me that I should avoid all those “tent meetings” where everyone got all emotional and went down to get saved. I should just sit down and figure out for myself what I believed and then live by that. I was stunned that a conservative Christian woman would say such a thing. It stayed with me since. It may be that it helped me hold to what I believed when my father’s Mennonite family took me to see the greatest tent show evangelist of the time, Billy Graham. When the call came on Youth Night to “Come on down for Jesus and be saved”, my oldest brother and I resisted the family pressure. I figured the that I had been baptized as a child, so I did not need any more saving, thank you very much. I have since been doing a great deal of sitting down and figuring out what I believe in and attempting to live by that. I don’t know what she would make of all of what I did with her advice, but I believe that being true to yourself was a value that we held in common.

I went on to read widely and talked a good game about what I read, but somehow, for some years, it didn’t translate into a life living by any of that wisdom. I was disconnected from myself, attempting to live a life that I thought a college educated, and thus middle class, life ought to be. I had no way to process what was valuable in myself, in my growing up. My family didn’t know how to do the kind of transition that I was attempting either. I felt that I had no wisdom of my own, but distrusted any community that I tried out. It all sounded hollow to me. Eventually, after trying self-medication as a path, I threw myself on the mercy of a therapist. Sometimes, you can need a guide for a period of time. That process brought a great deal into focus and I left eventually with a great deal more tools to make the next steps.

One of the important things that I learned was that I could not throw out anything of who I was. I had to own all of it and move from there. Palmer calls this the move to wholeness. He tells us that wholeness is not some mystical state of Buddha-hood, but a state that “means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.” He considers devastation happening in a life “as a seedbed for new life”. This doesn’t mean throwing out grieving or expressing anger in the moment, for example, when devastations happen in our lives, as they inevitably do, but, when we are ready, moving into the next part of our lives to remember and experience joy and gratitude again. To me this means to live whatever life brings fully. I am still working on that one. I have problems with transitions for instance. My summer has been a process of many transitions one after another and occasionally I could hear myself getting a little whiney. I have surrendered to my whiney state when alone to delve fully into all that irritates the part of me that really just wants everything to be totally comfortable. It helps then when I remember that those transitions are exactly what I had hoped for. Even fervently hoped for.

I am not the only human being in the world that has any kind of transitions that they are dealing with. I am sure that you can think of a few or even many in your own lives. The act, joyous as it is, of having and raising children, for instance, has transitions built into it, constantly. Ageing, one of those non-optional realities of life, has its own transitions built in. Just to mention a few.

One of the other important things that I learned is that community, in some form or other, is essential, certainly for me. We may all have our own personal reasons for being in community, but I mean here the need for something even besides receiving and offering support, and acting together for common causes, for instance. I believe now that reading and reflecting on great minds and compassionate souls is the backdrop that informs my experiencing life, but that the experiencing of life in relationship is where the learning comes that can be made a real part of my life. If I see myself as a loving person, in community I can see the growing edge of that for me. Do I love only people who have roughly the same political beliefs that I do?

Do I treat myself in the loving way that I think others should be treated? What do I do when there are people who are difficult for me to love, for whatever reason? How do I let the inner life inform the outer life and visa versa?

Palmer talks about the dance of being in solitude and being in community as the optimal way of having a life of integrity. The inner life informs the outer life and the outer life informs the inner. He compares it to being on a Mobius strip. This is a mathematical form that can be created simply by putting the two edges of a strip of paper together, but with a twist in beforehand. This causes the strip to be continuous, without any inner and outer. Thus the inner and the outer continually recreate each other. Our choices come in whether we will, “walk that strip wide awake to its continual interchanges, learning to co-create in ways that are life giving for ourselves and others or sleep walk on the Mobius strip, unconsciously co-creating ways that are dangerous and often death dealing to relationships, to good work, to hope.” I want to add a caution against the either or character of his statement. I feel that it is more likely that there is a complex reality of being awake and being asleep that most of us inhabit. The world of habit, of comfort is not that easily gotten rid of. We need some balance to make sure we have some comfort, as we make those transitions in life.

But we can make progress on moving more into the creative interchanges, if we dare.

The payoff for moving out of our comfort zones can be a big one. I began to get bold enough to start my own business, an unthinkable action for a person raised to believe that having a job was the only thing that I could ever do. It’s true that I folded within 5 years, the usual expectation for many new businesses. But I would not have missed it for anything. And it got me ready for the next transition, when I realized that I was going to do an even more unthinkable thing: enter graduate school to become a minister. I had no idea how that was going to happen, especially financially. But doors opened – that is another way that I know that I am on the right track, the doors keep opening.

I tell people that my intention is to become an associate or assistant minister, but the truth is I really don’t know if that will be the specific ministry that will happen. A friend once suggested to me that when a door opens for us, we may find ourselves in a corridor with many other doors there. We may be in that corridor for a time before the next door will open. It’s evidently not my job to know everything, but it is my job to walk thru that next door and do what needs to be done there.

As for being religious liberals, we have the history and tradition to point us in the general direction of what we need to do in this world. In the May 2005 UUA Commission on Appraisal document: Engaging Our Theological Diversity, there is a call for us to become more embodied, more mindful and more prophetic. Palmer reminds us “When we live by the soul’s imperatives, we gain courage to serve institutions more faithfully, to help them resist the temptations to default on their own missions.” I can’t think of anything that is more needed these days than that, both in our institution and others.

Meanwhile, do we need to get bolder and bigger in our actions? Do we need to hook up with more allies? I don’t know that I have the answers to those questions, but I do look forward to sharing some further thoughts with you as the year progresses.

Meanwhile, on the personal level, dwelling in that creative dance can give us more room for community, more room for the deeper levels of relationship in so-called ordinary life, and a deeper appreciation for that life. I can’t see myself doing good work in the world without the grounding of that life.

I look forward to exploring that realm with you in our time together this year. Despite the overwhelming evidence that can so easily be found of devastations so large that there is no hope, I have also experienced these last three years the evidence, not as easily found, of thousands upon thousands of people world wide who have gathered into multiple organizations and other groups to work on the job of recreating the way that this world functions toward a saner and more life-giving way of being on this precious earth that is our home.

I gladly join in partnership with them all to do my small part, while attempting to not underestimate the impact of one more increasingly awake life. They and this congregation are part of my network of ropes that keep me grounded in the onslaught of the devastations of our times.

What I can say for the present day is that it comes down to doing whatever works well for each of us to stay awake. Despite the blizzards and devastations of life, let’s be kind to ourselves and to one another. Let’s freely offer and accept support from one another. And let’s increase those times when we can feel gratitude and joy for this wonderful and precious life that we have been given.

Palmer, Parker J., A Hidden Wholeness: the Journey Toward an Undivided Life, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004.