Bringing Imperfect Gifts

Kye Flannery
May 6, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

As a highly educated and progressive denomination, we think often about what should be and what could be. But sometimes our deepest engagement with what “is” creates the best progress – and the best stories.

Call to Worship
By Erika A. Hewitt

All of us are welcome here; all of us are loved
All of us are welcome here; all of us are loved

Some of us are bringing our best selves to this space, and some of us are bringing our struggling selves, including pieces we might be ashamed of. All of us are welcome here, and all of us are loved.

Some of us already have open hearts; and some of us aren’t quite there yet, because our hearts have gotten a little beat up this week and might’ve forgotten how to trust and open. Your heart is welcome here, no matter how bruised. We welcome you among us.

All of us are imperfect, but we’re here to drop our defenses and trust that what happens in worship is powerful and life-giving. Together, we affirm that this day — and our being together — can make each of us braver, more compassionate, and wiser than when we woke up this morning. We welcome you here.

Reading
from Dakota
by Kathleen Norris

The desert monks were not moralists concerned that others behave in a proper way so much as people acutely aware of their own weaknesses who tried to see their situation clearly without the distortions of pride, ambition, or anger. They saw sin (what they called bad thoughts) as any impulse that leads us away from paying full attention to who and what we are and what we’re doing; any thought or act that interferes with our ability to love God and neighbor. Many desert stories speak of judgment as the worst obstacle for a monk. “Abba Joseph said to Abba Pastor: ‘Tell me how I can become a monk.’ The elder replied: ‘If you want to have rest here in this life and also in the next, in every conflict with another say, “Who am I?” and judge no one.'”

Sermon

First, I want to ask you to imagine a mental post-it in your mind. And on it, will you put the answer to these two questions?
What is a mistake?
What’s the worst mistake you ever made?

The last few years I’ve been attending high holidays in the Jewish faith. Learning about Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, has influenced my understanding of mistakes or sins. It’s a day where everybody reckons with their behavior over the last year, and asks each other for forgiveness. The phrase that is used at Yom Kippur is “missing the mark.”

Right now, I define mistakes as a misunderstanding or a forgetting of the bigger picture.

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made was not going to a funeral of a friend when I was 17. It was a person I loved who had died suddenly in a terrible accident — I was a freshman in college — I’d broken up with him… I was dating someone else — I felt unbearably, hideously guilty. I was afraid to face his family — I didn’t have the money to travel to Ireland, where he lived… I had no idea what to do. There was nobody I trusted to talk to about it. I just didn’t go.

And my guilt and my grief… I carried my guilt and my grief for ten years. Those two things, when you try to avoid them, they just clatter along at your heels, and I learned you can spend years just covering your ears, pretending all that din is normal.

I’ve been a chaplain now for about 4 years — I’ll start soon working with the Texas Organ Sharing Alliance, a nonprofit which meets with families when someone is extremely sick and could be a candidate for organ donation.

One of the best gifts of being a chaplain is that you get real comfortable with making mistakes. Going into hospital rooms, these are like people’s living rooms. And you just walk right in. No idea what you’ll find…

Once i asked a young man in his 30s in a cardiac ICU if the patient in the bed was his mother, when it was his wife. They were a lovely couple, both ministers, and I hope they’re doing well, that she’s trucking along w.o complications — You don’t make that mistake too many times.

You come at an awkward time, walk in on somebody turned over in bed with their bum being wiped. You stop hanging on to embarrassment, yours or theirs —

I’ve learned that the more comfortable I am as a chaplain with my own missteps and mistakes, the more I can give the gift of understanding to other people’s mistakes.

Making mistakes – and walking into the room knowing you’ll make them – takes courage.

Brene Brown talks a lot about this.
She and others have suggested we must “fail better next time”
“You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her.” -Winston Churchill
There’s a difference between honoring our mistakes and our growth and whitewashing — Watching all the lies of this administration after a mistake is made — when we lie about a mistake, that’s not courage. And it’s also not acceptance. I’ve met a lot of people in difficult circumstances, life and death…

I remember a woman who died at the hospital — a mistake I made there was speaking to her only in Spanish. People had told me she only spoke Spanish. That wasn’t true at all. She was bilingual. So she suffered through my tentative Spanish… Like a parent, you just suck up your mistakes and move on — chaplaincy in an intense situation can be a lot like parenting, in fact. You need to be okay, because you need to be able to ask everyone else in the room if they’re okay.

She wasn’t supposed to die that day. Her family wasn’t there, they were coming from hours away. I stood with her as she struggled for breath and sang to her and held her hand. One thing you know when you’ve been with a person as they’re dying — it’s not about saying “the right thing,” at all. It is about saying, “I care, and I’m here, I’m not leaving you.” And that’s pretty much it.

What you are left with as a chaplain is not “How can I not make a mistake here” but “Given all the things that are happening that nobody wanted, how can I just be decent to this patient and this family, treat them like I’d want my family to be treated?” It is a kind of love which amounts to Fearlessness. Applies to a lot of life I think.

So people just kept showing up for this woman who was dying — three of her exes showed up at the hospital.

In Texas, when you’re a chaplain, you know you have built trust with a family when they will acknowledge some of the more complicated truths: “My mom was a lesbian.” “She raised hell when she was younger.” “There is this crazy incident where somebody lost an earlobe.” “She had such a temper.” But also, “She’d do anything for you.”

Another patient whose family I got to know told me a great story about a family white water rafting trip.
Somebody’s planning was off, or the river itself didn’t go quite as they thought it would. This flotilla of rafts… just ran aground.
So, this man, he hopped out — turned a cooler top into an impromptu tray for drinks and said, “I’m your wader/waiter.” It was a brilliant move.

This is a story that was told at his funeral —
So much of what defines our character is what we do with something unexpected, our mistake or another person’s —

At the time when we die… what do we expect to have someone say at the funeral?
What is your wish? To live so authentically and lovingly that our Exes show up?
Maybe not ALL our exes 😉
But — is it really our deepest wish to have a funeral where people say, “Nothing to see here, mistakes were made, but not by her…”

I was a chaplain for a year to a mom who was in her early 30s. She died last year, leaving behind a small child, just two years old. A funny, loud, strong little girl. And her mother, my patient, knew it could be dangerous for her to get pregnant, but she went ahead with it, and ended up with this terminal disease.

This young woman, her heart was enormous. She was broken-hearted, but so courageous. She knew she was dying for almost a year. Her body had stopped being able to process nutrients. She was starving, slowly… She knew she was going to leave her little girl with her husband, her mother, their families. And I just remember … my dear patient, grooming her own Mom to be mother to her baby. This wasn’t the mom she’d have asked for — many of the things my patient had made of her life, her motivation, her enthusiasm, her schooling — she’d grown into these things in OPPOSITION to her mother — and yet, she knew her boat and her mother’s boat and her daughter’s boat were tied together. So she worked to teach her mother what she knew about being a good mother.

Everybody in that room was mothering each other the best way they knew how.

Many times at the hospital, you’re confronted with the question, … often accompanied by anger and fear… Am I doing enough? Are we doing enough? Is this other family member doing enough?

And what you learn in walking with families in this scenario is that… we all do our damndest to make the best decision we can in the moment with the energy and information we have.

Being with people in this way makes me think there really are no mistakes when you’re coming from love.

Alice Walker’s rewriting of the Beatitudes features this line: “HELPED are those who love the broken and the whole; none of their children, nor any of their ancestors, nor any parts of themselves, shall be hidden from them.”

I love that! If our hearts are big enough, our lenses are big enough, and we take in all parts of ourselves and each other.

One of the biggest things we fear in our imperfection is that we do not deserve respect and love.

That if we reveal ourselves as imperfect, we will not be offered Dignity – Belonging. Someone will say — YOU! Out of the pack. You’re holding us back!

Part of what I like about being UU is that we work to make space for many kinds of people in the pack.

Poet and mystic Marianne Williamson — writes about the dangers of “playing small” — we give others freedom, she says, by living out loud:

“We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

What I admire about a child is not that she gets everything right, I’m willing to forgive selfishness, thoughtlessness, wrong words…

I admire her “is-ness” — not measuring what she is against what others think, but nurturing a direct and profound and observational relationship with ls… Tao…

No movement is perfect, no people are perfect.

Pauli Murray… stubborn bus integrator… gender-queer person who did not get to be the face of the civil rights movement because she dressed in a masculine way and loved women.

Likewise, Bayard Rustin… MLK’s right-hand man… Meet the gay activist behind Martin Luther King Jrs civil rights movement “Not a problem for Dr. King, he was under such scrutiny, but it was a problem for the movement…”

Women’s suffrage movement 1880s where white leaders agreed not to pursue black folks’ right to vote — leaving black women and men disenfranchised —

No movement is perfect, no people are perfect. But part of respecting learning is not avoiding mistakes — we have to get it out there before it’s “perfect”

I think this connects to the Buddhist concept of Shunyata – emptiness, no-self. Is it a dodge for personal responsibility? “Mistakes were made, but not by me?” I don’t think so —

Shunyata is a way of dealing with mistakes as impersonal. It means we don’t have such hard edges that rub us wrong or cut us when we make a mistake.

Like when you get someone’s pronouns wrong.
Immediate feeling: (blush, terror) “This is going on your permanent record!” It can call up anxiety like at report card time — will I be judged and found wanting?
A students? B students? C students? Do we have feelings about that?

I’ve been an “A” student for most of my life — but in the last few years I’ve started to embrace my inner “C” student. C students of the world unite –!

I have a friend who says — a friend who’s intensely brilliant and also struggles with ADHD, so has had to do a lot of work on deep acceptance of imperfection — “There’s nothing I like so much as having been wrong about something.” Notice the tense. I was wrong, now I know better.

I sometimes present in a more gender-queer way (maybe not as much in Texas — it really depends), and a friend whose daughter I was babysitting asked me point-blank if I’m a girl or a boy. That was surprising, but cool. Her mom was mortified — But really it was okay with me. When we can be a safe space for people who are struggling with a question, that’s the best.

A friend of mine who is trans* feels the same way. He says, “I don’t mind kids asking questions, I like it,” he says. “I’ll ask them back, ‘well, what do you think I am?'” And kids will have the chance to think about signifiers of masculinity and femininity.”

It also brings I think new light to Jesus’ question: “Who do you say that I am?” Because we notice too in that passage that what the answers people bring to the table tell us a lot more about culture, about assumption, than they do about who a person truly is.

When we are willing to ask or to entertain questions, we’re willing to learn something new. We open the landscape, and say, ‘this space is okay for mistakes.’

One of my favorite Christmas stories is The Littlest Angel. Do you all know this story? A lonely, forlorn small child in the very grown-up world of heaven…shiny, harmonious, sparkling and tasteful — he’s dirty and clumsy — there is a contest to give the best birthday gift to the Christ child. And the most valuable gift is the gift given by this child — a bird’s nest, a dog’s collar, a butterfly, 2 white stones…

When we start to deeply engage with nondualism – not just living in black or white – we also begin to engage with paradox – when 2 white stones and a butterfly are fitting gifts for the King of Kings.

Tao – nondualism – “The Thunder” poem from Nag Hammadi. We are no one in isolation. We only understand in community. And none of us is only one thing.

As a chaplain — having met people at many stages of their lives, and at the time of death — nobody says, “I wish I had been more polite and remembered everyone’s name,” “I wish I’d paid my rent on time,” “I wish I hadn’t offended a friend twenty years ago.” What they regret is what they did with a mistake: “I wish I hadn’t let our relationship go.” “I wish I hadn’t stayed with the wrong partner for so many years.” “I wish I hadn’t let my mother go through a painful time alone.” Because mistakes are our chance to recommit to what we believe is true and important, by doing something hard. Really, we regret not the mistake, but what we did or didn’t do with it.

Actual Regrets I’ve heard: “I wish we’d gotten to start our blueberry farm.” “I wish I could have recorded another album.” “I wish I’d had a chance to fall in love.”

If you listen deeply to these wishes, you start to realize that they’re really wishing for … the chance to make more mistakes.

And at the end of life — Big, audacious mistakes mean you will leave people laughing and in awe of you. (Hopefully nobody loses an earlobe.)

In the midst of any glorious mistake, I think we can feel free to ask ourselves: What am I practicing?

What is it you’re practicing? Right in the thick of your worst mistake, on your mental post-it… what is it you’re practicing?

Gail Sher, author of One Continous Mistake… a Buddhist approach to writing: “If writing is your practice, the only way to fail is not to write.”

That terrible mistake when I was 17 — not getting to see a friend’s family one last time, not finding a way to travel to his funeral, not finding a way at the time to claim my grief and honor his life — At the time, I couldn’t have told you what I was practicing.

Now I know:
I was practicing not seeing money as a barrier to important things —
I was practicing following my heart — really badly, it turns out — but you learn how tolisten better.
I was practicing confronting terrible feelings of guilt and walking myself through them.
And learning the dance I go through when I want to block them out…
I was practicing showing up for grief — learning the beast that grief can create under the surface if you don’t give it air, and let it breathe.

I wish I’d moved heaven and earth to be there to honor his life, and mourn his death.

But I couldn’t, and instead, that led me closer to my vocation. That was when I began to see steps toward where I wanted to be. And now, as a chaplain, I walk with others through their grief process.

Lucky enough this week to be exposed to some lines from Rilke: ” So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp/ it has an inner light, even from a distance- and changes us, even if we do not reach it/into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are…” (Thanks, Ann Edwards!)

Now my job is finding nonjudgmental space for people who fear they haven’t done their best, who have hurt others, who haven’t known what to do.

I believe this is a key commitment we make as universalists — to follow the light, not to leave each other in hell, or even purgatory, when we mistakes. Not using a mistake as an excuse to put a person, or ourselves, out of our heart. We must be kind, because we are each fighting a hard battle.

I’ll close with some words from Leonard Cohen — “Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free –“

BENEDICTION

Like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
We have tried in our way to be free

Like a worm on a hook
Like a knight from some old-fashioned book
I have saved all my ribbons for thee
If I, if I have been unkind
I hope that you can just let it go by

If I, if I have been untrue
I hope you know it was never to you

Like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
We have tried in our way to be free

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 18 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.