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© Davidson Loehr 2005

24 October 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Much of the information about the goddesses I’m using here came from Jungian psychiatrist Jean Shinoda-Bolen’s book Goddesses in Everywoman, which I think is an excellent book for understanding the ‘goddess’ styles as psychological dynamics that are alive and well today. In the book, she creates a prayer to the goddesses, appealing to the kinds of dynamics they represent. It isn’t appealing to distant divinities, but to inherent tendencies and awarenesses. Here are just the lines directed to the goddesses in today’s sermon:

ATHENA – help me to think clearly in this situation.

ARTEMIS – keep me focused on that goal in the distance.

APHRODITE – help me to love and enjoy my body.

HESTIA – honor me with your presence, bring me peace and serenity.

Let’s combine them into a more straightforward simple prayer:

Spirits of life, goddesses of our psyches, be with us here. Help us to think clearly. Keep us focused on our distant goals. Help us to love and enjoy our bodies, and honor us with your presence; bring us peace and serenity. Amen.

SERMON: “Myths to Live By,” Part Three

In going over my notes about how the Greek goddesses divided the wide range that women have of being into separate deities/dynamics, I realized that this is really about the difference between politics and religion. That may not sound right: after all, we’re talking about goddesses, not political parties. But I think it is right. We’ll come back to this.

Two weeks ago, I brought you the three ‘dependent’ goddesses: Hera the wife, Demeter the mother, and Persephone the maiden. Today I want to bring you the uppity goddesses. They were called the Virgin, or Independent, Goddesses. They never married, and men were not necessary to make them feel completed. These goddesses were Artemis, Athena, and Hestia, plus the Wild Card: Aphrodite.

Artemis (Diana, to the Romans) was the hunter who spurned both men and society, and traveled with a band of women who served and looked up to her. She was not a friend of men. In fact, men were downright unsafe around her. Two of the most famous stories about her testify to this. One involves a lover named Orion whom she accidentally killed through her intensely competitive nature. He got to be a constellation, but if I were Orion that would be, at best, a consolation prize.

The most famous story about Artemis involved a young hunter named Actaeon, who was unlucky enough to see her naked ‘ in other words, to see her vulnerability. Artemis could not be aware of her vulnerability. She was so furious at him for this intrusion that she changed him into a stag and his own dogs killed him. This was the goddess whose mottoes could have been ‘Don’t fence me in’ and ‘Don’t tread on me’ ‘ or ‘Men Beware!’ Her close friends were women’she was also the only goddess who repeatedly came to the aid of her mother. During the heyday of the women’s movement, Gloria Steinem was the incarnation of Artemis, and Artemis was seen as the guiding spirit of the women’s movement.

Another of the Independent goddesses was Athena, whom the Romans called Minerva. Athena wore armor, and was a warrior goddess who protected her chosen heroes, all of whom were males. She was her daddy’s girl: the myth had it that she sprung full-grown from Zeus’s head, and she never acknowledged her mother. When Athena was pictured with another figure, that other was invariably a male: Achilles and Odysseus, for example, the heroes of the Iliad and the Odyssey. This is a woman who fought for the male values and the patriarchal establishment. Unlike Artemis, she often fought for men and against women, and it was seldom safe for women to cross her path. Two of her stories show this.

The first was the story of Agamemnon, where it was Athena who would not give him victory in battle unless he sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia. In some versions of the story, Artemis insisted on sparing the girl’s life, but Artemis was never a match for Athena. Agamemnon killed the girl, after which Athena helped him win the military battle.

The second story – one of the great Greek stories, and the source of one of our scientific designations – is about the young woman Arachne. Arachne was, like Athena, a superb weaver. In fact, Arachne was so good she said that not even Athena could match her.

A dozen years ago I was stepfather to two young girls, the younger of whom loved the Greek myths. I would read them to her every night, and we went through four or five books of them, until the stories were old friends of hers, and she looked forward to revisiting them in each new book’s version. About the third time we revisited the story, we got to this point where Arachne said she was a better weaver even than Athena. Allison suddenly looked at me, shook her head, and said, ‘She’s dead meat!’

Athena challenged Arachne to a weaving contest, and both of them made flawless weavings. But the subject that Arachne chose for her weaving was her undoing, and shows where Athena’s real allegiance lay. Athena wove a heroic tapestry of Zeus’s great achievements and glories. Arachne wove a humiliating picture of three of Zeus’s sexual seductions and infidelities. And this so infuriated Athena that she tore Arachne’s weaving to pieces, then turned her into a spider, condemned forever to hang from a thread and spin: to this day, the biological name of spiders is ‘Arachnids.’ It was not Arachne’s impudence to Athena that doomed her; it was her impudence to Athena’s father and his privileges. For every Artemis who comes to attack men and their rules, there will be an Athena to protect them. In all the Greek mythology, Artemis never once won against Athena.

The third independent goddess, and the least known of the Olympians, was Hestia, whom the Romans called Vesta. Hestia was the only one of the six who was never portrayed in human form. She was more of a spirit, like a spirit of a contentment derived from going within, either in involvement with homemaking or spiritual meditation, like a nun in a convent. Hestia’s spirit is what makes a house a home, or turns a mere church service into a real worship service. Like the other self-contained goddesses, Hestia had no significant or necessary men in her life.

The final goddess is the most complex: the goddess Aphrodite, whom the Romans called Venus, the goddess of love and beauty. She was married to the lame craftsman Hephaestus, though she was never faithful to him and bore him no children. She had numerous affairs with both gods and men, however, and bore several children to them. Her favorite consort was the god of war, whom the Greeks called Ares and the Romans called Mars. Here was the union of our two most uncontrollable passions, love and war. If they can be kept in balance, they can produce harmony; otherwise, their offspring will be only terror and fear. And when you learn that the names of the three children from the matings of Ares and Aphrodite were in fact Harmony, Terror and Fear, you may begin to understand that mythology is not a fiction about some other world. Mythology is about insights into the deeper levels of our own lives. It is to help us in our search for harmony rather than fear and terror.

Aphrodite was, paradoxically, most like the introverted Hestia, in that both of them found their completion by following their love, their lust, or their inner bliss. Hestia withdrew from men while Aphrodite interacted with them, but Aphrodite interacted with men the way a wine connoisseur interacts with a fine wine: enjoying its qualities, but just for a while. The T-shirt slogan “So many men, so little time” is one of Aphrodite’s slogans. And while no one could dissuade either Aphrodite or Hestia from the directions their feelings took them, the feelings they followed, while strong, were not necessarily wise.

A Hestia-type woman can become absorbed in the rituals of housework within an unfulfilling or even an abusive marriage. And while meditation or spiritual exercises can help center and deepen a busy life, they can also become opiates that remove you from a healthy participation in life, or numb you to the pain of a life that desperately needs to be changed.

And Aphrodite’s stories show that love may be powerful, but that it is blind. The passion was always consuming, but Aphrodite’s spirit was never known for its wisdom. Among the Aphrodite stories are two where she made a girl fall in love with her father and a mother fall in love with her stepson: both stories had tragic endings. Two modern incarnations of the Aphrodite spirit might be Madonna and J. Lo. In Marilyn Monroe, you could perhaps say that the spirit of Aphrodite was combined with a deadly vulnerability, and the combination was more than Marilyn could hold together.

When you think of these character styles in terms of the ancient Greek goddesses, and then look back over the past fifty years of our country’s history, some surprising patterns emerge, for there have been major shifts in our scripts about what a woman should be over the past few decades.

After World War II, our society strongly endorsed the submissive and compliant roles of daughter, wife and mother for women. Women went to college to get their “M.R.S. Degree” and, once married, often dropped out of school. American women were not stopping at having two children, but were having three, four, five, or six. By 1950 the birthrate in the United States equaled India’s for the first and only time (Jean Shinoda-Bolen, Goddesses in Everywoman, pp. 28-29). These were the years of Hera and Demeter.

Twenty years later, the 1970s was the decade of the women’s movement – vintage years for both Artemis and Athena, when feminists and career women took center stage. More women than ever before were now in school, pursuing doctoral, business, medicine, and law degrees. That was the era when the University of Texas Law School was finally opened to blacks, Hispanics and women – by then-Senator Oscar Mauzy, whose wife Ann is still a member of this church. Divorce rates soared and birthrates dropped as ‘independent’ women took the lead, and women whose identities were involved with being a wife and mother found themselves in an increasingly unsupportive climate. Or, to put it another way, our society’s story was changing, and the new script gave a different kind of women’s role the leading part. The roles of wife and mother, which had had the leading parts, were now made into minor characters, or even ridiculed, as overly independent and aggressive women had been made into minor characters and ridiculed just two decades earlier.

Now Artemis styles burst forth with their powerful fury against men’s rules and, often, against men themselves. They burned their bras, they made posters that said ‘woman needs man like a fish needs a bicycle,’ they organized women’s movements to strengthen sisterhood all over the country, and they began working to add an Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution.

We usually think of the 60s and 70s as the time of women’s liberation movements, by which we mean Artemis-type movements. But what happened in the 60s and 70s was not that simple. It was the rise of women who acted under their own authority, and that includes both the Artemis types of the women’s movement and the Athena types who fought against it and its attack on a status quo in which they had found their own myth to live by, a script in which they seemed to live comfortably. All this is replaying now, coming around again, as mythic themes tend to do, so it’s worth trying to understand it better.

In the 1970s, a nearly archetypal Athena figure appeared. She was a Phi Beta Kappa woman with a master’s degree from Radcliff: a woman named Phyllis Schlafly. Before her leadership of the opposition, ratification of the ERA seemed inevitable. In the first twelve months of its life, the year before Phyllis Schlafly formed her organization called STOP ERA in October 1972, the ERA rolled up ratifications from thirty states. But once Schlafly led her troops into battle, the momentum stopped. In the next eight years, only five more states ratified ‘ and five other states voted to rescind their ratification (Bolen, 82). That’s what an Athena looks like in action, and it is awe-inspiring, even if you’re on the other side.

Framing current events in terms of mythic Greek goddesses is not unavoidably relevant to the real historical events of our times, but it is interesting to note that if the confrontations between those who were for and those who were against the ERA, those who were pro-choice and those who were against it and so on ‘ if these conflicts are seen as confrontations between Artemis and Athena, Artemis would not stand much of a chance. Not even the greatest male heroes of Greece were a match for Athena.

But the lesson I want to draw from seeing the women’s movement as a fundamental change of scripts and myths is a different kind of lesson. What should be most obvious about exalting the characters of only wife, mother and maiden is how woefully inadequate they are by themselves, how incapable of doing justice to the whole range of styles that women carry within them. Without some Artemis, Hestia and Aphrodite, women will be little more than victims and slaves. The pendulum had gone too far to the right, and the women’s movements of the past generation were desperately needed to restore both balance and even humanity to some of the women of this society.

But – all this was politics, not religion. Dividing the goddesses into competing dynamics, siding with one against the other ‘ all this is politics, not religion, and it’s the road to strife, not integration.

There is a very simple definition of the difference between politics and religion. Politics is the conflict between partial visions, in which one partial vision seeks a controlling power over another partial vision. This means that every political victory is at the same time a defeat of our efforts at integration and wholeness. Because empowered partial visions are still only partial visions.

Religion, by definition, has to be the search for a holistic vision, an integrated vision, and a balance between the competing dynamics that are inherent parts of us. In religion, every victory of a partial vision is another form of idolatry: exalting a partial vision to ultimate status. We live in political times, not religious ones. Even the virulent and war-mongering conservative Christians seek power for a very tiny vision – one which Jesus would have detested – rather than seeking the religious vision of oneness, of seeing all people (including Iraqis) as our brothers and sisters. So Christianity has been transformed into a political movement whose very aims are profoundly destructive of any honest religious impulse. It is an irony common to barbarous times.

These seven ancient Greek goddesses represent very different kinds of allegiances, many of them at odds with one another. Superficially, praying to the ancient goddesses could sound like someone is worshiping them, as distant powers. But more deeply, the Greeks were seeking their energies and perspectives, in search of a kind of harmony that transcends all of the goddesses, a kind of harmony that is not within the reach of any one of them.

This is the same kind of harmony that America has lost sight of, and so has lost the ability and the will to seek. It is a harmony that must be a wholly human achievement. We must fashion it. It can be fashioned only by fighting for what we love, but fighting in a way that brings the various parts of our life together, rather than letting any one of them rule us. It was not done in the lifetimes of those who invoked the spirits of the gods and goddesses. It will not be done in our lifetime, or in the lifetime of those who follow. That’s why it is a religious quest, always with us, and a task each person and each new generation must always accomplish for them.

It is what Joseph Campbell once called “the quest for the lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul.” It is the most essential quest of religion, and of life. The gods and goddesses we have created along the way can be clues and guides, and may open us to the better path we need.

But the gods cannot do it for us. It is our task: our task alone, and our task together. Let it be a task that calls us to it, and graces us with the inspiration of the gods – all of them.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr 2005

10 October 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER: An Invocation to Three Goddesses

For our prayer, I want to recapture some of the prayers of ancient Greeks, to three of the female figures that became goddesses: Persephone the daughter, Demeter the mother, and Hera the wife. They are simple prayers, but hear what simple human things they are praying for:

PERSEPHONE – help me to stay open and receptive.

DEMETER – teach me to be patient and generous, help me to be a good mother.

HERA – help me to make a commitment and be faithful.

Let us claim those petitions as our own:

Help us to stay open and receptive.

Help us to be patient and generous, to be good mothers.

Help us to make a commitment and be faithful.

Help us reclaim these gentle parts of ourselves, that we might become more whole.

Amen.

SERMON: “Myths to Live By”, Part Two

According to Greek mythology, the three Fates spin out the thread of our lives, stretch that thread as far as they choose, and cut it when they will. That was their way of saying life is a gift of unknown length. During the little span of life we are allotted by the Fates, we often puzzle over just what kind of gift it is, this gift of life. We wonder who we think we are, or who we should be, what we think we’re doing with our few years, and how to pull it all together in a better way. We try to find the path that feels most true, most worthy of a gift so short, yet so precious. We try to live a life that makes a story worth telling.

The question of who we are is complicated because there are so many levels to it, so many competing scripts. Babies in the crib have personality styles that are still a part of them twenty, fifty, eighty years later. Some of them whine, some gurgle and coo, and the odds are those dispositions will remain parts of their characteristic styles. This is what makes children become later attracted to some stories and myths, but not to others. In some, they recognize a part of themselves, and the story gives it words and form. In other stories, they see nothing but senseless make-believe.

I’ve been aware of much of this in my own life. The stories that have been most important to me stories like ‘The Little Red Hen,’ ‘The Little Engine That Could,’ the parable of the blind men and the elephant, and the story of the Greek god Proteus who remained something sacred even when he changed shape’these are nearly all expressions of styles that my parents and relatives assure me I had exhibited while I was still in early childhood. The stories were attractive because they gave voice to parts of my own soul. And the stories and proverbs that are most important to you probably also reflect personality traits that have been yours since infancy.

So if we look at our dominant scripts, or myths, and then look within, at our own psychobiography and whatever innate styles life has given us, we see several layers, some reinforcing and some conflicting with the others, like the voices of the three goddesses in the invocation I read you. And when we look outside of ourselves toward our larger world, there are also many scripts in which we play large or small roles. Family, friends, and peer groups have their own ideas of how things should be, so we learn to play parts in many different kinds of scripts. Some of them feel unnatural or wrong, but we get used to them: we learn to play roles that we would not have chosen, and in which we never feel fully comfortable. A society also has myths it lives by, and roles it assigns to its citizens: consumer, follower, warrior.

The picture of who we are and why we are living the lives we are living is a picture made complicated by the fact that there are so many different roles thrust upon us, so many levels of scripts in which we play small or large parts. And the best way we have of finding our way through this maze, of getting a better picture of who we are and what parts of our life fit or do not fit, is by sorting out the stories we are living out.

We could do this by talking about fairy tales, children’s stories, movie or television scripts, or even the words to popular songs. But this subject is so full it can get out of hand almost immediately, so I thought it would be more manageable, and perhaps more helpful, to spend two sermons going back to some of the classic character styles that the Greeks molded into their Olympian deities that show some of the enduring attitudes with which women in all eras have been able to identify.

Three of these seven goddesses form a kind of trinity. Jean Shinoda-Bolen, a Jungian psychiatrist, calls them the Vulnerable Goddesses, because all were either seduced or raped by male gods. You could also call them the Dependent Goddesses, because they required men or families in order to be complete. These goddesses were Hera, Demeter, and Persephone, whom the Romans called Juno, Ceres, and Proserpine. Together, they form the trinity of wife, mother, and daughter, and if the majority of men wrote the scripts, these would be the main roles assigned to women.

If you’re my age, you grew up when these were the roles all women were expected to fill: the age of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, Donna Reed and the rest of them.

After World War II, our society strongly endorsed the submissive and compliant roles of daughter, wife and mother for women. Women went to college to get their ‘Mrs. Degree’ and, once married, often dropped out of school. American women were not stopping at having two children, but were having three, four, five, or six. By 1950 the birthrate in the United States equaled India’s for the first and only time (Jean Shinoda-Bolen, Goddesses in Everywoman, p. 28-29). These were the years of Hera and Demeter.

But if you grew up when Jonobie did, it was a world of very different expectations for women, as she learned from her mother: very different goddesses, which we’ll talk about in two weeks.

We all know the roles and stereotypes of wife, mother and daughter so well, it’s hard to see what we could hear that’s new. While wondering how I could get your attention, I remembered a conservative friend I used to have who hated to have her assumptions challenged. Once she said to me in exasperation, ‘I hate it when people make me think – it’s irritating!’ But everyone is irritated when their comfortable assumptions are challenged. So that’s what I want to do this morning: irritate you and, hopefully, let us see some things differently.

To do it, I’ll combine these ancient mythic roles with modern biology. Liberals like to quote biological studies showing that homosexuality is encoded in our brains before we are born, because it makes homosexuality as natural as left-handedness. There, science is on the side of liberals.

But on the subject of woman being designed for nurturing roles like motherhood, the same biologists using the same methods have supported conservative biases.

The biases of social and political liberals of the past thirty years have said women can compete with men, that it’s just cultural conditioning that makes women seem designed for roles of motherhood and homemaker.

No, the biases of liberal social and political ideology have been much stronger and more arrogant than that. They have made it clear that choosing a career is preferable to choosing the ‘old’ roles of wife and mother. After the first service this morning, a woman came through the line to tell me she had been a Unitarian for over fifty years. She grew up in the 50s, went to college to get her Mrs. degree, got married, and raised a family ‘ which she found profoundly fulfilling. But for about two decades in her Unitarian churches, she heard her choices reviled from the pulpits, in adult programs, and during coffee hour. Looking back, the liberal song of the 70s seems to have been ‘Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?’ It was a dumb song, and did violence to some of our own women.

And it was ironic that, from about the 1960s through perhaps the 1980s, when it was politically and academically incorrect to suggest that we, like all other animals on earth, came with biologically shaped and directed behavioral programs, social scientists in psychology, sociology and anthropology were studying and publishing a large number of papers showing that without the role of biology, we simply can’t explain the difference between men and women. (For an excellent and dispassionate book on this, see Carl Degler’s 1991 In Search of Human Nature.) The sexes are profoundly different in deep ways that are not the result of education but biology. Women are made for relating with others, caring about them, nurturing them ‘ all the traits that we identify with the role of Mother.

The differences between boys and girls are apparent in the first hours after birth. Girl babies are much more interested than boys in people and faces; the boys seem just as happy with an object dangled in front of them.

From the outset of life, girl babies show a greater interest in communicating with other people. One study involves babies of only 2-4 days old. It shows that girls spend almost twice as long as boys maintaining eye contact with a silent adult, and girls also look longer than boys when the adult is talking. The boys’ attention span was the same, whether the adult was talking or not’showing a relative bias towards what they could see, rather than what they could hear. . .

This female bias towards the personal shows itself in other ways. At four months old, most baby girls can distinguish photographs of people they know from photographs of strangers; boys usually cannot. A one-week-old baby girl can distinguish a baby’s cry from a background of general noise of a similar volume. Baby boys cannot. (Anne Moir, Brain Sex, p. 56)

Boys will make up stories full of zap, pow, and villainy. Girls’ narratives focus on home, friendship, emotions; the boy will tell the story of the robber, while the girls tell the same tale from the point of view of the victim . . .

Of course we all remember, from the playground, girls and boys who did not conform to this pattern. Indeed, they stick in the mind precisely because they were so different from most of the other girls and boys.’ (Brain Sex, pp. 59-60)

What all the innate differences add up to is what poets and regular people alike have been saying for centuries. Women are the gender with a higher awareness of and sensitivity to the existence and needs of other people. They come wired to care about the needs of their children. Both biologists and religious conservatives say it is very significant that there is no known culture in which childrearing is done mostly by men. This recognition that females have a natural role as mates and mothers is so widespread, so obvious, it describes females of every species we know, including ours.

So when religious or political conservatives fight for laws that define and defend women’s roles as mothers and wives, when they oppose abortion as violating a natural law so ancient it could be called the will of the gods ‘ when they do this, they are standing on some solid ground. And they would say what biologists say: that when we find exceptions to these rules, they stand out precisely because they are so unlike the norms. And laws, they say, should be grounded not in exceptions but in the rules, the norms, the deep voice of gods of nature, reflected in the way things really are.

Are you irritated yet? We liberals always assume that science is on the side of our political biases, but sometimes it is not.

And these deep predispositions in many women come up again and again. My favorite line in Jonobie’s Affirmation of Faith was when she said the reason she couldn’t succeed in a man’s world as her mother had done was not because of sexism, but because she had no passion inside of her for it. That kind of passion, as the Greeks knew, is the presence of a god. Jonobie has different goddesses directing her life than her mother did, and some of them are more like the traditional and biological tendencies of women than her mother’s were ‘ though as she and I discussed it, her guiding spirit, or goddess, isn’t Hera or Demeter, but Hestia: one we’ll talk about in two weeks.

Passion means the presence of a god. The word ‘enthusiasm’ contains the whole story. Look it up: it means to be filled with a god. And we must go where we are filled with gods, not where we have no passion for something.

I was reminded of a paragraph I read years ago by a Canadian psychologist named Sandra Witleson:

To have power, like riches or lovers, one has to want it, work for it, and strive to maintain it. Men will make the most extraordinary sacrifices of personal happiness, health, time, friendships and relationships in the pursuit and maintenance of power, status and success. Women won’t; most of them simply are not made that way.’ (Brain Sex, pp. 161-2). In other words, they have no passion for it.

Even at the simple chemical level, hormones play an important part in making woman the less aggressive sex. Estrogen, for instance, has a neutralizing effect on the aggression hormone, testosterone. Several clinical studies show how the female hormone can rescue violent males from extremes of aggressive behavior. It has even been used to control the behavior of male sex offenders.’ (Brain Sex, p. 79)

And another woman scientist wrote that ‘Marriages work, against all the odds, not because women are submissive, and accommodate their domineering males; marriages work because women’s natural social skills ‘ it’s been called ‘social intelligence’ ‘ enable them to manage a relationship so much better than a man. Women can predict and understand human behavior better than men, can sense the motives behind speech and behavior; so, if he is the engine of the ship, she is the rudder. She is also the navigator, because she alone has the chart and knows where the rocks are.’ (Brain Sex, p. 140) Notice there is no hint of inferiority in that woman’s description of women, just profound difference. But it’s a very different notion than seeking ‘sensitivity training’ to make men respond more like women, one of the dated liberal fads of the 70s and 80s. If you’re younger and have never heard of this, it’s because it didn’t work.

The message of biology is that there are sets of choices hard-wired, that we are not free to choose otherwise because it won’t feel natural or right to us. That’s almost exactly what the Greeks were trying to say by calling these things gods. They are eternal parts of the human condition. The Greeks saw the Dependent styles as the traits of being open, receptive and committed, the traits praised in the prayer this morning. And those, they identified with the female rather than the male styles of being ‘ as poets have always done, too.

So biology seems pretty strongly in the corner of political and religious conservatives on the subject of some of the roles nature or God have equipped women for. All this will bring a satisfied grin to the face of conservatives, and will often bring an irritated grimace to the faces of liberals, won’t it?

Now here we have ancient Greek myths of Hera, Demeter and Persephone ‘ the roles of wife, mother and daughter ‘ and findings of modern biology saying that yes indeed, these styles of being are programmed, hard-wired, into women. They are both natural and enduring parts of the human condition.

How would understanding this challenge our views of women, including some of the women here today? The liberal view of thirty years ago, that there are no permanent differences between the sexes, that it’s all about education rather than biology ‘ these views are wrong. They are not true to sciences, and not true to human nature.

I’ll continue this in two weeks when we consider the other kind of goddesses, the powerful and independent ones. There too, however, there will be an unpleasant surprise, for the most powerful of the independent goddesses is firmly in the camp of conservatives.

Jonobie’s mother sounds like she would fit in any Unitarian church in the country and be on the right side of most discussions about women. But Jonobie’s story is one of the very different stories characteristic of a great number of women in their 20s, 30s and 40s, as you can learn by talking with some of them in this church. Unitarianism has long been so identified with the assumptions of political liberalism that for many, it simply is liberal politics, with hymns and occasional candles. But I think cultural, political and religious liberals, in order to live in the present rather than the past, need to revisit and expand our understanding of the great range of spirits that guide the women among us and in the larger world.

I said I wanted to irritate you. But I don’t mean the kind of irritation that just causes a blister. I mean the kind of irritation that a grain of sand is, when it gets inside an oyster ‘ the kind of irritation that might, with time and work, produce a pearl of wisdom.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr 2004

3 October 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

The theologian Howard Thurman once said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go and do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

It sounds easy, but often seems hard. Let us focus on what makes us come alive, that we may go and do it.

Let us seek to live within stories that know our true name. And those places where we feel safe, real and cherished: let us seek them as well, and learn to dwell near them.

Let us muster the courage to listen for those voices that demand only the best from us, and let us grow comfortable in their company. For they are angels of our better nature, and we need to put ourselves in the company of the better angels of our nature.

For our calling is a high one. We are made, as scientists and poets have told us, entirely of stardust; of the stuff of gods are we made. And that noble origin grants us much honor, and a task.

The task begins with asking what makes us come alive and going to do it. Because more than anything, the world needs people who have come alive. Let us seek that which makes us come alive, nothing less. Amen.

SERMON: “Myths to Live By”, Part One

Over the next few weeks, I want to talk with you about stories, so let’s start with one:

The Great Stone Face

Once there were people who lived in a valley at the foot of a large mountain. High at the top of the mountain there was a face, a great face carved in the stone. The people said it was the face of a god. And if you could see that face clearly, they said, it would show you who you were, and how you were meant to live your life.

That sounded easy enough, but it was not. For the face was in a part of the mountain impossible to climb, and so high up it was almost always obscured by clouds or fog. Furthermore, the face seemed to look differently in different light, and no two people ever saw it exactly the same.

But it was important, this face, because if only it could be seen clearly’well, then you would know who you really were, and who you were meant to be. And so the people studied what they could see of the face, as best they could, and they told others what they thought they saw.

Stories even arose, stories about times that the great face had actually spoken to someone, and what the great face had said. People wrote these things down, and tried to make a list of do’s and don’t for living, but no two lists ever completely agreed. Still the people told their stories, and listened to the stories of others, because after all there was so much at stake, if only they could get it right.

And as they believed they understood the message of the great face in the stone, they tried to live in the ways they felt they were meant to live. Usually, this meant they tried to be kind to one another, to be good neighbors, to work hard, to make their little valley a better place for their having been there, and so on, as you would expect. There were always a few, of course, who did not care much about making the valley a better place. They lived to chase after power or wealth or other things like that, and they too, if pressed on it, would argue that this was the way the great face of stone had intended things to be.

From time to time, as you would also expect, there were also people who said that all of this was just nonsense, that there was no face at all in the stones above, that these were just these silly myths. And it was certainly true that if there was a face up there in the rocks, it was very faint, so faint that you couldn’t even be sure you were seeing anything at all.

Yet others would then say that without the face, and the stories about the face, the people in the valley might not have been so eager to be decent to one another, and then what kind of a valley would they have? After all, they would say, you needed something to live for, and some kind of rules to live by.

But as any visitor or other objective person could see, if there was any face at all up there, it was too vague to be clear about, even on a sunny day. All you could be sure of was that the people had these stories, and they lived by them. Should there be an expedition to the top of the mountain to try and see once and for all what the great face of stone was trying to say? Or should they instead be paying more attention to their stories, and their lives? If they could never see the great face clearly, then all they had were their stories, and their efforts to live well together. And if someone swore that the great face had indeed spoken clearly but the way it wanted them to live made no sense, either to individuals or to the community, then who would have cared what the great stone face said, anyway?

Well, as you can tell, this is not settled, neither within that valley nor elsewhere. And yet there is something here of importance, and we cannot seem to stop thinking and talking about it.

The psychiatrist Rollo May wrote a book not long before he died, called The Cry for Myth, which I recommend to anyone interested in this subject. These are some of the things he wrote about myth in his book:

“A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. [And all worlds are senseless until we can find a way to make sense of them!] Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence. Myths are like the beams in a house: not exposed to outside view, they are the structure which holds the house together so people can live in it. Myth making is essential in gaining mental health, and the compassionate therapist will not discourage it. Indeed, the very birth and proliferation of psychotherapy in our contemporary age were called forth by the disintegration of our myths (p. 15).”

“Whereas empirical language refers to objective facts, myth refers to the quintessence of human experience, the meaning and significance of human life (p. 26).” He has also defined psychotherapy itself as the search for an adequate personal mythology.

What is a myth? Well, it is a script for our life, a kind of story buried deep within us and probably going back beyond our childhood even to the crib, a story that defines our peculiar style of living, and makes us who we are. This is the story, the script, that we live out in more ways than we can count. So a myth is a script.

The psychiatrist Alfred Adler spoke of these stories as our ‘guiding fictions,’ and that is another good phrase. A myth is a guiding fiction, an internalized story that assigns us a role within it, that tells us who we are and should be, and we tend to follow that script throughout our lives, both as individuals and as a society.

It does not do any good to ask whether myths or stories are ‘true’ or not. True and false are the wrong questions to ask of these scripts for living. They are good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, adequate or inadequate. They can serve as good or bad guides for our life. But once they are in place, once we are living out our lives in their terms, they are very hard to change, or even to be aware of: one of the images that Rollo May used was the image of myths as the beams in a house, not exposed to view, but holding the structure together from within.

Here’s what a myth can sound like in real life. Some years ago, at the Unitarian summer camp at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, I spoke with a woman who told me her problem was that she just couldn’t seem to do enough. She was working hard at everything, sacrificing herself to her husband, her children, and nearly anyone else who asked. But her life felt empty, she didn’t seem to be getting anything out of it, didn’t seem to be getting anything back from all this giving she was doing. I asked her if she thought she was supposed to be getting something out of it, and she said yes, it’s supposed to work that way: you give and you give, but eventually, you get back, too, and that’s what makes it all worth it.

That’s what I mean by a script, a guiding fiction. There is a story being lived out not only by that woman, but by millions of women and men ‘ though that one is mostly a women’s story. But there is no way to help this woman do well enough to get what she wants, because she is living out a story that is not likely to have a happy ending. It is like the story of Cinderella, who works and slaves for others, and whose only hope is that somehow a fairy Godmother will see her pure heart, reward her with a handsome prince, and usher in a kind of Judgement Day, when all who have wronged her will be punished. The only way to win is to get out of this story and find a different kind of role to play, because in real life there is a great scarcity of fairy godmothers.

Cinderella is only a fairy tale. But the best fairy tales have plots that have been told many times in many other ways. This Cinderella script, for example, is very much like a traditional script of Christianity, especially for women, that says you spend your whole life giving to men, to children, and to all others who ask, you spend your life as a Suffering Servant, and you’ll get your reward in heaven.

Now you have to say that this role is not always, or even necessarily, bad. It depends on the other characters in the story, and what roles they are playing. This is often a very rewarding role for women, because their husband, children, and friends appreciate and love them not in heaven but here and now for their hard work and their good heart.

Nor do you have to be a woman to find yourself in this story. College students living on no money in crummy apartments with three-inch cockroaches can identify with Cinderella too, where the role of the fairy godmother will be played by their eventual employer who makes all of this sacrifice worth it. And that usually happens. So it is not necessarily a bad story. But sometimes, a story like that Cinderella story, that ‘pay now, fly later’ script’sometimes it only makes people perpetual victims. And then the only way out of it is to get out of the story, and find a better script for your life.

Let’s do another story. You see a teen-aged boy who acts like a caricature of every macho role he has ever seen. He is a little blowhard practicing to become a big blowhard. He is arrogant with girls and with everyone else. His guiding fiction is a very old story. He is acting out the ancient warrior role, even the ancient barbarian role: the role of one who believes that through strength and bluster he can intimidate opponents, win the battle, get the girl and win respect.

It is not hard to see where a boy could learn a story like this. He could go to action movies or listen to Neo-conservative speeches about war and America’s manifest destiny to rule the world, and he would see this same old script being played out. It can govern a whole life, that myth, no matter how inadequate or silly it is.

And when a boy is frustrated because he can’t seem to win the battle or the girl or whatever, it will do him no good to take karate or courses in how to succeed through intimidation. Oh, he might become a successful businessman that way, but he will not become much of a human being, and that is what we are after here. To do that, he has to get out of that ridiculous story, and into a bigger one, into one that can steer him toward a more grown-up and responsible kind of life.

As in the case of the Cinderella story, this macho role you see in movies and television programs is an ancient part of our human repertoire. Just as you could understand the Cinderella role to be a variation on the ancient Greek goddess Persephone, the obedient daughter who was forever trying to please people, so you could see this macho script as another incarnation of the old Greek war-god Ares.

Do you see how different the discussion of life’s problems is when we do it in terms of the stories and scripts we’re living out instead of talking about tables of moral absolutes, theological mandates and forbidding lists of ‘Thou shalts’ and ‘Thou shalt nots’? We’ve taken it to a deeper and more important level, when we can identify the scripts we are living out, and begin to ask whether these are really adequate models for a mature and integrated human life. When we are living out stories rather than God’s Orders, then we can aspire to a creative role in the picture ‘ editor, perhaps. Or at least collaborator.

When you understand your life as a story rather than a set of rules, then there is the possibility of changing the story: changing the setting, the plot, and the ending. That is another way of understanding what a religious conversion is about, or someone going through a significant personal transformation in psychotherapy: it is someone changing their story, finding a different role to play, finding a new myth.

While there are a lot of images and stories that are important to me, you can learn most of what you need to know about me by understanding how I have been both attracted to and shaped by two children’s stories, a fable, and a minor Greek god. The children’s stories are ‘The Little Engine That Could’ and ‘The Little Red Hen.’ The fable is the old story of the blind men and the elephant, and the last is a little-known Greek god named Proteus. These stories, at least as I have understood them, have been characteristic of my views of what is most sacred in life, what is to be avoided, and how I have gone through difficult changes in my life.

You can learn more about me by understanding the stories that have been important, especially those four, than you can learn by knowing my education, my occupational history, or my family background.

And the same is true of you. Neither you nor anyone else will learn much about you from your resum’. If you really want to learn who you are, you will need to know what your guiding fictions are, your stories, your scripts, the myths you live by.

I want to give you an assignment. I want you to think of the stories, images, fables, proverbs, slogans and so on that are your favorites. Write them down if you need to, but make at least a good mental list of them. Or make a list of what you think are the five best rules to live by: they will be a good start.

Make a list of them, and then look at them and see how they are alike and how they are different, whether they seem related to one another. Then try to think of stories that they bring to mind, stories that seem to make the same points. The stories may be from movies or television shows you have seen, books you have read, fairy tales, Aesop’s fables, stories from the Bible, or just favorite personal anecdotes from within your own family. But you have such a collection of proverbs, fables, guiding fictions and myths, and they have played a central role in who you really are. They have a lot to do with what matters most to you, what you think life is about, who you see as the winners and losers in life. Learning to know your own stories is like learning to know your own soul.

It is said, at least in legend, that some of the Native American Plains Indians painted what amounted to psychological self-portraits on the decorative shields they carried, much like some of the shields our own kids made a few months ago. These shields showed, through symbolic animals like the eagle, bear, buffalo and mouse, what this person’s spirit was like, what they brought to life, and what they most likely still lacked, so that those who met them along life’s ways might better be able to help them on their journey toward wholeness. Sharing our stories is a little like carrying such a symbolic shield. It is a way of telling ourselves and others who we are, what we struggle with, and what is sacred to us. Try it with someone you trust, or just do the exercise by yourself. If you are willing to share your stories with me, I would love to hear them, and you can call me either at church or at home, I’m usually up until midnight.

Your stories, slogans and so forth may seem silly when you become aware of them, like stories of the Little Red Hen or the Little Engine That Could. I can assure you that they are not silly, and that there is probably a classic myth, thousands of years old, that tell the same stories. The Little Engine That Could, for example, is a child’s version of the ancient myth of Prometheus, and the Little Red Hen is telling the same story that Aesop told over 2500 years ago in his fable about the ant and the grasshopper. These things may sound silly, but they are not. The myths we live by are some of the most important things about us.

There is a wonderful old story about stories, it is the legend of Sheherezade. She was condemned to death by an immature, woman-hating tyrant. To save her life and the lives of others, she began telling the tyrant a story the night before he was going to have her killed, and she ended the story in mid-air, to be finished the next night. He let her live another night because he wanted to hear the ending. But she was no fool, and the story kept going on, for a thousand and one nights, according to the legend, until through her stories she had finally softened his heart, and opened his eyes and ears. She awakened the decent person that was inside of this tyrant. It was waiting like a Sleeping Beauty, for someone who could reach his soul and break the evil spell his life was being lived under.

But you see, we are all under the spell of Sheherezade. We all tell our stories in order to live. And we tell them, as well, in order to transform both ourselves and others into the people we think we were meant to be. We live in that valley where we look up to see a vague but important face carved in the rock high above. We know there is something terribly significant about that face. Somehow, it calls us toward a noble, even a sacred, destiny. We are not quite sure what that is, for the face seems to change as you move through life, or as you view it from different perspectives.

Actually, this is a myth. There is no face up there in the rocks at all. There may have been long ago, but the image is worn away beyond recognition now, and all we have are the stories. They are not much. Children’s stories, fables, old myths, tales and images from our sacred scriptures – these are about all that we have. And so we tell those stories, as Sheherezade did. That is why it is so important to know these guiding fictions that shape our lives, and to find better myths to live by: because we are all under the spell of Sheherezade. We all tell our stories in order to live.

Perhaps the people in the valley had it backwards. Perhaps it was their stories and the way they lived their lives that created the great face of stone. It is still unfinished, still worth pondering. Let us leave this place and ponder the meaning of our stories, and the meaning of our lives. Let us go seeking stories that have parts for us, for our families, community, nation and world ‘ parts that are worth playing.

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© Davidson Loehr

5 September 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

One of the most famous short prayers is ‘Lord, I believe – help my unbelief!’

That prayer speaks for more of us more of the time than we may like to admit. We do believe. We believe most of the important and necessary things: that life is good, people are fair and honest, and we matter. But when you listen to the news, or any political attack ads, it’s so easy to disbelieve.

We believe we are good people with a lot to offer. But let a relationship go sour or a close friend drift away, and how quickly unbelief comes. We trust in a basic humanity and compassion in everyone ‘ then we hear about the slaughters in the Russian school this week, and we wonder.

We think we’re smart enough for life, until someone calls us stupid. We remember that remark for years, even decades, and during our dark moments it makes us wonder.

We’ve got a good education and a good job where we know we are making an important contribution. We feel confident and secure – until we are laid off. Then Lord, I believe, but help my unbelief!

We have our guiding values and beliefs tied securely to our will and purpose, we have no serious doubts about them. Then something happens that our answers don’t fit, and again we doubt.

In a hundred ways, the old prayer is our prayer: Lord, I believe – but help my unbelief!

Sometimes we just need to remember some very basic things that we already believe; need to be assured they are really true, and that the most important ground beneath our feet is solid, rather than shifting.

So let us remember:

— Life is a gift, and it is good.

— We are precious parts of life, and the world needs the compassion and generosity of spirit we have to offer.

— We are never condemned by our mistakes. We’re not supposed to be perfect; we’re supposed to be more fully human. We’re supposed to be alive, aware, courageous and compassionate toward ourselves and others.

We believe these things. We know them to be true. But not always.

So if we would make life harder by trying to play God, let us at least try to play a God of love, understanding and forgiveness, rather than a mean little deity of anger and blame.

And let us always remember – in the words of another of history’s most famous short prayers – that all will be well, all will be well, all will be well.

Amen.

SERMON: Religion is like an airplane

Oh, there are lots of ways that religion is like an airplane. We’ve got an aisle and a choice of sitting beside or away from a window. We both have people making announcements before we start; once in awhile there’s food, though ours is better. Airplane passengers get a little bag of nuts, and churches usually have a few of those, too, on both sides of the pulpit. You generally trust the pilot to take you up and bring you down safely, though once in a while pilots crash, and so do preachers.

You have to leave a lot of your baggage behind when you fly. And you can’t bring some of your old baggage on spiritual journeys, either. Some churches even offer the theological equivalent of Frequent Flyer Miles, where those who attend regularly feel more sure they’ll get a free flight to the universe’s best vacation spot after they die. And like an airplane, we use religion to get someplace we weren’t before the trip, someplace higher, with a better view of life and everything ‘ though some religions, like some airplanes, don’t fly very high and the views aren’t always good.

And a sermon is like an airplane ride too: sometimes both of them seem to taxi around so long you wonder if they’ll ever take off. So let’s get up a little higher, and look at some other ways that religion is like an airplane.

Higher, more inclusive visions

An airplane ride can give us a broad, wide, inclusive view of things we just can’t get from the ground. And when religion is working, it too is about giving us a broad and inclusive view of ourselves, life and everything else. At its best, it is a vision of life reunited with its own depth and integrity. I’m not talking about religion in a narrow sense here; I’m talking about religion in a very broad sense. And some of the best insights are really quite spectacular in their simplicity, and their ability to see right to the heart of life itself.

– In the Old Testament, the ancient Hebrew sages wrote that all the commandments can be summed up in just two: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself. Love what is most high, most holy, most life-giving, with everything in you, and when you look at your neighbor, see yourself, and love accordingly. Spectacular!

– Jesus of Nazareth taught a Kingdom of God that’s still beyond apparent human achievement, but still dazzling in its simplicity. It isn’t anything supernatural, he said: it isn’t coming, isn’t something in the future. It’s potentially already here, within and among us, spread out on the earth. And it’s a simple thing. The Kingdom of God is the state of the world when we all learn to treat each other like brothers and sisters, like fellow children of God. Period. Amen. End of sermon, end of religion. I don’t know how it could be defined any better.

– The Hindus – who do ‘cosmic’ better than anyone – take their advanced students by the hand, and take them up in their Hindu version of the airplane. They point to everything that is, everything in the whole universe: all the dynamic forces that create, sustain and destroy the universe. Everything. Then they look at the student, point out to eternity and infinity, and they say ‘That art Thou.’ A whole graduate religious education in just three words.

– The great Chinese sage Lao Tsu lived five centuries before Jesus, and he really soared! There are so many treasures in the Tao te Ching it’s hard to choose: ounce for ounce, I think it’s the wisest book ever written. But one favorite would be his saying ‘What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher? What is a bad man but a good man’s job? If you don’t understand this, you will get lost, however intelligent you are. It is the great secret.’ Neither religion nor ethics get much better than that. That’s flying! These are simple, true, insights we almost never hear on the daily news or in schools, and they’re among the most important our species has ever produced.

– The Buddha told us – in his good-news/bad-news message – that both our comforts and our fears come from our own illusions, and that real freedom is growing beyond the need for our illusions. Hardly anyone is ever able really to do this, but it’s right. Buddha had another simple picture. In his most famous sermon, he simply picked up a lotus blossom and held it in his hand. Everything in life, everything you need to know, he said, is contained even in this simple and beautiful lotus blossom. Some of the most profound religious insights are condensed into such small statements that we can take them home, care for them for years, and they never stop opening up to reveal more and more, like a lotus blossom in bloom.

– Even the stories of great religions offer us views of ourselves and life that take us to dizzying heights. I’ve spoken before here of the ancient Greek story about Psyche and Eros, as one of these. Here, from over three thousand years ago, is the story of the soul’s search for divine love that lies at the heart of nearly all Western religious traditions.

– And you probably all know the story of the eagle raised by chickens, who spent his whole life thinking he was a chicken but feeling uncentered, disconnected from his true calling – until the day when eagles circling high overhead finally visited him to show him his true calling. Then he flew up above the sky where his true calling really was. That’s a religious story, too. It’s real message is that we’re all eagles, all capable of flying so much higher than we want to believe

– And one last story, of the thousands of high-flying myths and tales out there, comes from the Jews. Like many Jewish stories, it comes wrapped in wit. One day God, the story says, decided to play a trick on humans. So he went to his favorite rabbi to ask his advice. ‘I want to hide from people,’ God said, ‘and I’m not sure of the best place to hide. Should I hide on the dark side of the moon? at the edge of the galaxy? What do you think?’ To which the rabbi replied ‘You always make it too hard. Just hide in the human heart: it’s the last place they’ll think to look.’ And God has been hiding there ever since.

These are some of the sights seen on a good religious trip. Like an airplane ride, they are views of life from high above it. So high above it, in fact, that it’s almost impossible to identify with any of these people. That must have occurred to you, during the week when you’re remembering some teaching like these from one of religion’s great prophets and sages. That world they’re talking about seems a long way away from the kind of life we really live.

Prophets aren’t regular people

If the first lesson of religion is the wisdom and power of its most gifted prophets and sages, the second lesson is that these were pretty strange people, all of them. We don’t usually talk about them this way, but people who flew that high and offered such wonderful views to us during our little airplane rides weren’t much like us. They lived in rarefied air. In some ways, they could see our world so clearly because they really didn’t live in it.

One of the most popular themes in classic literature is that unbridgeable gap between humans and gods, the danger in wanting to fly too high, in taking that eagle-raised-by-chickens story too far.

In the Hebrew scriptures, as in most religious scriptures, it is taught that no one can look on the face of God and survive ‘ a theme turned into a movie, in Indiana Jones and the ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark.’ The Greeks told the story of young Icarus, whose father invented wings so he could fly, and attached them with wax, only warning his son not to fly too high. The youth did, flew too close to the realm of the gods, and the heat of the sun melted the wax and he plunged to his death. This has been a common theme of artists for two thousand years, the plunge of young Icarus into the sea. The Greeks retold the story in the tale of young Phaeton, who talked Zeus into letting him drive Apollo’s chariot through the sky. But he couldn’t handle the horses, pulled the sun too close to the earth, the earth caught fire from the heat, and he was finally thrown to his death. Again, the Greeks tell of the time Hera was jealous of Zeus’s affair with the human woman Semele, and tricked Semele into demanding that Zeus show himself to her without disguise. The undisguised sight of the god burned the human woman to ashes immediately.

And the sages and prophets who fly so high and seem almost to speak for the gods, they’re a strange bunch too, and not much like us.

A century ago, there was an Austrian journalist and social critic named Karl Kraus. His fame has dimmed a lot since then, but he was one of these people who always seemed to see things as though he were up in that airplane, and he knew it. He once wrote some lines that speak for all great sages and prophets who have ever lived:

‘I hear noises which others do not hear’

‘And they disturb for me the music of the spheres

‘ which others don’t hear either.’

I think that’s right. I think people like Jesus and Buddha and Lao Tsu and the rest of them were really disturbed by those ‘noises’ that most of us don’t hear. I also think they could hear, in the background, a kind of ‘music of the spheres’ that we don’t hear very clearly either.

My favorite philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, was another of these. He was really fifty years, maybe a century, ahead of the other philosophers at Cambridge with him seventy years ago: Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, Alfred North Whitehead, John Maynard Keynes. No one understood him, and he never seemed to care. One of his admiring students once said that he too wanted to be a philosopher like Wittgenstein and try to deliver these great visions that others don’t understand. Wittgenstein said ‘No, you can’t do it.’ Then he added ‘I can only live here because I manufacture my own oxygen.’

All this is a variation on the old religious insight that we can take our chariot rides, or our airplane rides, but we have to come back down and land. We have to live down here on earth, not up there where we would have to make our own oxygen.

Coming back to earth

We go to church and listen to the Good Samaritan story, and fancy ourselves in the role. Then we go out into the street and play the roles of those who walked by because, after all, it isn’t safe out there and we might get hurt. We can’t fill our whole life with these noble causes, or we’ll have no time left for living down here on earth. Trying to be like Jesus or Buddha would be like young Icarus trying to fly too close to the sun.

We listen to stories about Jesus’ idea of the Kingdom of God, and we’re uplifted. We hear about the eagle raised by chickens, and we like the idea, though back home we’re not sure we really believe it.

Then we hear stories about some of the great martyrs in history: Jesus, St. Paul, many early Christian Church Fathers, or thousands of Tibetan Buddhists in our own time, who gave their lives for their beliefs. We’re not like that! We just don’t live at that level, the flame doesn’t burn that bright in us.

So religion is like an airplane because after the high-flying visions and insights of history’s great teachers, after being inspired on Sunday by stories of chicken-flavored eagles and the rest of it, we have to land. We have to come back to earth. We just don’t live lives that pure, and there’s wisdom in being able to admit it without feeling like a loser.

Some people dismiss the great religious figures because of this, asking what good it does to follow teachings so far above us we can never live up to them. But their teachings survive just because they are so high above the everydayness of our lives. I think of the millions of sailors who have steered at night by sighting on the North Star for more than three thousand years. You know, not a single one of them has ever reached it! Yet I suspect that without it to go by, their courses would not have been as true. High religious and ethical teachings are like that.

And I think of great religious figures like cathedrals: like the giant and elaborate cathedrals of medieval Christianity all over Europe and Mexico. It’s like all the really sacred and precious and rare stuff is concentrated in them, the way cathedrals are made of gold and marble and wonderful stained glass, surrounded by regular old villages of regular old folks like us. People go to the cathedrals to take a little airplane flight, to let their spirits soar, to rise above themselves for a bit, in that exquisite atmosphere. Religious giants like the Buddha, Jesus and the rest of them are like those cathedrals, too. There’s something precious concentrated in them, but in a form so strong, so all-consuming, they represent standards too high for regular people to live out.

Why is it worth the trip?

You might wonder why it’s worth taking these religious flights into the stratosphere, where we see cathedral-sized visions, hear stories with more promise and hope than we are likely to realize in our regular old down-to-earth human lives. I’ve certainly wondered, both as a preacher and as a person.

There are two reasons, I think.

First is the contrast between the high ideals of good religion, and the low ideals that seem to run so much of the real world. A Bible with the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ in a religion where envy and greed are considered deadly sins, used to justify the invasion of Iraq and the slaughter of thousands of its women and children and the theft of its oil. A Jesus who said not to judge, and that God’s grace, like the sun, shines on all ‘ this Jesus is used as a blunt instrument to beat down ambitious women, gays, lesbians, and whole rafts of people who don’t fit simple cookie-cutter molds.

These examples could be multiplied a hundredfold, just making it even more clear why we so desperately need to keep in mind the higher visions, what Abraham Lincoln called ‘the better angels of our nature.’

There is something magical about these flights to the visions of our higher natures. There is something transformative. These stories – to use another kind of metaphor – are like little seeds that sometimes take root in us and grow to immense size. They’re like a little bit of yeast in a mound of dough, invisibly making the whole thing a lot bigger than it would have been otherwise. That was another of Jesus’ images for the Kingdom of God: yeast, that nearly invisible stuff that makes bread rise so high.

We take these flights, we hear these stories about the lotus blossom, about God hiding in the human heart, about the eagle among chickens, about that Hindu teaching that we are a part of everything alive and wondrous in the whole universe. We hear all these fantastic stories from a vantage point far above our own usual vision. Then we go home, go back to our down-to-earth lives, and it seems we’ve left the cathedral behind.

But we haven’t. When we go on vacations in airplanes, we return from our trips with pictures and memories. Our flights into the cathedrals of our souls to hear the angels of our better nature leave us with pictures and memories too ‘ and those amazing, magical stories.

And someday, in ways large and small, we will be at home in our world, and the seeds planted on our religious flights will begin to bloom. We’ll remember a story like the one about the eagle raised with chickens. We’ll smile to ourselves, and silently say ‘I wonder’.

Or we think of the whole infinite and eternal universe, remember the Hindu sages pointing to it, and to us, saying ‘That art Thou.’ And silently, we say to ourselves ‘I wonder’.

Then one day we become aware – I don’t know how it happens, but it does – that there is something hiding in our hearts, something we hadn’t been aware of before, and that Something hiding in our hearts is God.

And suddenly, like a holy ritual being enacted in a huge ancient cathedral built over the sacred depths of life, that lotus blossom finally begins to open.

And so do we.

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Davidson Loehr

22 August 2004

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Today I want to offer you some high expectations and a challenge.

A critique offered twenty years ago to UU seminary students from a very wise Lutheran minister, Joseph Sittler. At that time he was around 80 and nearly blind. He observed that Unitarians had many great qualities but we hadn’t yet found what we were seeking.

He said, “You have some deep hungers that haven’t been filled.” When asked how he could tell he said, “I know what happens when religious people find what they’re seeking.” “The best of them get filled to overflowing, and the world around them is nourished by the overflow.” “When that happens even an old blind man will be able to see it.”

If this church were accused of having a faith that made a positive difference in the larger world around us would there be enough evidence to convict us? I’m not sure there would.

 Davidson Loehr 2004