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© Davidson Loehr

15 June 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

SERMON

One of my favorite discussions of religion happened some years back with a group of Presbyterians. Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans and most others, as you may know, say all the same things about their uniqueness as a group that UUs do. You’ll hear them say that steering a bunch of them is like herding cats, you’ll hear them say things like “Presbyterians are all like that,” “What would you expect of a bunch of Lutherans?” or “Nobody tells a Baptist what to believe!” and the rest.

About fifteen years ago, I belonged to an ecumenical ministers’ group. About thirty or forty of us met together every Thursday for lunch, and our churches took turns hosting the lunches, so we got to meet a nice variety of people from other religions – mostly the women who prepared and served the lunches. We were visiting a small rural Presbyterian church one Thursday, and before lunch I overheard a small group of Presbyterian women talking. They were trashing Catholics or Baptists, and one of them said “Well, I’m glad we’re Presbyterians!” After a little silence, a second woman said “We’re not supposed to be Presbyterians. We’re supposed to be Christians.” After more silence, another said “Even that sounds arrogant. We’re supposed to love one another, that’s all.”

There is a whole graduate-level course in the difference between religion and a special club in that little interchange. Social clubs are about who we are, what we believe, what is distinctive about us. So this includes political parties, fraternities and sororities, college boosters, and parts of all religions. But these identities are always about who we are. I think of them as roosters crowing to draw attention to themselves. They’re not really doing anything, just crowing.

But religion has always been very different. It isn’t about who we are or what we believe. It’s about what we owe to others, to the world, how we are commanded to behave, like the third Presbyterian woman knew. Religion is always about trying to get people to seek a higher identity than the ones we usually seek. Left alone, we identify with ourselves, or with our club, our class, our kind of people, our political party, fraternity or sorority, even with the sports team we root for. These identities can be so powerful people will kill or die for them, as has happened a few times in world soccer matches.

That Presbyterian discussion about the sacred and the profane reminded me of a bible passage, and a movie made about that bible passage. The bible passage is in the gospel of Matthew where Jesus says, “Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone?” (Matthew 7:9, NRSV)

And the movie, which is one of the favorite movies of many who have seen it, is a picture that won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1988. It’s a Danish film with subtitles, about a small religious group whose favorite Biblical question was “Who, when your child asks for bread, will give a stone?” Yet the movie showed it was this dour little group that was doing just that. They taught conformity to their style, they really just worshiped their way of being. Even the bread they served at their meals was stale.

Who offers a stone to people who ask for bread? Lots of people, and lots of groups. It’s what the first two Presbyterians were offering: club membership rather than a transformed life and world. All you have to offer is being called a Presbyterian or a Christian, a Unitarian Universalist or a Muslim? Those are stones, not bread. And it became clear when the third woman spoke and said they were just supposed to love one another, just that. There was bread. Manna, bread from heaven, bread for the soul and for the soul of the world.

Do you see and feel the difference? It matters so much!

I want to use another word to talk about the difference between honest religion and lesser identities like club or denominational identities. It’s about the different kinds of authority that religion and clubs, political parties or social groups have. These latter, the social and political clubs, have only the authority of their group. They say “This is true because we say it is, and if you don’t agree you need to join another club or church or party. If you don’t like our truth, join the club down the street.” Political parties are not concerned with the truth as much as they are with toeing the party line, and the same is true of all religions at their most superficial level. It’s always about them: so Presbyterians are people who say they believe this but not that; Catholics believe that but not this. It’s never about their character, the kind of people they are, how they treat others. Religious wars and heresy trials are never about character or behavior, always about public profession of the beliefs demanded by the club with the club.

Religious truth must always rest on what is called ontological truth. Sorry for the two-dollar word, but it means a truth that is not determined by what we do or don’t believe, not determined by any authority. Saying something is an ontological truth is saying this is really the way life is, taken deeply, whether we like it or not. It is the only authority an honest religion can ever claim. Every religion I know has a way of saying that the quality of our life is determined largely by the quality of the values we’re living out, and that the focus isn’t on how special we are, but whether we love one another, especially those who are different from us.

The Greeks had a formula for this that I’ve always loved:

Plant a thought, reap an action;

plant an action, reap a habit;

plant a habit, reap a character;

plant a character, reap a destiny.

The Greeks believed that the authority for living well is written in the depths of the human condition, understood rightly, and that we must try to live this way or pay the price. This is so similar to the messages of Taoism, Buddhism, almost all religions. Some religions make some of the eternal dynamics and values into gods, to indicate that they are powerful and persistent and must always be dealt with. This is one way to understand the whole pantheon of Greek gods and goddesses: projections of natural and psychological dynamics that have always been with us, that frame the possibilities of living.

And the task of living wisely is the task of Zeus: to mediate between competing desires and demands, in service of a balanced life directed toward serving the greater good of ourselves and others. What is the prize for this? It is salvation by character, it is personal and communal authenticity.

You can’t get that second-hand. You can’t get it by joining a club, a denomination or a church, or putting fish named “Jesus” on your car trunk. You only get it by doing the self-examination and the work. It’s free, but it isn’t cheap.

And, as every religion I know teaches, there is a penalty for not taking our lives this seriously. Hinduism and Buddhism have you coming back until you get it right. Taoism and many nature religions talk about being out of touch with the essential balance of life, saying you pay the penalty of a diminished and less connected life. Western religions talk about Hell as a place for those who failed worst. But you don’t have to think in supernatural terms. In fact, it’s probably better if you don’t think in supernatural terms.

I’ve quoted a paragraph here before from my favorite Western religious thinker, the Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard. Movie critics say the movie “Babette’s Feast” was all about Kierkegaard’s ideas, too; and it was certainly shot through with them. He didn’t think you could fool yourself, others and life forever. He thought there was a price to pay for identifying only with clubs, churches, denominations – Lutheran, in his case. It was a kind of existential Judgment Day he called “the Midnight Hour.” It could come in the morning when your face looks back at you from the mirror and says “Who are you? Why weren’t you your more true self?” –

“Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself.” (from Either/Or, in A Kierkegaard Anthology edited by Robert Bretall, Princeton University Press, 1946, p. 99)

When something posing as an adequate identity short-circuits the process by giving people prizes simply for being Christian, Unitarian Universalist or Republican, then it has become a betrayal of the religious calling that’s lost beneath the shallower rewards of a group identity.

And I want to persuade you that the difference between liberal religion and a religion called UUism defined by the seven principles is the difference between religion and a social club, a political party, a secular or cultural identity. It is the difference between the authority of life taken deeply, and the authority of a club.

Now how did this brand-new faith called Unitarian Universalism, defined by those seven principles, come about? This isn’t hard to see. The UUA is funding an advertising campaign in Kansas City costing about a quarter of a million dollars, to establish brand-name recognition for UU churches in a city where almost nobody has ever heard of them. One of the women working with the project called me a few weeks ago to say that while more visitors are coming to their churches, the visitors want to know what the religion is, and when she shows them the seven principles they just roll their eyes and often don’t return. “I don’t like them either,” she said, “but it’s all we’ve got.”

They have brand-name recognition, but they don’t have a product to sell, which means a lot of the money is probably wasted. People are coming asking for spiritual bread, and feeling like they’re being offered stones. Even the woman offering the stones is aware that something is missing. That something might be called religion.

One of the slogans used in this billboard campaign is very helpful in understanding what the problem is. That billboard reads, “Many religions, one faith.” Look what they are saying – and saying honestly, I think. There are many religions in our churches, we all know that. You can be Christian, atheist, Buddhist, wiccan, whatever you like. But then there is this “one faith.” The “one faith” that they call Unitarian Universalism. This means that the “one faith” is not a religion. And it sounds like that “one faith” trumps the religions, is the higher category that defines everyone who joins the churches, no matter what they may personally believe. Where did this “one faith” come from?

Let’s look at the origins of UUism – the faith defined by the seven principles. We don’t have to go back very far, it’s a brand-new faith. But its origins were not religious.

When the Unitarians and the Universalists merged in 1961, both religions were moribund. American Universalism had the supernatural teaching that all dead people go to heaven, there is no hell. But people really haven’t worried or written much about where dead people might go for over a century, especially in liberal circles. By about 1900, the Universalists had an answer to a question few liberals were asking any more. Their last seminary closed in the 1970s (Crane, at Tufts University).

And the American Unitarianism of the 19th century as a bible-centered monotheistic religion was also about dead in liberal circles forty years ago. Most who came to our churches were asking their questions in scientific language, language about this life in this world, and they weren’t talking much about God.

Both Unitarians and Universalists, however, were cultural and political liberals, usually supporting the same individual-rights causes. So there was a common identity, it just wasn’t religious.

So as soon as the two religions merged 1961, the question of what on earth they believed arose. Some of you will remember this arising in the 1970s, when Unitarians were saying “The problem is that our children don’t know what to tell their friends they believe!” That, for the record, was a lie. That wasn’t the problem at all. The problem was that the adults, including many of the ministers, no longer knew what they believed, or even what was worth believing. They were really in about the same nebulous place as most of the liberal culture in America – as they still are.

Imagine what might have happened if Unitarians, 25 years ago when they realized they didn’t know what was worth believing, had actually become leaders and asked religious questions. They might have used some of their grant money to bring together theologians and religion scholars from around the world, to discover common themes and common beliefs that underlie all the world’s religions. They might have discovered that there is a core of beliefs that have marked people of good character in all times and places, and might have made those beliefs central – not to their shared cultural habits, but to their religion – hopefully, something with a name shorter than eleven syllables.

Theologians, sociologists of religion, cultural anthropologists, existential psychologists, historians, philosophers – think of the panels of experts, poets, religious thinkers from around the world that could have been assembled! And the results might have marked a watershed in religious history. The first time people might actually have looked beyond confessionalism, beyond religious jargon, to ask what on earth really is worth believing, what ideals must command the attention of all good people. I’m not exaggerating, I think it could have been revolutionary, both for our churches and for others.

But nothing like that happened. Nobody was interested in it. The early 1980s were very self-absorbed times in our country – it was the “Me” generation – and our people reflected that as products of the times. Also, as a religious movement that didn’t have a clear religion, there was a lot of defensiveness, and almost no faith that a set of real and necessary beliefs could be discovered.

So instead of looking outward, they looked inward. Instead of conducting a study, they took a poll. It was a poll taken to ask what current members in the early 1980s happened to believe. Not what they should believe, not what things could be argued to be most profoundly true, not what beliefs have been accepted through history as necessary in helping to form people of good character. No religious questions were asked, no religious scholars were consulted. They just took a poll. They held a mirror up to themselves to admire the beliefs they happened to bring into church with them, since they weren’t clear what beliefs worth having anyone would pick up in church.

What such a poll had to reveal, and what it did reveal, were the secular assumptions that cultural liberals of the early 1980s brought into church with them, the beliefs they had absorbed from the broader liberal culture. And the principles have been used, since then, to describe “our kind of people” – not their religion, which is at best a secondary concern, but the secular faith of cultural liberalism: the “one faith” that constitutes the ersatz new faith called “Unitarian Universalism.”

“UUism” is the religion for our masses, just as Presbyterianism is the religion for those masses. It was created by people who wanted to be able to speak for their masses, people who were frustrated by religious pluralism and wanted, finally, “one faith.” That is only likely to happen in a mass religion, a group faith. And mass religions have a different faith than religions do.

The faith of religions for the masses is the faith that there is safety in numbers and security and identity in belonging to a group of like-minded people. The faith of honest religion is fundamentally different; it is the faith that life really does have some abiding truths that can guide, strengthen and comfort us if only we will listen, hear, and obey them, even when they put us at odds with our group – which they usually will.

Club membership, society identity, religion for the masses, is easy and secure, and can feel really good if what you seek is acceptance without work, just for being you in a group of people just like you. It’s the feeling a Democrat gets at a Democratic convention, but – curiously! – doesn’t get at a Republican convention. It’s the feeling a Republican gets at a Republican convention, but – again, curiously – not at a Democratic convention. This is because political parties, like denominations and other group identities, aren’t in the pursuit of truth; they’re in pursuit of conformity with a party line that can bestow an identity on their kind of people.

I am not and have never been a “Unitarian Universalist,” though I’ve identified with the American Unitarian tradition. But even as an outsider to this new “faith” called UUism, it’s easy to see that it is in trouble, lost in the woods. Even Bill Sinkford, the president of the UUA, has said publicly that the principles are so empty and boring that nobody would want them read by their bedside in a hospital. This isn’t just my rant: even the president of the association knows that the emperor has no clothes – and suspects it isn’t a real emperor, either. That’s the definition of stones, not bread. Who would give stones to people asking for bread? The UUA would and does.

I imagine people coming to the UUA twenty years from now, or even one week from now, saying “We came to you asking for bread, and you gave us this silly faith based on principles that came from taking a poll. How could you do that? We trusted you to take us seriously. How could you do that?”

It is sad and frustrating to have watched the new and vapid “faith” called Unitarian Universalism replace the focus and purpose of an honest religion with such self-absorbed pap. Because bad faith drives out good faith. It’s also sad to observe that when a religion is dumbed down to the self-descriptive boasts of its members, people follow it to that lower level because they trusted their leaders to lead them in the ways of righteousness and wholeness, and to feed them bread rather than stones.

This isn’t finished. The mistakes made 20 years ago through lack of vision and courage are related to the fact that the adult membership of the UUA has declined 44% since 1970, and has declined 5% per decade since 1980 relative to the population of the U.S. [1]

The lack of religious vision and courage are also related to the president of the UUA saying that the seven principles of the “one faith” of UUism are so hollow and boring that nobody would want them read by their hospital bedside – even as we spend more money creating religious education programs based on them. It is material for a Garrison Keillor joke, and might be funny if we weren’t paying for it – in more currencies than we care to count.

So this isn’t finished. And I can’t finish it today with one critique. This “movement” – the one that’s moving backwards – is lost in the woods, led there marching to the chant of the “one faith” composed of seven principles no one can remember. The way out, I believe, will not be under the banner of “Unitarian Universalism.” It will only come, I think, when individuals, ministers, churches and leaders (probably in that order) forego the simple comforts of club membership for the engaging challenges of the same spirit of honest religion that has animated every great religion, every serious quest for noble character, in history.

I think a motto we use in this church could help the UUA shift their vision toward something that might point toward an exit from the woods. Not “Many religions, one faith,” but – as you see printed on all our orders of service – “One church. Many beliefs.”

The many beliefs are variations on timeless themes. Those themes are the range of commandments that have always stirred the human soul to higher and nobler aspirations, to become better people, partners, parents and citizens. They sing through the prayers of every honest religion of history, and are recognizable immediately:

– Don’t to do others what you wouldn’t want them to do to you.

– Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your god.

– Whatsoever things are true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, or good report – think on these things

– Be a blessing unto the world

– Speak from the Buddha-seed within you to the Buddha-seed within others.

– A good man is a bad man’s teacher; a bad man is a good man’s job.

While these themes are legion, they are all sung in the key of honest religion, not the self-absorption of smaller identities. We know them by their sound and the seriousness with which they take both us and all of life. No two people will find exactly the same combination of variations on these themes to find their own way out of the woods, so though we can be one church – meaning a sangha, a place where religious concerns are valued higher than lesser concerns – there must be many beliefs, many variations on these themes. The variations are negotiable; the themes are not.

The way out of the woods can, I believe, only be walked along paths of religious beliefs, not the mass recitations of groups in love mostly with their kind of people. It is an unending journey, this succession of paths out of the woods, and along the way are many stones to trip us up. But there is also food for this trip, nourishment for head and heart, body and soul. We’ll be serving – well, you know.

————————-

[1] “UUism” and its growth or decline, compared with the growth in the US population since 1970:

in 1970, UUs (167,583) were .081727% of the US population (205,052,000)

in 1980, UUs (139,052) were .06138% of the US population (226,545,805)

in 1990, UUs (145,250) were .0584% of the US population (248,709,873)

in 2000, UUs (155,449) were .05524% of the US population (281,421,906)

The 2000 figures show UUs have lost over 32% since 1970 (.05524% is 67.6% of .081727%) They’ve lost 10% since 1980, 5% since 1990.

Here are some more ways to play with those figures:

Since 1970, the US population has increased by 37.244%, while UU adult members have declined by over 7.2%. If UUs had kept up with US population growth, there would be about 229,998 adult members today instead of the 155,000+ we have. So we are about 44.5% behind where we would need to be, to have kept pace with US population growth. And we’re about 45% behind where we’d need to be actually to say we had GROWN in the past thirty years.

(Figures obtained from the UUA and the Internet.)

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© Davidson Loehr

June 1, 3003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

INTRODUCTION

I began writing soliloquies for the characters in Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son in 1988, as a more creative way to explore the many depths and insights of great stories. As all who write stories learn, the characters have their own integrity, and once you’ve found it, the characters determine what they will say, not the storyteller. So the exercise of trying to put yourself inside the spirit of different characters is almost always eye-opening, and the stories usually lead to unexpected places. This was especially true with these four soliloquies. I wrote them in order of increasing difficulty – the older brother’s story is the easiest to tell, because everyone identifies with his complaints. In 1990, I wrote the second installment, a soliloquy for the fatted calf. This began almost as a joke, I expected the story to be very simply, whiny or angry, and straightforward. I was astonished when I found that the fatted calf had a voice and a perspective, and I was a little shocked to see what it had to say. I’m not aware that I had ever seen the story in this way before.

But after 1990, I left the project. Something about the last two characters felt harder, and felt like it would take a turn I didn’t know how to make. So it wasn’t until 2003, fifteen years after I’d begun the project, that I had two Sundays in a row to fill, and decided it would be a good time to finish what I had begun so long ago. The father was hard to write partly because I had to forget the confessional spin traditionally put on it: that the “father” is really God, so we must build this part up to be wonderful and wise. When I could finally just see him as the father of these two sons, he turned out to have a very different perspective on the story: less wise, perhaps, but much more human.

But the hardest to write, and the most surprising, was the soliloquy for the Prodigal Son. It has always seemed to me that his father’s actions put him in a tough place, living out his life among people who thought he was a shiftless cheat. As I got into him, it became clear to me that this parable – at least as I read it – contains the essential message of the man Jesus, at least as I understand it. And the lack of an ending to the story also seems to have been true to Jesus’ message: that this revolution can not be finished by one person or one God, that it is a conspiracy against the ways of the world into which we are all invited. This gave me a new appreciation for how unpleasant and unwelcome a message like this would be, in any time and place.

I don’t mean to inflict these soliloquies on you as the only way to speak through the material. I invite you into the story yourselves, to find for yourself the voices that seem to speak to and through you. And you may want to add more characters to the tale: a mother, for instance. For me, this was a spiritual exploration of the message of the man Jesus and some of its unsettling implications, as well as an exploration of my own spirit, and a challenge to my own beliefs. All great stories contain buried treasure, I invite you to dig here for a bit. – Davidson Loehr, June 2003

READINGS: Christian and Buddhist versions of the Prodigal Son Parable

I decided to contrast Jesus’ story with an older Buddhist version of a very similar situation. The two thinkers, and two religions, see things very differently, and their wisdom points in quite different directions, as you’ll see.

1. The Christian version comes from the gospel of Luke:

There was a man who had two sons; and the younger of them said to his father, “Father, give me the share of property that falls to me.” And he divided his living between them. Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took his journey into a far country, and there he squandered his property in loose living. And when he had spent everything, a great famine arose in that country and he began to be in want. So he went and joined himself to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed swine. And he would gladly have fed on the pods that the swine ate; and no one gave him anything. But when he came to himself he said, “How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired servants.” And he arose and came to his father. But while he was yet at a distance, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. And the son said to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” But the father said to his servants, “Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet; and bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry; for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.” And they began to make merry. (Luke 15: 11-24, RSV)

2. A Buddhist Version of the Prodigal Son story

A young man left his father and ran away. For long he dwelt in other countries, for ten, or twenty, or fifty years. The older he grew, the more needy he became. Wandering in all directions to seek clothing and food, he unexpectedly approached his native country. The father had searched for his son all those years in vain and meanwhile had settled in a certain city. His home became very rich; his goods and treasures were fabulous.

At this time, the poor son, wandering through village after village and passing through countries and cities, at last reached the city where his father had settled. The father had always been thinking of his son, yet, although he had been parted from him over fifty years, he had never spoken of the matter to anyone. He only pondered over it within himself and cherished regret in his heart, saying, “Old and worn out I am. Although I own much wealth – gold, silver, and jewels, granaries and treasuries overflowing – I have no son. Some day my end will come and my wealth will be scattered and lost, for I have no heir. If I could only get back my son and commit my wealth to him, how contented and happy would I be, with no further anxiety!”

Meanwhile the poor son, hired for wages here and there, unexpectedly arrived at his father’s house. Standing by the gate, he saw from a distance his father seated on a lion-couch, his feet on a jeweled footstool, and with expensive strings of pearls adorning his body, revered and surrounded by priests, warriors, and citizens, attendants and young slaves waiting upon him right and left. The poor son, seeing his father having such great power, was seized with fear, regretting that he had come to this place. He reflected, “This must be a king, or someone of royal rank, it is impossible for me to be hired here. I had better go to some poor village in search of a job, where food and clothing are easier to get. If I stay here long, I may suffer oppression.” Reflecting thus, he rushed away.

Meanwhile the rich elder on his lion-seat had recognized his son at first glance, and with great joy in his heart reflected, “Now I have someone to whom I may pass on my wealth. I have always been thinking of my son, with no means of seeing him, but suddenly he himself has come and my longing is satisfied. Though worn with years, I yearn for him.”

Instantly he sent off his attendants to pursue the son quickly and fetch him back. Immediately the messengers hasten forth to seize him. The poor son, surprised and scared, loudly cried his complaint, “I have committed no offense against you, why should I be arrested?” The messengers all the more hastened to lay hold of him and brought him back. Following that, the poor son, thought that although he was innocent he would be imprisoned, and that now he would surely die. He became all the more terrified, fainted away and fell on the ground. The father, seeing this from a distance, sent word to the messengers, “I have no need for this man. Do not bring him by force. Sprinkle cold water on his face to restore him to consciousness and do not speak to him any further.” Why? The father, knowing that his son’s disposition was inferior, knowing that his own lordly position had caused distress to his son, yet convinced that he was his son, tactfully did not say to others, “This is my son.”

A messenger said to the son, “I set you free, go wherever you will.” The poor son was delighted, thus obtaining the unexpected release. He arose from the ground and went to a poor village in search of food and clothing. Then the elder, desiring to attract his son, set up a device. Secretly he sent two men, sorrowful and poor in appearance, saying, “Go and visit that place and gently say to the poor man, ‘There is a place for you to work here. We will hire you for scavenging, and we both also will work along with you.'” Then the two messengers went in search of the poor son and, having found him, presented him the above proposal. The poor son, having received his wages in advance, joined them in removing a refuse heap.

His father, beholding the son, was struck with compassion for him. One day he saw at a distance, through the window, his son’s figure, haggard and drawn, lean and sorrowful, filthy with dirt and dust. He took off his strings of jewels, his soft attire, and put on a coarse, torn and dirty garment, smeared his body with dust, took a basket in his right hand, and with an appearance fear-inspiring said to the laborers, “Get on with your work, don’t be lazy.” By such means he got near to his son, to whom he afterwards said, “Ay, my man, you stay and work here, do not leave again. I will increase your wages, give whatever you need, bowls, rice, wheat-flour, salt, vinegar, and so on. Have no hesitation; besides there is an old servant whom you can get if you need him. Be at ease in your mind; I am, as it were, your father; do not be worried again. Why? I am old and advanced in years, but you are young and vigorous; all the time you have been working, you have never been deceitful, lazy, angry or grumbling. I have never seen you, like the other laborers, with such vices as these. From this time forth you will be as my own begotten son.”

The elder gave him a new name and called him a son. But the poor son, although he rejoiced at this happening, still thought of himself as a humble hireling. For this reason, for twenty years he continued to be employed in scavenging. After this period, there grew mutual confidence between the father and the son. He went in and out and at his ease, though his abode was still in a small hut.

Then the father became ill and, knowing that he would die soon, said to the poor son, “Now I possess an abundance of gold, silver, and precious things, and my granaries and treasuries are full to overflowing. I want you to understand in detail the quantities of these things, and the amounts that should be received and given. This is my wish, and you must agree to it. Why? Because now we are of the same mind. Be increasingly careful so that there be no waste.” The poor son accepted his instruction and commands, and became acquainted with all the goods. However, he still had no idea of expecting to inherit anything, his abode was still the original place and he was still unable to abandon his sense of inferiority.

After a short time had again passed, the father noticed that his son’s ideas had gradually been enlarged, his aspirations developed, and that he despised his previous state of mind. Seeing that his own end was approaching, he commanded his son to come, and gathered all his relatives, the kings, priests, warriors, and citizens. When they were all assembled, he addressed them saying, “Now, gentlemen, this is my son, begotten by me. It is over fifty years since, from a certain city, he left me and ran away to endure loneliness and misery. His former name was so-and-so and my name was so-and-so. At that time in that city I sought him sorrowfully. Suddenly I met him in this place and regained him. This is really my son and I am really his father. Now all the wealth which I possess belongs entirely to my son, and all my previous disbursements and receipts are known by this son.” When the poor son heard these words of his father, great was his joy at such unexpected news, and thus he thought, “Without any mind for, or effort on my part, these treasures now come to me.”

World-honored One! The very rich elder is the Tathagata, and we are all as the Buddha’s sons. The Buddha has always declared that we are his sons. But because of the three sufferings, in the midst of births-and-deaths we have borne all kinds of torments, being deluded and ignorant and enjoying our attachment to things of no value. Today the World-honored One has caused us to ponder over and remove the dirt of all diverting discussions of inferior things. In these we have hitherto been diligent to make progress and have got, as it were, a day’s pay for our effort to reach nirvana. Obtaining this, we greatly rejoiced and were contented, saying to ourselves, “For our diligence and progress in the Buddha-law what we have received is ample”. The Buddha, knowing that our minds delighted in inferior things, by his tactfulness taught according to our capacity, but still we did not perceive that we are really Buddha’s sons. Therefore we say that though we had no mind to hope or expect it, yet now the Great Treasure of the King of the Law has of itself come to us, and such things that Buddha-sons should obtain, we have all obtained. (Saddharmapundarika Sutra 4)

I. The Older Brother’s Soliloquy

My father has spoken of justice and of love, and claims to have played the one off against the other, letting love win out. He makes it all sound so easy, as though anyone with a warm heart would have done the same. But his justice is too weak, his love too soft, and he betrays them both, as he also betrays me.

He says he is a gatekeeper, and his task is to choose life and let it come through the gate and not shut it out. And so are we all gatekeepers, and so are we all charged with choosing life and letting it through. But first we must recognize it; and we must recognize it in its largest form, not its smallest; and in its most responsible incarnation, not its cheapest.

To choose life means to be able to make some distinctions: some distinctions which are necessary even to recognize life. And this my father has not done. This is where his big and soft heart has done long-term harm for the sake of short-term good.

It is true that both justice and love are needed in order to be a proper gatekeeper, but they are not as my father has understood them. For justice to survive, there must be fairness, there must be balance, and when necessary retribution. It is harsh but true that our decisions and our actions determine the quality of our lives, and the worth of our lives both to ourselves and to others. It is also harsh but true that lives can be squandered, even wasted. It happens every day, you see it all around you. And though it may be a cruel fact of life, it is still a fact of life, and there is a terribly important kind of justice in that.

For if our decisions do not matter, if our actions do not matter, if anything we do can simply be forgiven, then what good are ethics? Why teach our children to do good at all? Why not simply teach them how to play upon the soft hearts of others for forgiveness? Why care about education and religion and laws to help people become responsible and generous citizens if it does not really matter? If it is always an option simply to slough off the very responsibility on which we all depend and follow our own selfish whims, knowing that all will be forgiven anyway, then why even have words for goodness, justice and truth?

Words like duty and responsibility may seem cold and hard words, but they are not. They are deeply caring words, for without them neither fairness nor justice could exist. And one charged with being a gatekeeper of life cannot shrug off these notions with impunity, for without fairness and justice it is not life that is being served, but the special privilege of a select few.

Justice requires doing our part. Unless we do our part, there will be no whole, for the whole is made up of all of us doing our part to keep it together and make it work for ourselves, for others, and for those who will come after us. This is what is at stake in justice, and justice is what my father has betrayed.

But he betrays love too, even though he thinks he acts in its behalf. For his heart is too soft and mushy, and he confuses love with mere sentimentality. He loses the distinctions which real love demands. And there must be distinctions. No one can love everything and everyone, for that is not love at all, but only an insipid kind of indifference which permits everything because nothing is sacred to it. A parent who endorses everything is as irresponsible and as destructive as a physician who can not tell a nose from a boil or an arm from a deadly tumor and so lets them all grow together until the sick parts have at last killed the healthy ones because those who were charged to protect life did not make the needed distinctions.

This is why not all things can be forgiven, and why we must let even those we love pay the cost of their mistakes. Real love must know what is to be loved and what is not to be loved, and to make that difference important. That is a gatekeeper’s job. That is what is involved in choosing life rather than death, health rather than sickness. And that is what my father did not do.

Listen: to choose life is to choose the most responsible forms of it, not the least, and not to let your fondness for a part be the cause of your harming the whole. You cannot isolate one life from all the rest and act only on its behalf without regard for the implications of your act. For human life is not an individual thing: it is communal, collective. It is like a giant tapestry, in which we are all parts of the fragile weave. We may each be but a thread; but without that thread the whole fabric is weakened. Gatekeepers must keep the fabric from being weakened, lest it tear and be ruined.

Life is like music. But it is not like singing a solo, it is like being part of a whole ensemble. We must all play part of the melody, the harmony, or the rhythm, or the whole piece will suffer, and all will suffer who might otherwise have enjoyed it. You cannot simply sit out and refuse to play your part, or you hurt all of the others who have come in good faith and generosity to play their parts. And to reward the one who refuses to weave or to play is to harm the entire tapestry, the entire piece of music, because of your short-sighted preference for one non-player for whom your heart had a soft spot.

We have a supreme worth, but our worth consists in our participation, not our withdrawl. Our worth consists in our being a part of the whole, not being apart from it. And the truth which both justice and love must acknowledge is that some lives are more worthy than others. Some lives are more deserving of respect, and some deserve only our criticism, our correction, or our censure.

It is not easy to be the gatekeeper my father thinks himself to be. It means loving the whole more than loving the parts, and when necessary protecting the whole from one or more indifferent parts, no matter the cost. For where all is forgiven, nothing is holy. And to do disservice to the holy, as my father has done, is not only irresponsible and uncaring, but blasphemous as well. This was my father’s sin, this was his betrayal.

Now hear my story, and see if you do not agree.

I have worked here all of my life, and have been a faithful son and a faithful worker since I can remember. Since my brother left, it has been harder, with only the two of us to share the work, but we have done it. We have each worked harder in order to carry the weight which my brother dropped at our feet, but that is what life is like, and that is what we must do. Still, it has not been painful drudgery. There is a kind of joy in earning your bread, and contributing to the lives of others. Our wheat feeds many people, just as we are protected by the clothing some of them have made, made comfortable by the furniture others have made, and kept dry by the house which still others have built for us. We are part of a community, and there is a fullness in that.

And there is an end of the work to look forward to, at the coming harvest. That is why we have been fattening the calf for these many months, as a reward for those who have earned it.

Now what would you feel if you had returned home today as I did, tired and hungry, to find the makings of a great feast? “What happens here?” I asked a servant, and it was then and in that way that I learned that my wastrel of a brother had finally returned home, his money squandered and his honor gone, and that my father had been so overjoyed by this shameful return that he had killed our fatted calf. Our fatted calf, the one we had raised to fill our bellies at the harvest festival-that is the calf which was killed. There will be no fatted calf for the harvest festival this year. Those who have earned a feast will go without while it is spent instead on the one who did nothing, earned nothing, and made life harder for those of us who stayed behind. And to see that calf slaughtered for this feast to honor that brother who did those things-it is something I will not abide.

Do not tell me that you would not be outraged if this happened to you, for you would be. And I was outraged, and flew into a fit. “Come in,” the servant had the gall to say to me, “your father has bid me welcome you in.”

“Never!” I screamed back at him. “I will not come in through that door. It is unclean. It has been made unholy and unhospitable by my brother and by my father, and by this whole offensive feast. If I cannot stop this sacrilege, I can at least refuse to endorse it. I can at least preserve my integrity. My father may do this to me, but he cannot make me participate in it.

Well, that is my story, those are the things I have been repeating to myself as I sit out here on this hill, looking across at my house where my brother parades around in his robe and his ring and my father sanctions the whole unjust mess in the name of a cheap and misguided love. And I know that of all the people who hear this story, most will take my side in it.

Ah, but now the finale: for here comes my father. He has come out of that cursed door. He has seen me, sitting here on the hill in my grand pout, and now he comes to fetch me. Well, there will be no surprises. I know him well, and know well what he will say.

“Come,” he will say, “to the feast.” “I will not,” I will answer, “for it is an unjust feast.”

“It is a feast of forgiveness and gratitude,” he will say, “not of justice.” “I will not,” I will say. “I do not care if it is a feast of forgiveness and gratitude, it is an unfair feast of forgiveness and gratitude, and I’ll have no part in it.”

And then, after a few more exchanges like this, my father will look at me in that look of his that I know so well, and he’ll kiss me on the cheek, look me in the eyes, and say: “the door is open, my son, and it can be no more than open. It is open for you and for your brother, as it has always been. There is a feast of life going on, to which you are invited. If you refuse, it will be only your own pettiness and anger which keep you out, and only your own bitterness which you shall taste. And so: come into the feast, or sit alone on this hillside and pout. But the door is open, you too are welcome, and you too are loved.”

He’ll turn, after that, and walk back to the house.

And then, I shall have to decide . . . .

II. The Fatted Calf’s Soliloquy

A fatted calf doesn’t have a lot of choices. The end is known from the beginning; for we will be sacrificed for something, and we do not get to choose what it will be. Our whole life gets its meaning from the celebration at the end of it, a celebration we never see. We have no story of our own; you hear about us only through the story told about the feast we are given to.

I was meant for a harvest feast. Many months ahead they began to fatten me. I didn’t mind; in fact, I liked it, because I ate so much better than all the other calves. I thought I was special; I suppose I was, in a way. Still, it was just a harvest feast they had in mind. They do it every year. Every year there is a harvest, and every year a calf is fattened for the occasion. It is always the same, I was just this year’s main course. Nothing special, just part of the annual cycle, as regular and indifferent as a machine, like all of Nature’s cycles.

You may not be very interested in my story, since it sounds so different from your own. And you are different from fatted calves, it is true. But we are much alike, too. For your life is also given for something. Your days and years, your energies and allegiances, are given over to something, and you serve it mostly without thinking about it, maybe without even being aware of it.

You serve a job, a career, an army, a country, another person, even a set of beliefs. So much of your life is defined by the things you give it for; your whole life is a kind of sacrifice offered to your gods large and small, to your values good and bad, even to your lusts, your greeds, your habits and your whims.

And you are fattened, too. You are fed differently according to what you serve, but you are fattened. They feed you money, power, popularity, success, recognition, a sense of purpose, a sense of place, a kind of inner satisfaction – that is the fattening you’re given while your life is spent on the things you serve with it.

And much of your story, like mine, will be told by the things you have served. In truth, you give more of yourself than you think. You serve well, even when you don’t serve wisely.

Yet in the end, how often it is that the things you serve do not serve you in return, but only take from you until at last they take your life. And then when the story is told, you are just left out, forgotten. You were just a little part in some kind of a giant game, or a play (whether comedy or tragedy), like the sacrifice of a fatted calf at an annual harvest.

This is where you are really not so different from me as you think. You may chatter about being master of your fate: but did you choose your sex and race, your family, your gifts and handicaps, your social and economic station, your country, or the times into which you were born? No, much of your play had already been written for you, and you have mostly just acted out your assigned part, just as I have.

A soldier commits his service, even his life, to the commands of his country. But he does not get to choose his war, whether it will be a popular or unpopular one, whether his sacrifices will be respected or reviled. His life hangs from threads controlled by others, and he does not choose what his life will be given to, though he knows it may be given to something, and the value of that something may not even be assessed until after he has died.

A woman may serve a business, playing in good faith the small part assigned to her, only learning at the end that it was an evil business after all; all of her good works were part of a bad story, and she will be defined by that story for the rest of her days.

You are as innocent as I, and often as powerless. So you are more like the fatted calf than you may like to think. And now perhaps you will be able to hear my story:

I was born anonymous, I lived anonymously, and I was scheduled to die the same way: as an extra, just another calf being used as calves have always been used, serving an end of no great or lasting significance to anyone. I went along as we always have, because a fatted calf doesn’t have many choices. And if everything had happened as it had been planned, you would never have heard of me. My life would have been given to a routine harvest feast on a small farm in an obscure country, and I would never have had a story to be told, for there is not much in a fatted calf’s life that is worth retelling.

I did not choose any of this. The meaning of my life was defined by the things that were chosen for me by others, by the larger play in which I was just a small part. And I was chosen to serve routine and anonymous things, things which never acknowledged or cherished me but only used me up.

So you see: that is why my story is worth telling. It is worth telling because I have a story. That’s the miracle of it: that I have a story at all! And it happened because someone came alive. A younger brother broke from the routine. He could not find himself in it. His heart, his soul, something could find no home in the routine he was expected to serve with his life. And in a burst of foolish young courage he broke free. He wasted all of his money, it is true. But he was searching, however awkwardly, for something with more life in it, for something to serve that might know his name, that might give him a more authentic life than the obedient security brought by just doing your duty.

He failed. He failed miserably. But in his failure there was a great awakening, and it made all the difference.

First the younger brother awoke, and came back home. And then his father awoke, and reached out to him – not with justice, but with forgiveness and love. That was the miracle. And with that miracle, a whole new world was born: a world with a gentleness and a wholeness that offend the workaday mind, as they have offended the older brother. But it is a world with more space to live, for those who are imperfect, who don’t find their true path on the first try. It is a world of grace and of hope for those who must fail before they can succeed – those who hope and pray for another chance.

In that moment of his father’s forgiveness, a new son was born, and a new world of possibilities, for all who can listen to this story and hear its message. Then suddenly there was something more important and more urgent than a harvest feast, for something sacred had broken into ordinary life, something with the power to transform it.

And the moment of its entry, the moment of the birth of a new son and a new world, must not be allowed to pass by without celebrating it. The birth of sacred possibilities in life must not be allowed to slide by with stopping to give thanks, without making all of life stop and look and hear and rejoice.

And so in place of a harvest feast there was a sacred feast; a holy meal; a communion. A meal not of food to be gulped down and forgotten, but of food consecrated to a holy purpose, food to be cherished and savored and never to disappear from memory. That is how this feast took place, this feast which has changed everyone who has ever truly understood it.

And I was a part of it! My life was changed by the choices others made. For now instead of being consumed by life and then forgotten, I have become a part of it all, and I will never be forgotten as long as this story is told and heard and cherished.

If a miracle is a gift of life beyond understanding, then a miracle happened here, you see? And I was a passive recipient of this miracle. The meaning of my life was changed forever because of the choices and the decisions made by others.

It’s ironic, but I could not tell my story to other fatted calves, for we have no choices, and could not elect to change what we shall serve with our lives even if we wanted to.

That is why I tell my story to you instead: because, you see, that is where we are so different. Fatted calves can not choose what we will serve with our lives. We cannot choose whether we shall serve something that gives our lives a sacred kind of glow, or whether we shall just serve something that drains our life from us until at last nothing is left of us, not even our story. A fatted calf doesn’t have many choices. But you do: you can choose.

III. The Father’s Soliloquy

PRAYER

How often we dispense justice rather than compassion. We give people what they deserve rather than what they need.

Someone we’ve wanted to get even with for months finally leaves an opening, and we rush for it.

Our partner embarrasses us, so we wait for our chance, knowing their weak spots better than anyone because they trust us. When the chance comes, we jump at it, they’re embarrassed, we feel vindicated, and the game continues.

We can’t score points on the boss, so we bring the frustration home, waiting for someone we can score on. Then we are on our guard, for we know they’ll try to get even.

How many times in our life has this kind of behavior described us? Giving people their due, making sure they get what they deserve, not letting them off the hook, showing them that what goes around comes around, while hoping we never get the same kind of humiliating justice visited upon us.

It is this world, this very recognizable human world, into which we must bring the harder lessons of religion, the voices of our more tender mercies. It is of this world and of ourselves that we ask whether this is the highest road we can travel, the most we can expect of ourselves or others.

Christians ask “What would Jesus do?” Jews say we are commanded to love God with all our heart and soul, and to love our neighbor as ourself. Buddhists ask whether we are acting from out of the Buddha seed within us, and recognizing the Buddha seed within others. Confucius would ask whether our actions let our society move with more grace, or less. And the Tao te Ching says the great secret of life is realizing that a bad person is a good person’s job, and a good person is a bad person’s teacher.

When we look anywhere that people have tried to take seriously the human condition, we find that most of the suffering we experience comes from the way we treat one another, and the ways in which we get even for the ways in which others have treated us.

Let us remind ourselves once more of things we have always known. That two wrongs don’t make a right, that peace almost always begins through the actions of the bigger person, the person of better character. That understanding is more grown-up than undermining, and that when we score points against another by demeaning them, those points are taken out of our own moral stock.

And then … then let us ask, even in those cases where a hard justice is due, whether we, our relationships and our world are better served by justice, or by compassion. By giving someone what they deserve, or forgiving their trespasses, in the faith that they are good people doing the best they can, and they could use a break rather than a breaking.

For as wise preachers have said forever, it is by giving that we can receive, by understanding that we can be understood, and by forgiving that we may be forgiven.

It is so hard to do. Let us find the strength within and around us to do what is best and most compassionate, when it would be so much easier merely to do what is right. We seek the moral strength for these higher callings, and pray for the courage to do not what is right, but what is best.

Amen.

The Father’s Soliloquy

Do you really wonder why I did it? I hardly know how to answer.

Maybe I wondered what God would want me to do, or remembered that I am his father and he’s my son. Maybe I felt some guilt, wondered what I might have done differently, how I might have been a better father.

Some people say we’re on our own, that our mistakes are our own fault and we must pay for them. Most of my friends say that. I don’t know what they mean. Everything I’ve done in my life I’ve done as part of a family, a people, a religion, part of the whole human race. You may say those connections are invisible; I say they have supported me my whole life. If we’re alone, it is everyone’s loss and everyone’s failure. We’re not alone. Who could say such a thing?

I think of how awful he looked when he returned. What sad, desperate eyes he had. I had never seen him so completely undone, forlorn, lost, hollow, without hope or joy. He no longer approached me as my son, he no longer felt like my son.

My neighbors say he asked for this. He demanded his inheritance in advance, demanded that I give him the money I would have left him if he’d waited until I died. It’s one of our laws; sons can do that. It almost never happens, of course. For it cuts all ties to the family forevermore. They may never again make any claims on their family if they do this. Yet my son did it, and he could; it’s the law.

But to let an impersonal law rip the warmth of my son not only out of my home but out of my heart? Who could allow such a thing? No one I would want to know, no one I would want to be.

When I looked in his eyes, I saw his whole life there, from the day that red little baby came, all the growing up years, all the million little memories a father has. Silly memories, many of them, you know, the things parents notice and won’t forget.

I remember when he was young how he would get scared when it thundered. “Oh,” I’d tell him, “that’s just God. He’s upset, worried about something. But don’t worry about him, he’ll get over it. You’ll see, in the morning he’ll be all sunny again.”

It was our little joke, We must have played that thunder joke a hundred times. I remember just a few years ago – it seems like yesterday – when we were out working in the field trying to get the animals fed, and it thundered something fierce. He ignored it for awhile, then suddenly he looked up from his work and shouted “Hey Lord, we’ve got troubles too, but you don’t see us griping. Get over it!”

God, he was such a burst of life, that boy! So different from his older brother. The older one has always been so serious, so responsible. All work. Maybe he was trying to be the other grown-up after his mother died, I don’t know. He’s so good, so decent, but so rule-bound. I keep hoping he’ll make space for a little gentleness, replace some compulsion with compassion.

My younger son is almost the opposite. Oh, he worked, he did his share, but for him it was never about the work. For him, life was about joy, not jobs.

Every year at the harvest festival he would ask why we couldn’t do this much more often, why we had to make work common and joy rare. I would explain that joy is all the richer because it is so rare, that life has a rhythm, like nature. Bad times, good times, work days, holidays, seriousness, fun, it’s all too much without putting a rhythm to it. That’s why we rest on the Sabbath. That’s why we just have harvest feasts once a year, I told him.

But he never bought it. He didn’t complain about the work; maybe he should have. Instead, he kept it in until it exploded in that awful decision to leave.

My neighbors, my friends, all said good riddance, that any son who would demand his inheritance in advance was no real son anyway, that I was better off without him. Like he was a bad investment.

But if you’re a parent, you know that when he left, it broke my heart.

I think I know what he wanted. Work, duty, responsibility are so important, but they’re not enough. Where’s the softness to life, the humanity? When do our hearts touch? Only once a year at a harvest feast? That’s not enough joy. I think my son was freezing to death here, and maybe some of that’s my fault, I don’t know.

But how do you bring all that into the real world? The world you and I know, of work and duty – how do you bring compassion and love into that? It only fits at the edges, not at the center. At the center, there’s work to do.

My son wanted a different kind of world, with more life to it, more connections, more of a sense of family, something better than work and duty, that might transform our duties into activities that fed the spirit as well as the belly.

These things were in my mind when he returned. Where is there room for love in our world? How can we interrupt the endless cycles of responsibility, the functional relationships, to make it all a more gentle home for the human spirit, and for the Holy Spirit? We seem to see people only in terms of what they do or earn. My servants respect and fear me not because they really think I’m a superior person, but because I control the money, the power, their jobs. Where is the human relationship?

Why can’t we know each other as brothers and sisters, children of God? That could transform the whole world if it ever took root. I miss it too. I can’t create the new kind of world; one person can’t do that alone. But I thought I could start it by acting out of a different place, so I did it.

It was only a start. I don’t know what will come of it. But I do know the only way the world can be transformed is through people having the vision and courage to act from out of a different kind of center.

In some ways, I don’t envy my son. My act was easy. He has to live with it now, among people who don’t understand.

My older boy wants an explanation; my friends and neighbors want an explanation. They say it is a slap in my older son’s face for his dutiful work, and a slap in their face too, for it has planted irresponsible ideas in the heads of their own sons. There is this whole system of work, duty, responsibility, justice and honor, they say, and I have insulted it, maybe threatened it. If the failure to do your duty can be so easily forgiven, they say, then where is its necessity?

Did I have to have a whole philosophical system to act out of? Couldn’t I just love my son and act out of that? I don’t understand all their concerns. I’m just a father who lost his son, then found him again and threw a party to celebrate it. Wouldn’t it be a better world if others did this too?

Maybe there are implications to what I did. Perhaps this act can’t stand alone. I wonder how my younger son feels? Don’t you think he’d be grateful, or is there more to that, too?

The rabbis say that the whole substance of the Torah can be summed up simply by saying love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself. But if you owe all that to a neighbor, what do you owe your son? You must owe at least as much. Don’t you even owe more? And even if it isn’t owed, can’t you simply give it? Can’t you give more?

I don’t know. I just acted out of love for my son. Once he was dead to me and gone forever. Now he is alive again, and here. Isn’t that enough? Figuring out the rest of it is up to you.

I did what I could. I planted a seed, in the hope that it might some day grow into something that could give more shelter. It wasn’t enough, but I did what I could to tilt my world toward compassion and love, away from functional relationships and toward human relationships, you know? I did what I could. And you – what about you?

IV. The Prodigal Son’s Soliloquy

PRAYER

Are gifts ever really free? Are there really any worthwhile gifts that don’t obligate us, somehow, some time, to reciprocate?

Aren’t all gifts really windows opening us to a different kind of world, where generosity of spirit is the rule?

There are gifts that could be called gifts from heaven, gifts from God, gifts from the warm heart of the universe, to warm our own hearts, to replenish our souls, to give us another chance, a chance we did not earn.

We have all received such gifts, whether large or small. How would our world be changed if we responded in kind, if we saw every unearned gift as a kind of torch we may carry in the relay race called life, may carry until we can pass it on to another, in the form of another unearned gift.

There is, hidden among the folds of our world, this other, hidden world where people are measured by what they need rather than by what they have earned. Everyone who has ever received such a gift has been initiated into this higher, this hidden, world. And every such gift we receive has two parts, is two things.

First, it is an unearned gift of understanding, of compassion, of life, a second chance. Second, it is an IOU that we carry to remind ourselves that we too are now players in this hidden and higher world, that we too owe generous actions from the warmth of our own hearts, in the form of unexpected and unearned gifts to another, perhaps to many others.

It is a kind of silent conspiracy, a conspiracy that has been going on since the beginning of time. Make no mistake. Its goal is revolutionary. Its goal is to remove our hearts of stone and replace them with hearts of flesh. Its goal is to teach us to see others through the eyes of compassion. Its goal is the subtle and silent birth of a new kind of world, a kingdom of heaven, a kingdom of God, where we become one with others, become creatures whose lives beat to the rhythm of the same heart, sing the same music. It is the heart of the universe and the music of the spheres.

And we are given another chance to recognize it every time we receive a gift that we did not earn. Great gifts are also great debts. Let us pray that we have the good sense to be humbled by the gifts we have received, and the good manners to pass them on to others.

In this way, as in perhaps no other way, we may be both the midwives and the firstborn children of a new heaven and a new earth. Right here, right now.

We pray with grateful hearts for the gifts we have received. Now it is our turn. Amen.

The Prodigal Son’s Soliloquy

Don’t envy me! I would give anything for the return of my naivete.

You hear the story from outside of my life, outside of my skin, and you think it’s just a lovely tale, a free gift, a story for the children, something to wrap candy in.

But from inside, it is a torment – a torment in need of a resolution that I don’t know how to find.

To nearly everyone hearing this tale, it will sound like the story of a young fool who got away with it, who had his cake and ate it too. But can you imagine trying to live surrounded by relatives, friends and neighbors who look at you like a good-for-nothing? They think I’m a brat whose soft-minded father has cheated both my brother and the whole idea of justice.

No, most of them don’t say it out loud. The servants know better. And you can always count on most of your friends for polite hypocrisy.

A servant looked at me yesterday, a woman who has raised me since I was a baby. She looked at me with those eyes I know as well as any in my world, and she said, “Well, wasn’t that nice for you? Wasn’t that nice for you.?” She says that with her mouth. But her eyes say, “Now you owe a great debt, my boy. How will you repay it?”

And behind even that message she and the other servants think “How spoiled you privileged people are. Can you imagine what would happen to us if we threw such a fit and stormed out of our jobs? You had a safety net that we don’t have. We’ve lived our lives accepting your privilege because we must. But when you returned and your father showed us all that you are also exempted from even the most basic consequences for your actions, you lost our respect. We may not say so, and are paid to lie if asked, but you will read it in our eyes until you have paid your debt – your debt to everyone who honors our responsibilities because we trust that you will also honor yours.

“Do you think we are not connected? Do you think you live and act in a vacuum, that your privileges and exemptions don’t have consequences? They do, and you will see it in our eyes until you have paid your debt.”

These are the voices I hear, the sounds I live among. The glances that greet me. I owe a debt and I don’t understand it. It is as though my father’s act has thrown me into a new world, a world whose rules I don’t know.

I want my naivete back. I understood my world when I was still naïve. There was a balance to it, a rough kind of harmony and justice. Things fit together, because we all knew the rules and we all played by them. It was a world of work and duty.

Here, we had the farm. We had it because several generations had worked and developed it, and passed it on to my father, who was to pass it on to us after we had done our years of duties. That’s what makes the world go: it’s a world of duties.

We all have duties. Our servants have duties. Our friends and neighbors have duties. And when we all understand that world and our roles in it, when we all do those interlocking duties, then the world works and there is honor.

No, it’s more than that. We’re all parts of the world, and when all the parts work together, the combination of our efforts, our trust, our mutual respect, it creates an invisible, almost magical kind of harmony, feels like a harmony of honor and justice. Without that subtle harmony, both honor and justice are lost, don’t you see? I see it. I understand it. That’s the world I know, and I understand it. I know you understand it too.

But what my father has done doesn’t fit in this world. It breaks that chain of honor and duty.

I knew what I was doing when I demanded my inheritance and left. I wanted out. I thought, “Give me my money and get out of my way. I’m tired of the farm, I’m tired of a life hemmed in by work, duty, this unending struggle just to live, without the time or energy left for joy.”

Most nights we were too exhausted for anything but sleep. And it was far worse for the servants. What kind of a life is that? The servants work for us, and we work … for what? More of the same? Is that life? Is that all there is?

There was something wrong with that world and I wanted out. I knew the cost of what I did. I knew I had given up my rights as a son, and given up my privileges. I knew that.

I returned to ask the man who was once father to be my employer, to hire me as a servant. I tried to find a better way to live, a way beyond the endless cycle of work and duty, duty and work, never able to earn enough joy to give life enough gentleness and grace. I failed. I couldn’t do it. I came back willing to pay the price. I was beaten by that world, I was defeated by it, and I came back to pay the price, for the rest of my life, to pay the penalty.

I hate that world, but I know it, all the way down into my bones I know it. You can say it was a rut, I say it was my rut, the one I knew. But now what? Now what do I do?

My father didn’t play fair. He made a move that was outside the rules of my world, and now what? It can’t end here, don’t you see? My father says he has trumped honor and duty with love, but it can’t end here. That’s what all the angry looks and snide remarks mean. It’s the one thing I do understand. My father has challenged a whole world, and it can’t end here.

Most people will tell this story as a story of cheap grace, when your father, or God, can make everything right for you, while you ignore the implications of that charitable act for everyone else involved. But it can’t stop here. Whether done by a father or by a God, one random act of kindness doesn’t change much. The system goes on, this merely distracts us for awhile. Only if my father’s actions became the norm would it make a real difference. And one person can’t do that, whether a father or a god. The world would have to be transformed, and that would have to be done by all of us. It can’t end here.

In a world defined by work and duty, random acts of mercy like my father’s might be seeds for a new kind of world if others can understand them, are persuaded that it could be a better world, and follow his lead. But unless they transform the world, they are just ornaments.

Do you see this? If one privileged man can negate the whole structure of work and duty by a random act of kindness, then that whole system of work and duty is arbitrary: true for the powerless, optional for sons of the privileged. And this must turn the powerless against the powerful, as it has turned the servants’ hearts against me.

But it also offends others who have privilege, like our neighbors; for they sense, even if only dimly, the danger such forgiveness represents. What if all their sons demanded their inheritance and left? What if no one thought they had to uphold honor or duty? What would hold the world together? Love? There’s nowhere near enough of it.

So my father has struck a blow against the world in which I was raised, the only world I know. And it can’t stop here.

– And yet … I can’t get over his welcoming me back with love rather than justice. It gave me a new life, another chance. It was a chance I needed but hadn’t earned; yet he gave it to me anyway. I have been moved by his act, shaken to the core of my being. That’s my real dilemma. I had wanted to escape from the iron rules of work and duty by escaping into a fantasy of endless irresponsible pleasure. I felt something wrong; I didn’t know how to remedy it. And somehow, I wonder if my father hasn’t found the answer. Perhaps the grind of the world can’t be relieved by hedonistic escapes, as I’d hoped. Perhaps it can only be saved by acts not of justice but of love.

But not random acts of love. Those can only be an anesthetic to numb us to the fact that the world is really and enduringly inhumane and inequitable.

That’s what is so maddening about my father’s act. Alone, it was madness, and I shall pay for it through losing my connections with those around me. Or, if I refuse to respond to them, refuse to meet their eyes, I’ll lose my humanity through acting superior and arrogant, wearing a smugness that exults in my unfair privilege over others.

So now what?

If I stay in the old world, what do I do? If I return not as servant but as son, yet get no inheritance, then after my father dies I will be a de facto servant, not a son – everyone will see to it. But if my father still divides what is left between my brother and me, all who are left alive, including me, will see it as a cheat, a theft from my brother, and an insult to our whole world of duty and work and the honor that can arise from duty and work.

But what is the alternative? What if I prefer a world where love trumps duty, where we are valued according to our human currency rather than the coin of the realm – what then?

How should I then react to my father’s offer? And what are the implications, if I accept it? What then do I owe my brother? If I say to him, “Sorry, but our father’s love has over-ruled your expectation of justice” – is that treating my brother in a loving way, or just using my father’s love to my own selfish advantage? What kind of world would that make?

And what of our servants? What would it mean to value them by their human currency rather than their lack of money and power?

What if the servants ask to be treated as equals? What if they say in words what they are saying with their eyes: that when I was on my own, I did no better than they have – I wound up feeding pigs – so how can I now think I have a natural right to privilege that I wasn’t capable of earning? I don’t know. But this is torment.

I would give anything for the return of my naivete, for my simple world. For now my eyes are open, but only dimly. I know I owe a great debt, and do not know how to pay it. Unless I and others work to transform the world, we are the enemies of the very compassion and love that my father has used to save my life?

So now what shall I do? And you: what shall you do? And what shall we do? For this isn’t just an old story. It is our story, the story of our world. We’re in this together. And what shall we do? What shall we do now?

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© Davidson Loehr

June 1, 3003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

INTRODUCTION

I began writing soliloquies for the characters in Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son in 1988, as a more creative way to explore the many depths and insights of great stories. As all who write stories learn, the characters have their own integrity, and once you’ve found it, the characters determine what they will say, not the storyteller. So the exercise of trying to put yourself inside the spirit of different characters is almost always eye-opening, and the stories usually lead to unexpected places. This was especially true with these four soliloquies. I wrote them in order of increasing difficulty – the older brother’s story is the easiest to tell, because everyone identifies with his complaints. In 1990, I wrote the second installment, a soliloquy for the fatted calf. This began almost as a joke, I expected the story to be very simply, whiny or angry, and straightforward. I was astonished when I found that the fatted calf had a voice and a perspective, and I was a little shocked to see what it had to say. I’m not aware that I had ever seen the story in this way before.

But after 1990, I left the project. Something about the last two characters felt harder, and felt like it would take a turn I didn’t know how to make. So it wasn’t until 2003, fifteen years after I’d begun the project, that I had two Sundays in a row to fill, and decided it would be a good time to finish what I had begun so long ago. The father was hard to write partly because I had to forget the confessional spin traditionally put on it: that the “father” is really God, so we must build this part up to be wonderful and wise. When I could finally just see him as the father of these two sons, he turned out to have a very different perspective on the story: less wise, perhaps, but much more human.

But the hardest to write, and the most surprising, was the soliloquy for the Prodigal Son. It has always seemed to me that his father’s actions put him in a tough place, living out his life among people who thought he was a shiftless cheat. As I got into him, it became clear to me that this parable – at least as I read it – contains the essential message of the man Jesus, at least as I understand it. And the lack of an ending to the story also seems to have been true to Jesus’ message: that this revolution can not be finished by one person or one God, that it is a conspiracy against the ways of the world into which we are all invited. This gave me a new appreciation for how unpleasant and unwelcome a message like this would be, in any time and place.

I don’t mean to inflict these soliloquies on you as the only way to speak through the material. I invite you into the story yourselves, to find for yourself the voices that seem to speak to and through you. And you may want to add more characters to the tale: a mother, for instance. For me, this was a spiritual exploration of the message of the man Jesus and some of its unsettling implications, as well as an exploration of my own spirit, and a challenge to my own beliefs. All great stories contain buried treasure, I invite you to dig here for a bit. – Davidson Loehr, June 2003

READINGS: Christian and Buddhist versions of the Prodigal Son Parable

I decided to contrast Jesus’ story with an older Buddhist version of a very similar situation. The two thinkers, and two religions, see things very differently, and their wisdom points in quite different directions, as you’ll see.

1. The Christian version comes from the gospel of Luke:

There was a man who had two sons; and the younger of them said to his father, “Father, give me the share of property that falls to me.” And he divided his living between them. Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took his journey into a far country, and there he squandered his property in loose living. And when he had spent everything, a great famine arose in that country and he began to be in want. So he went and joined himself to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed swine. And he would gladly have fed on the pods that the swine ate; and no one gave him anything. But when he came to himself he said, “How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired servants.” And he arose and came to his father. But while he was yet at a distance, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. And the son said to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” But the father said to his servants, “Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet; and bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry; for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.” And they began to make merry. (Luke 15: 11-24, RSV)

2. A Buddhist Version of the Prodigal Son story

A young man left his father and ran away. For long he dwelt in other countries, for ten, or twenty, or fifty years. The older he grew, the more needy he became. Wandering in all directions to seek clothing and food, he unexpectedly approached his native country. The father had searched for his son all those years in vain and meanwhile had settled in a certain city. His home became very rich; his goods and treasures were fabulous.

At this time, the poor son, wandering through village after village and passing through countries and cities, at last reached the city where his father had settled. The father had always been thinking of his son, yet, although he had been parted from him over fifty years, he had never spoken of the matter to anyone. He only pondered over it within himself and cherished regret in his heart, saying, “Old and worn out I am. Although I own much wealth – gold, silver, and jewels, granaries and treasuries overflowing – I have no son. Some day my end will come and my wealth will be scattered and lost, for I have no heir. If I could only get back my son and commit my wealth to him, how contented and happy would I be, with no further anxiety!”

Meanwhile the poor son, hired for wages here and there, unexpectedly arrived at his father’s house. Standing by the gate, he saw from a distance his father seated on a lion-couch, his feet on a jeweled footstool, and with expensive strings of pearls adorning his body, revered and surrounded by priests, warriors, and citizens, attendants and young slaves waiting upon him right and left. The poor son, seeing his father having such great power, was seized with fear, regretting that he had come to this place. He reflected, “This must be a king, or someone of royal rank, it is impossible for me to be hired here. I had better go to some poor village in search of a job, where food and clothing are easier to get. If I stay here long, I may suffer oppression.” Reflecting thus, he rushed away.

Meanwhile the rich elder on his lion-seat had recognized his son at first glance, and with great joy in his heart reflected, “Now I have someone to whom I may pass on my wealth. I have always been thinking of my son, with no means of seeing him, but suddenly he himself has come and my longing is satisfied. Though worn with years, I yearn for him.”

Instantly he sent off his attendants to pursue the son quickly and fetch him back. Immediately the messengers hasten forth to seize him. The poor son, surprised and scared, loudly cried his complaint, “I have committed no offense against you, why should I be arrested?” The messengers all the more hastened to lay hold of him and brought him back. Following that, the poor son, thought that although he was innocent he would be imprisoned, and that now he would surely die. He became all the more terrified, fainted away and fell on the ground. The father, seeing this from a distance, sent word to the messengers, “I have no need for this man. Do not bring him by force. Sprinkle cold water on his face to restore him to consciousness and do not speak to him any further.” Why? The father, knowing that his son’s disposition was inferior, knowing that his own lordly position had caused distress to his son, yet convinced that he was his son, tactfully did not say to others, “This is my son.”

A messenger said to the son, “I set you free, go wherever you will.” The poor son was delighted, thus obtaining the unexpected release. He arose from the ground and went to a poor village in search of food and clothing. Then the elder, desiring to attract his son, set up a device. Secretly he sent two men, sorrowful and poor in appearance, saying, “Go and visit that place and gently say to the poor man, ‘There is a place for you to work here. We will hire you for scavenging, and we both also will work along with you.'” Then the two messengers went in search of the poor son and, having found him, presented him the above proposal. The poor son, having received his wages in advance, joined them in removing a refuse heap.

His father, beholding the son, was struck with compassion for him. One day he saw at a distance, through the window, his son’s figure, haggard and drawn, lean and sorrowful, filthy with dirt and dust. He took off his strings of jewels, his soft attire, and put on a coarse, torn and dirty garment, smeared his body with dust, took a basket in his right hand, and with an appearance fear-inspiring said to the laborers, “Get on with your work, don’t be lazy.” By such means he got near to his son, to whom he afterwards said, “Ay, my man, you stay and work here, do not leave again. I will increase your wages, give whatever you need, bowls, rice, wheat-flour, salt, vinegar, and so on. Have no hesitation; besides there is an old servant whom you can get if you need him. Be at ease in your mind; I am, as it were, your father; do not be worried again. Why? I am old and advanced in years, but you are young and vigorous; all the time you have been working, you have never been deceitful, lazy, angry or grumbling. I have never seen you, like the other laborers, with such vices as these. From this time forth you will be as my own begotten son.”

The elder gave him a new name and called him a son. But the poor son, although he rejoiced at this happening, still thought of himself as a humble hireling. For this reason, for twenty years he continued to be employed in scavenging. After this period, there grew mutual confidence between the father and the son. He went in and out and at his ease, though his abode was still in a small hut.

Then the father became ill and, knowing that he would die soon, said to the poor son, “Now I possess an abundance of gold, silver, and precious things, and my granaries and treasuries are full to overflowing. I want you to understand in detail the quantities of these things, and the amounts that should be received and given. This is my wish, and you must agree to it. Why? Because now we are of the same mind. Be increasingly careful so that there be no waste.” The poor son accepted his instruction and commands, and became acquainted with all the goods. However, he still had no idea of expecting to inherit anything, his abode was still the original place and he was still unable to abandon his sense of inferiority.

After a short time had again passed, the father noticed that his son’s ideas had gradually been enlarged, his aspirations developed, and that he despised his previous state of mind. Seeing that his own end was approaching, he commanded his son to come, and gathered all his relatives, the kings, priests, warriors, and citizens. When they were all assembled, he addressed them saying, “Now, gentlemen, this is my son, begotten by me. It is over fifty years since, from a certain city, he left me and ran away to endure loneliness and misery. His former name was so-and-so and my name was so-and-so. At that time in that city I sought him sorrowfully. Suddenly I met him in this place and regained him. This is really my son and I am really his father. Now all the wealth which I possess belongs entirely to my son, and all my previous disbursements and receipts are known by this son.” When the poor son heard these words of his father, great was his joy at such unexpected news, and thus he thought, “Without any mind for, or effort on my part, these treasures now come to me.”

World-honored One! The very rich elder is the Tathagata, and we are all as the Buddha’s sons. The Buddha has always declared that we are his sons. But because of the three sufferings, in the midst of births-and-deaths we have borne all kinds of torments, being deluded and ignorant and enjoying our attachment to things of no value. Today the World-honored One has caused us to ponder over and remove the dirt of all diverting discussions of inferior things. In these we have hitherto been diligent to make progress and have got, as it were, a day’s pay for our effort to reach nirvana. Obtaining this, we greatly rejoiced and were contented, saying to ourselves, “For our diligence and progress in the Buddha-law what we have received is ample”. The Buddha, knowing that our minds delighted in inferior things, by his tactfulness taught according to our capacity, but still we did not perceive that we are really Buddha’s sons. Therefore we say that though we had no mind to hope or expect it, yet now the Great Treasure of the King of the Law has of itself come to us, and such things that Buddha-sons should obtain, we have all obtained. (Saddharmapundarika Sutra 4)

PRAYER

How often we dispense justice rather than compassion. We give people what they deserve rather than what they need.

Someone we’ve wanted to get even with for months finally leaves an opening, and we rush for it.

Our partner embarrasses us, so we wait for our chance, knowing their weak spots better than anyone because they trust us. When the chance comes, we jump at it, they’re embarrassed, we feel vindicated, and the game continues.

We can’t score points on the boss, so we bring the frustration home, waiting for someone we can score on. Then we are on our guard, for we know they’ll try to get even.

How many times in our life has this kind of behavior described us? Giving people their due, making sure they get what they deserve, not letting them off the hook, showing them that what goes around comes around, while hoping we never get the same kind of humiliating justice visited upon us.

It is this world, this very recognizable human world, into which we must bring the harder lessons of religion, the voices of our more tender mercies. It is of this world and of ourselves that we ask whether this is the highest road we can travel, the most we can expect of ourselves or others.

Christians ask “What would Jesus do?” Jews say we are commanded to love God with all our heart and soul, and to love our neighbor as ourself. Buddhists ask whether we are acting from out of the Buddha seed within us, and recognizing the Buddha seed within others. Confucius would ask whether our actions let our society move with more grace, or less. And the Tao te Ching says the great secret of life is realizing that a bad person is a good person’s job, and a good person is a bad person’s teacher.

When we look anywhere that people have tried to take seriously the human condition, we find that most of the suffering we experience comes from the way we treat one another, and the ways in which we get even for the ways in which others have treated us.

Let us remind ourselves once more of things we have always known. That two wrongs don’t make a right, that peace almost always begins through the actions of the bigger person, the person of better character. That understanding is more grown-up than undermining, and that when we score points against another by demeaning them, those points are taken out of our own moral stock.

And then … then let us ask, even in those cases where a hard justice is due, whether we, our relationships and our world are better served by justice, or by compassion. By giving someone what they deserve, or forgiving their trespasses, in the faith that they are good people doing the best they can, and they could use a break rather than a breaking.

For as wise preachers have said forever, it is by giving that we can receive, by understanding that we can be understood, and by forgiving that we may be forgiven.

It is so hard to do. Let us find the strength within and around us to do what is best and most compassionate, when it would be so much easier merely to do what is right. We seek the moral strength for these higher callings, and pray for the courage to do not what is right, but what is best.

Amen.

The Father’s Soliloquy

Do you really wonder why I did it? I hardly know how to answer.

Maybe I wondered what God would want me to do, or remembered that I am his father and he’s my son. Maybe I felt some guilt, wondered what I might have done differently, how I might have been a better father.

Some people say we’re on our own, that our mistakes are our own fault and we must pay for them. Most of my friends say that. I don’t know what they mean. Everything I’ve done in my life I’ve done as part of a family, a people, a religion, part of the whole human race. You may say those connections are invisible; I say they have supported me my whole life. If we’re alone, it is everyone’s loss and everyone’s failure. We’re not alone. Who could say such a thing?

I think of how awful he looked when he returned. What sad, desperate eyes he had. I had never seen him so completely undone, forlorn, lost, hollow, without hope or joy. He no longer approached me as my son, he no longer felt like my son.

My neighbors say he asked for this. He demanded his inheritance in advance, demanded that I give him the money I would have left him if he’d waited until I died. It’s one of our laws; sons can do that. It almost never happens, of course. For it cuts all ties to the family forevermore. They may never again make any claims on their family if they do this. Yet my son did it, and he could; it’s the law.

But to let an impersonal law rip the warmth of my son not only out of my home but out of my heart? Who could allow such a thing? No one I would want to know, no one I would want to be.

When I looked in his eyes, I saw his whole life there, from the day that red little baby came, all the growing up years, all the million little memories a father has. Silly memories, many of them, you know, the things parents notice and won’t forget.

I remember when he was young how he would get scared when it thundered. “Oh,” I’d tell him, “that’s just God. He’s upset, worried about something. But don’t worry about him, he’ll get over it. You’ll see, in the morning he’ll be all sunny again.”

It was our little joke, We must have played that thunder joke a hundred times. I remember just a few years ago – it seems like yesterday – when we were out working in the field trying to get the animals fed, and it thundered something fierce. He ignored it for awhile, then suddenly he looked up from his work and shouted “Hey Lord, we’ve got troubles too, but you don’t see us griping. Get over it!”

God, he was such a burst of life, that boy! So different from his older brother. The older one has always been so serious, so responsible. All work. Maybe he was trying to be the other grown-up after his mother died, I don’t know. He’s so good, so decent, but so rule-bound. I keep hoping he’ll make space for a little gentleness, replace some compulsion with compassion.

My younger son is almost the opposite. Oh, he worked, he did his share, but for him it was never about the work. For him, life was about joy, not jobs.

Every year at the harvest festival he would ask why we couldn’t do this much more often, why we had to make work common and joy rare. I would explain that joy is all the richer because it is so rare, that life has a rhythm, like nature. Bad times, good times, work days, holidays, seriousness, fun, it’s all too much without putting a rhythm to it. That’s why we rest on the Sabbath. That’s why we just have harvest feasts once a year, I told him.

But he never bought it. He didn’t complain about the work; maybe he should have. Instead, he kept it in until it exploded in that awful decision to leave.

My neighbors, my friends, all said good riddance, that any son who would demand his inheritance in advance was no real son anyway, that I was better off without him. Like he was a bad investment.

But if you’re a parent, you know that when he left, it broke my heart.

I think I know what he wanted. Work, duty, responsibility are so important, but they’re not enough. Where’s the softness to life, the humanity? When do our hearts touch? Only once a year at a harvest feast? That’s not enough joy. I think my son was freezing to death here, and maybe some of that’s my fault, I don’t know.

But how do you bring all that into the real world? The world you and I know, of work and duty – how do you bring compassion and love into that? It only fits at the edges, not at the center. At the center, there’s work to do.

My son wanted a different kind of world, with more life to it, more connections, more of a sense of family, something better than work and duty, that might transform our duties into activities that fed the spirit as well as the belly.

These things were in my mind when he returned. Where is there room for love in our world? How can we interrupt the endless cycles of responsibility, the functional relationships, to make it all a more gentle home for the human spirit, and for the Holy Spirit? We seem to see people only in terms of what they do or earn. My servants respect and fear me not because they really think I’m a superior person, but because I control the money, the power, their jobs. Where is the human relationship?

Why can’t we know each other as brothers and sisters, children of God? That could transform the whole world if it ever took root. I miss it too. I can’t create the new kind of world; one person can’t do that alone. But I thought I could start it by acting out of a different place, so I did it.

It was only a start. I don’t know what will come of it. But I do know the only way the world can be transformed is through people having the vision and courage to act from out of a different kind of center.

In some ways, I don’t envy my son. My act was easy. He has to live with it now, among people who don’t understand.

My older boy wants an explanation; my friends and neighbors want an explanation. They say it is a slap in my older son’s face for his dutiful work, and a slap in their face too, for it has planted irresponsible ideas in the heads of their own sons. There is this whole system of work, duty, responsibility, justice and honor, they say, and I have insulted it, maybe threatened it. If the failure to do your duty can be so easily forgiven, they say, then where is its necessity?

Did I have to have a whole philosophical system to act out of? Couldn’t I just love my son and act out of that? I don’t understand all their concerns. I’m just a father who lost his son, then found him again and threw a party to celebrate it. Wouldn’t it be a better world if others did this too?

Maybe there are implications to what I did. Perhaps this act can’t stand alone. I wonder how my younger son feels? Don’t you think he’d be grateful, or is there more to that, too?

The rabbis say that the whole substance of the Torah can be summed up simply by saying love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself. But if you owe all that to a neighbor, what do you owe your son? You must owe at least as much. Don’t you even owe more? And even if it isn’t owed, can’t you simply give it? Can’t you give more?

I don’t know. I just acted out of love for my son. Once he was dead to me and gone forever. Now he is alive again, and here. Isn’t that enough? Figuring out the rest of it is up to you.

I did what I could. I planted a seed, in the hope that it might some day grow into something that could give more shelter. It wasn’t enough, but I did what I could to tilt my world toward compassion and love, away from functional relationships and toward human relationships, you know? I did what I could. And you – what about you?

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© Davidson Loehr

18 May 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

We pray not to something, but from something,

to which we must give voice;

not to escape from our life, but to focus it;

not to relinquish our mind, but to replenish our soul.

We pray that we may live with honesty:

that we can accept who we are,

and admit who we are not;

that we don’t become so deafened by pride and fear

that we ignore the still small voices within us,

that could lead us out of darkness.

We pray that we can live with trust and openness:

to those people, those experiences, and those transformations

that can save us from narrowness and despair.

But we pray differently. Some here pray to god or gods; others see it as entirely psychological and internal, some have still more creative routes to this quest for wholeness. We meet to offer our prayers, and to make all sincere expressions of the living spirit safe and welcome.

And we pray on behalf of these hopes

with an open heart, an honest soul,

and a grateful reverence for the life which has been given to us.

AMEN.

SERMON: What’s the Good News?

This sermon came as a request from some of our members who attend the SNL service. When we announced a monthly bring-a-friend Sunday, they wanted to know what they could tell their friends this place or this religion were about. They know that many Christian churches talk about the Good News they have for the world, and they want to know what good news we have to offer.

Some of this is easy to answer; some is harder.

There are purposes, reasons for coming together, that we hold in common with almost all other churches, and all of them count as good news:

1. We come here to take ourselves and our lives more seriously, to live as though this life really matters.

2. The theme of all we do here is becoming better people, partners, parents and citizens by trying to articulate and incorporate the highest ideals we can grasp.

3. Life is a gift and we gather to be grateful for it, and to mark its transitions: dedication of children, coming of age, graduation, marriage, death.

4. And we are here because we know that in return for the gift of life we must give back. We are all sustained by the webs of caring woven by those who came before us. It is our task to learn how to weave and expand that web of compassion to others, so that those in the future may look back to us with thanks, and feel obliged to continue the weaving of these fragile and essential webs of life.

5. We gather to pursue a salvation by character, because we agree with Jesus that a tree is known by its fruits, and our real beliefs are shown by how we treat ourselves and others. The Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn has written of salvation through understanding, and many here will share that. It means that nothing is hidden. No supernatural agencies need to be placated. Everything we need is always before us. It takes only the eyes to see and ears to hear it. We gather to practice learning to see and hear with those eyes and ears.

We share many beliefs here. We also differ on many beliefs. Most of the shared beliefs here are secular rather than religious. This may sound odd, but it is not. The word secular means that it is concerned with this world here and now. Also, the people who find a home in Unitarian churches tend to come from the same kind of cultural background.

Most of the values we have learned are learned from our culture. The problem with this is that not all the values a culture teaches are healthy or good.

Our culture is set up for winners and losers. This doesn’t just mean the so-called “reality” shows on television: survivor, the bachelor, the world’s strongest man, Joe the fake millionaire and the rest of them. The whole American culture is shot through with the notion that only winners deserve much. The version of capitalism we have today – which is quite different from the version of capitalism we had after W.W.II – is a zero-sum game. If worker pay and benefits rise, stock prices fall. If American workers are fired because the corporation has moved production to Mexico or China, stock prices rise. If we’re not careful, we can learn to run our lives in a zero-sum game too, if we absorb some of the most unwise lessons of our culture. But looking at interpersonal relationships in this way leads to dehumanized lives.

You could say that all Unitarian churches are filled with a bunch of cultural liberals who are working out their different paths to salvation. By “liberal” I mean that most of you here today share a whole list of cultural values that are usually identified as liberal, though I think they’re really much broader. Let’s check some of this out with an informal poll. You probably didn’t study for today’s sermon, didn’t know there would be a pop quiz, but there is.

The older people here were products of the civil rights movements of the 1950s – 1970s. The ideas of individual rights and individual freedoms are ideas they value highly. They are overwhelmingly in favor of women’s rights, civil rights for all, gay rights, the rights of any and all people to have the ability to pursue both success and happiness. How many of those here over 45 share these beliefs and values?

(Show of hands)

And the younger people here share those values, whether you got them from your parents or your peers. For how many of you under 45 is this true?

(Hands)

The people who come to Unitarian churches and stay tend to have an optimistic view of human beings. Rather than thinking we are all born sinful or evil, the vast majority here believe that while we are capable of both good and evil, we are basically good, and can be trusted. This attitude goes way back. There was a 19th century joke that Universalists said God was too good to condemn us, and Unitarians believed we were too good to be condemned. I suspect most of you here also believe that people are basically good and can be trusted.

(Hands)

You’ll find a broad and deep concern for the environment, expressed in many ways, from our Xeriscaped garden and playground area to the Fair Trade coffee we buy for our coffee hours and the paper we recycle in the office. Virtually everyone here tends to see that we are all interrelated, and that caring for the environment is to be valued over doing long-term harm by exploiting the environment for short-term profit. How many of you share these concerns?

(Hands)

These are secular and cultural values, not really religious ones, but for many here they are their religion. They are the ways we care for each other and our world.

These values came most recently from the civil rights movements. But they go back to the founding of our country: to the Bill of Rights, the whole notion of individual rights, and the line from the Declaration of Independence that says we are all created equal, with an equal right to the pursuit of happiness.

And the history of Unitarians becoming active in social and political causes in the U.S. is a history of people acting to try and make laws more equitable, to favor the masses over the classes, the empowerment of the many over the empowerment of the few, and a sense of equality for all, regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation or belief.

The secular values that come from the civil rights and individual rights movements are mostly compassionate. Even when they didn’t do well they meant well. There are plenty of arguments that school busing was a bad idea, that affirmative action became a quota system that left many black people worse off than they were before, while discriminating against other minorities. Women scholars have criticized the excesses of the women’s movement for, among other things, weakening alimony and child support payments that made the lives of many women worse rather than better. Others say that paying huge sums into education didn’t work because the liberal educational philosophy was too permissive and loose, centered not on educating children but on making them feel good about themselves.

So the deeds done by cultural liberals may not always be wise or good, though the intent was.

And this goes all the way back in our history. Unitarians have almost always acted on behalf of the weak rather than the strong. The one time I know they did not do this is instructive. In the 1850s there was a progressive Unitarian preacher named Theodore Parker who fought for the abolition of slavery, for women’s rights and for prison reform. The more elite Unitarians of Boston – referred to then as the Boston Brahmins – would not allow Parker to preach in any Boston pulpit because some of them supported slavery, and others didn’t think it was polite to mix religious beliefs with political action. Today, we look back on Parker with pride, and seldom mention the others.

The notion of enslaving people with chains or with unlivable wages, of treating them like tools we can use for our own ends, has run counter to some strains of American culture since the nation began, and the overwhelming majority of people who find a home in Unitarian churches come from those more altruistic strains. So you’re surrounded by people, most of whom will stand for the masses against the classes, for the rights of the disempowered against those whose power enslaves them. Yes, it is a kind of political orthodoxy.

Like all orthodoxies, the political orthodoxy found in Unitarian churches tends to exert a pressure on what you feel comfortable saying out loud. This isn’t good news.

The problem with orthodoxies of any kind is that we tend to exalt our kind of people. You see it in political gatherings all the time. A Republican writer like Ann Coulter goes on national press shows to say that while there are both good and less good Republicans, there are no good Democrats. And local Democrats put bumper stickers on their cars that say, “Friends don’t let friends vote Republican.”

The few times I’ve attended the Unitarian General Assembly, it has always felt like a political assembly of Democrats and Green Party activists, not a religious gathering. When we’re surrounded by people who share our biases, it is almost impossible to avoid slipping into the narcissism that sees “our kind” as saved, the other kind as damned, or at least as second-rate citizens: “There are no good Democrats…. Friends don’t let friends vote Republican.”

The reason that our shared secular values count for so much here, and count as good news, is because they are the values that shape our world and our lives. People say that Unitarians can believe anything they want, but that isn’t really true. Our individual religious beliefs are like variations on shared themes. But the shared themes are not negotiable. They are those basic aims that all decent and noble people have always had. Things like:

1. becoming better people, partners, parents and citizens. That’s not negotiable. If you don’t want to do this, you’re in the wrong place.

2. trying to become a blessing to the world as we pass through it. Again, that’s not negotiable.

3. trying to take ourselves and those around us more seriously, to treat them in the way we would hope to be treated by compassionate people. If you don’t care about this, you won’t – and shouldn’t – be comfortable in this church.

4. feeling ourselves to be integral and important parts of the world, interrelated with all others and with the earth itself, with an appropriate feeling of gratitude and responsibility for this gift of life. Again, this isn’t negotiable.

But how we find our way to these ends, the individual spiritual paths we take, here we have many differences. As we say even on the cover of your order of service: One church. Many beliefs.

Some think in terms of God, or several or many gods. For others, god-talk doesn’t play a role in their beliefs. Perhaps they find their home within nature, or within a more political picture of helping others through trying to enact more compassionate laws. Some are not involved in social activism at all. Some are more mystical, needing first to feel a strong inner connection to the world, to others. Perhaps outward action will come from that later.

And let’s be honest, the real day-to-day beliefs that get many of us through the day don’t have much of anything to do with any organized religion at all. There are more astrologers alive today than at all times in history combined. In France, there are more professional astrologers than priests. And many here trust astrology, more than they trust any bibles or catechisms. All those beliefs and superstitions are here, just as they’re all throughout American culture.

Don’t worry: I won’t ask for a show of hands on astrology, or on how many of us always read the fortunes hidden inside of fortune cookies.

Some of what any church is like depends on the particular gifts and style of the minister. Some preach mostly from within the Christian tradition. I try to preach in ordinary language, drawing from many different religious traditions. I agree with the Buddhist Thich Nhat Hahn that one important way in which we’re saved – by which I mean made more whole, more authentic – is through understanding. I’m interested in finding and sharing insights and stories from the wisdom traditions of the world, those teachings designed to help us live more aware and compassionate lives, not according to a creed but according to the more enduring rules of human conduct as seen in the lives and stories of our noblest specimens.

So what’s the good news to be found in a Unitarian church – specifically, this one? It’s of several kinds:

1. Cultural and secular values. Whatever your political affiliation is, my experience of you is that you have brought some of the most compassionate and altruistic values to be found in our culture, and stand at the end of a long tradition of social activism on behalf of just the people on whose behalf all the worlds religions say we should act: the disempowered, the poor, the outcast.

There are many ways in which we give form to these beliefs here. In what passes for winter in Texas, we house about fifty single homeless people here on “Freeze nights,” where around forty volunteers cook dinner and breakfast for them. It’s the largest number of single homeless people served by any church in Austin. Within the church, we have a “helping hands” group to tend to some of our members’ needs, and a first-rate listening ministry of fifteen or twenty people who went through forty hours of training plus an internship, just to learn how to become a listening minister, a quiet presence for people who could use a good ear during some tough transitions.

We have monthly split-the-plate offerings that donate over $12,000 a year to about a dozen charitable organizations outside the church. This is a place where altruism and generosity are taught and expected of us all. As I tell new members and visitors during our monthly meeting, I ask members to support the church with at least a half-tithe, to pledge 5% of your gross income before taxes. We are working toward giving at least that much of our annual budget amount to charities outside the church. We’re not there yet, but we will be.

2. And though we borrow from many religions, we are always looking for those same high and demanding values of compassion and altruism. We gather to try and become better people, partners, parents and citizens, and to try and shape our character, and our children’s’ character, into a form that can equip us to live lives of compassion and understanding, so that when we are through we can be proud of the way in which we lived, the values, the causes and the people we served.

3. We pass through here once. Let our time here be spent trying to leave the world a little better than we found it, trying to become a blessing to ourselves and others. We seek to serve our highest values, and to serve those values through our treatment of our fellow humans.

Twenty centuries ago, Jesus described such a world as the kingdom of God. Before him, the Jews had called it the world to come, and their highest teaching was also to love God with all their hearts and to love their neighbors as themselves. The Buddha believed that when we could see through the illusions that cause us so much suffering, we would see that every creature on earth calls for our understanding and compassion. And Hindus bow when they meet you: not to you, but to the god within you.

Many of you have seen sets of those little Russian dolls that all nest inside each other. We’re like that. We each contain many people, and the influences of all who have touched our soul. And deep down, we contain more. Buddhists say we each contain a Buddha seed. The Christian mystic Meister Eckhart called it a God seed. But it’s there, it’s there inside us all. With the right kind of nourishment and care, those seeds can sprout, then bloom, and transform the world. The process can start any time, any place. Even here, even now. And that too is Good News.

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© Davidson Loehr

11 May 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

It is Mothers’ Day. Let us give thanks

– For mothers, whether they gave birth to the children or adopted them;

– For mothers who have lost a child, through miscarriage, abortion, adoption, or death, and who still feel the loss.

– For those who have never had children but who miss being mothers, and who are mothers in their hearts who express their nurture in other ways;

– For our own mothers, and theirs, as far back as our living memory will carry us;

– And for all who have lost their mothers, and still feel that loss.

It is Mothers’ Day. Let us remember all the varieties of mothers in all of our lives in deep gratitude and prayer.

Amen.

SERMON: Science, Religion and Life

We’ve come a long way since the Middle Ages, but we’re only halfway home. If you want a picture of people living in an integrated world where everything was really interconnected, just go back a thousand years. It was a very small world then. 99% of the people lived their whole lives within two or three miles of the place they were born.

They worked on the same farm, served the same prince or his successor, drank in the same tavern their whole life. There was only one religion. They attended the same church where they were baptized, married and buried. Many had just one or two priests in a lifetime. Virtually everyone but the priests was illiterate and the invention of the printing press was still four and a half centuries in the future, so there weren’t book discussion groups where intellectuals gathered to ponder disturbing ideas.

The people didn’t think about whether the world was flat or spherical, because either way, what difference would it make? They didn’t think about solar systems, galaxies, the speed of light or the ozone layer because those concepts hadn’t been invented yet. They didn’t think much about abstract concepts like knowledge or wisdom, though medieval theologians did. And what medieval theologians thought about knowledge and wisdom is still instructive for us today. Knowledge was called “scientia” in Latin, the word from which we later got our word science. Wisdom was “sapientia”; it’s nowhere near as famous as science.

They knew that knowledge made you certain, and could make you smug. Wisdom, on the other hand, could make you whole, help you integrate what you knew and who you are into a character who might live happily and well, a blessing to yourself and others. So the only knowledge they thought really important was the kind of knowledge that might lead to wisdom.

Knowledge made them certain, wisdom made them whole. It was a wonderful distinction that would play a bigger role after the medieval world came apart. And the medieval world started coming apart during the 12th and 13th centuries. By the 16th century, the Church had split. There were Lutherans, Calvinists, Reformed preachers, Mennonites, and by the end of the 16th century there were Unitarians as well.

Now your religious certainty extended only as far as the walls of your church. The people in the church across the street were equally certain, but about different things. Books were being printed, people were reading them and getting all sorts of new ideas about God, life, the world, everything.

And in the infant sciences – the new disciplines arising to seek knowledge – Copernicus and Galileo were shattering the certainty about the earth, the universe, and our place in it. They said the earth moved; what a crazy idea! It certainly didn’t seem like it moved. You could live a whole life and never feel it move. But these early scientists said it moved because they had knowledge of things that didn’t come from the concerns of everyday living, but from an intellectual curiosity. It was an early sign that knowledge was becoming unhooked from wisdom.

Of course the leaders of every church thought that what was proclaimed in all other churches was also knowledge coming unhooked from wisdom, and they yearned for a simple world again, one that fit within their understanding. That’s a strange idea: wanting a world that’s no bigger than our understanding. It’s like carrying around one bucket of ocean water and pretending it’s the whole ocean. But it was all they could carry. They weren’t so different from us there. Even today, I’m not sure any of us is carrying more than a few bucketfuls of the universe’s truths.

Some of this new knowledge threatened so many old certainties you could be killed just for believing it. Catholics and Protestants didn’t agree on most sacraments – Catholics said there were seven, Protestants had dropped all but two, communion and baptism. But they all agreed that infants must be baptized or they would go to hell. In the middle of the 16th century, the Mennonites said that infant baptism wasn’t mentioned in the bible, and that adults must be baptized again as a sign of their affirmation of the right religious beliefs.

This sounds pretty ho-hum today, if not just downright boring. But Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists and the rest thought it was a capital crime. They hunted down Mennonites everywhere and killed them for being certain about the wrong things.

Religious warfare was breaking out all over. It wasn’t safe to be sure unless your certainties agreed with the church’s.

When others could shrug off the beliefs you were certain you needed to live, and yet they lived quite well, it was a sign that maybe your own certainties weren’t grounded in truth after all, but only in old habits and small visions. And few people can live with that fear. In August of 1572, it boiled over in France in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, where French Catholics tried to provide the Final Solution for the Protestant Problem by killing 30,000 of them in one day and about 100,000 of them in one week.

And this bloody and barbaric state of affairs, odd as it seems, was the manger in which our modern sciences were born.

In the early 1600s, a young genius named Descartes, thinking he was saving Western civilization, came up with a new definition of knowledge, to make it safe from the churches by separating it from the kind of knowledge religion cared about.

Religion cared most about personal and subjective knowledge. Who are we, how are we to live, what’s the meaning of life, how should we treat one another – that sort of thing.

Descartes’ new kind of knowledge was much more restricted. It excluded all the personal and subjective questions about life’s meaning and purpose. He defined a new territory for knowledge, which included only impersonal, objective, factual things. Not how to live, but how to understand objective things like numbers, rocks, trees, bridges, and the laws of nature. Knowledge, in other words, was separated from wisdom, and exalted in its own right as “science.”

That’s why to this day the only time sciences get attacked by churches is when their knowledge has implications for who we are and how we are to live: evolution, birth control, cloning.

To put it another way, Descartes succeeded so well he helped create new problems we still haven’t solved. Knowledge and wisdom have been so successfully separated that today we struggle with how to forge a new synthesis of sciences and religions, facts and values, objective truths and their meaning or use in personal, subjective living. That’s what I meant when I said we’ve come a long way from the Middle Ages, but we’re only half way home.

Last week, Cathy used a wonderful phrase from Emily Dickinson I want to use again. Our souls, said Dickinson, must stand ajar if we are to let the world in. Descartes taught us to seek objective certainty rather than personal wholeness, and nearly all of our sciences have followed him. Our sciences have succeeded spectacularly within this narrower and more impersonal definition of a knowledge that’s been separated from questions of how we should live, how to bring our heads and hearts together in an integrated life lived with hope and trust.

The sciences have now defined what count as facts, what counts as knowledge and truth. And their success undermined and discredited the orthodox claims of religion. This would have broken Descartes’ heart, though it was he who defined this new kind of knowledge that left the concerns of our hearts out.

Many, many people have left the religions of their childhood after becoming bored or disgusted with their religion’s teachings about heaven, hell, miracles and a capricious God who was alternately and unpredictably loving or vengeful. Many of those people feel so deeply betrayed it will be years, if ever, before they will be willing to take something called religion seriously again. We have some of those people in this room. And some who are here have partners they love who won’t come because, after all, this is a church, and they think all churches lie.

Some studies have been saying for over sixty years that 40% of Americans attend church regularly. Other studies say the numbers are faked, that the real number is more like 20%, one in five. This means that 60-80% of Americans don’t think the messages heard in churches are worth getting out of bed for.

So religion, which is supposed to be speaking about who we are and how we should live to make our lives most fulfilling, stammers because while it has some wisdom hidden in its myths and stories, it can’t do knowledge as well as the sciences, so we don’t trust it. Our doors are shut.

But while sciences have knowledge, they are not about finding wisdom. They can say the earth is 4-5 billion years old, that we evolved over millions of years, that there’s neither a heaven above the sky nor a hell below the ground. But sciences can’t tell us why or how that needs to matter to any of us. What would make any of that important or necessary knowledge? Most people in history lived their whole lives never knowing any of it, and they lived full and happy lives.

If someone lives well believing they have a guardian angel or that a god or goddess is watching over them, and it dispels their fears and lets them live in peace and confidence, what difference could it make whether it’s true? Is it a contest? Is there a prize involved? Scientific knowledge may make us smug, but smugness isn’t really what we’re after, is it?

Aren’t we after different questions, that aren’t scientific at all? Questions like:

What should I serve with my life?

How do I balance greed and fairness?

How should I live so I’ll be proud to have lived that way?

What do I owe to myself, to those I love, to my community, to history?

What are the moral responsibilities of power?

What does survive after I’m gone, of the things I loved?

Please understand that I’m not against sciences; I’m for them. Good sciences can save us from bad religion. No religious teachings should be protected from any and all critical scientific questions. We seek a peace that passes understanding, not that bypasses it.

And good religion can and should save us from bad science. No scientific assertion should ever be protected against questions like “So what? What does this have to do with me, who and what I love or serve with the days and years of my life? Maybe in a narrow sense this is true, but so what?”

The attitude of certainty that we have been trained to seek for almost 400 years has become, ironically, the enemy of both honest science and honest religion. It’s not that all certainty is bad, only that certainty which is about half-truths, about facts unhooked from values, data divorced from human meanings.

An example, for this Mother’s Day, is the recent attempt by some groups in Texas to prevent gay and lesbian couples from adopting children. These people are certain that “parents” must mean always and only one person of each sex, that it’s about the sex of the people playing the roles of parents, rather than the roles they are playing.

They’re saying that bad parents of mixed sex would be preferred to good parents of the same sex.

But no. That’s too ignorant of nature to be good science, for Nature’s God created many species in which both homosexuality and bisexuality are found. And it’s too hateful to be good religion.

It’s the role of mothering and fathering that defines mothers and fathers, not what sex they happened to be born.

But we can’t learn it when certainty has slammed our minds shut, or slammed our hearts and souls shut. We cannot learn either truth or love with our minds and hearts shut. Unless we want to dwell in yesterday’s ignorance and bigotries, both our minds and our souls must be left ajar.

Now you may wonder: Can we be certain of this? Yes, we can. Because that’s the one kind of certainty that can get us closer to honest science and honest religion, the kind of knowledge that can lead to wisdom. It is the certainty that we cannot hold the ocean in our buckets, cannot restrict life to the horizons of our own understanding, can not imprison love or parenting in our own small habits and biases.

That’s what we can always be certain of: that there is more. There is always more. More than we know, more than we dare to hope. There is more. There is always more. You can count on it.

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© Davidson Loehr

April 13, 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

Prayer

In everything we do or fail to do, we’re writing the story of our lives.

Too often, the fantasy and the reality of our lives are a world apart.

Sometimes we can’t find our way, or can’t recognize the way when we have found it.

Sometimes it seems the cost is just too high to take the high road, so we settle for a lower road because we believe it is all we can really afford.

Let us take this time, this place, these moments, to remind us of our higher calling. Let us be open to hearing the voices of gods rather than idols, consulting those angels of our better nature rather than the little demons and goblins of our lesser selves.

Let us think and act in ways that can do honor to us and to those who love us.

Let us act as though God were watching, as though those whom we love were watching, as though all the great and noble souls of history were watching.

For we are the gatekeepers of our better tomorrows.

We are, all of us, brothers and sisters, children of God, and the best hope of a more compassionate world.

Let us live in such a way that when we are finished, we can say, “In my time here, I was as compassionate, as courageous as I knew how to be. In my time I was, if even only in my small way, a blessing to those whose lives I touched.

“I came, I cared, and in the most important matters I tried to be authentic. I wasn’t perfect; but I was the best person that I knew how to be. And that is enough, it is enough, it is always enough.”

Amen.

SERMON: The Shadow Knows

One of the most famous and ancient story plots we have is about people going out on long adventures in search of a treasure they finally discover was buried at home all the time. I think of the movie “The Wizard of Oz,” where Dorothy left Kansas and went to Oz, which had the same characters she had known in Kansas. She finally discovered that the home she was looking for was always as close as clicking her heels.

Also in that movie, the three other main characters were searching for something they thought they didn’t have: brains, courage, a heart. But it wasn’t true: they had them all the time, they just didn’t know it.

I try to look at religion and life’s questions in a lot of different ways here, because the same road doesn’t work for everyone, so I think it’s worth knowing a lot of paths. This morning, I’m looking at life through some lenses from Jungian psychology. I think the Jungians offer some fertile ways of understanding what we think of as salvation, or a kind of healthy wholeness.

For Jung, that especially meant bringing together the favorite parts of our personality, which he called the persona, and the equally important parts that stay hidden, which he called the shadow. The notion of a shadow may sound spooky, but it really isn’t.

Our society, our families and our relationships tend to “edit” us. They prefer certain parts of us, and encourage them. But there’s a lot more to us, and it doesn’t go away. When we shine a light on the parts of us we like, our other parts go into the shadows. The shadow is the despised quarter of our being, or at least the unknown part. It often has as much energy as our ego does. If it gets more energy, it can erupt with its own terrible purpose, and run our lives like a mad puppeteer.

In our culture, especially recently, when we find two opposing forces we are taught to use the bigger one to destroy the weaker one. Whether this will work in international relations remains to be seen. But it doesn’t work psychologically, or in relationships. The two sides are both parts of us, and must be integrated. Otherwise, we’re more likely to flip from one extreme to another: the abused boy who becomes an abuser, religious fundamentalists who attack heretics, or a country that defines itself as peace-loving while claiming the right to declare preemptive war on anyone it chooses. These are some ways the shadow can erupt to define or control us, if we can’t grow big enough to integrate it.

Since we don’t have effective means of integrating our shadow sides today, we project them into our horror movies, gangster epics, violence, rap, garish or shocking fashions, etc. But that can’t integrate them.

To refuse the dark side of our nature is to store up the darkness. Then these things erupt as symptoms: a black mood, psychosomatic illness, or unconsciously inspired accidents – or war, economic chaos, strikes, racial intolerance, etc. The front pages of our newspapers hurl our collective shadows at us every day.

It is a dark page in human history when people make others bear their shadow for them. Men lay their shadow on women, whites upon blacks, blacks upon Hispanics – as I learned when I moved to Austin – Catholics upon Protestants, capitalists upon 3rd world countries, the poor and powerless, Muslims upon Hindus, on and on.

– That was all a kind of theoretical introduction for those who like theories. Now let’s get more specific, because in real life, examples of people whose shadows control or cripple them are usually simpler. I’ve brought you three examples of this, from a personal, institutional and societal scale.

On an individual level, I think of a woman I knew some years ago named Betsy. She was in a shadow rut. She dated a series of men who were all just as judgmental and dismissive of her as her father had been. Her shadow was running this show, trying to win approval from her father through this succession of stand-ins. She was doomed to repeat this plot until she finally got in touch with the parts of her that needed her father’s approval, understand she was never going to get it, and get on with her life. Then, when her father or others like him charged her like bulls with demeaning and hurtful remarks, she could play the matador, just letting the dangerous bulls pass by, without trying to confront them.

For an institutional example where the shadow is running the show, I think of Christianity, especially now as we see the fundamentalist versions gearing up for holy war against Muslims. Hucksters like Jerry Falwell are teaching that Islam is an evil religion teaching war and murder – apparently ignorant of the Christian Crusades, where Christians were told to kill Muslims and promised an eternal reward in heaven for doing so. This entire script is being acted out by the shadow, because it is these Christians who are teaching war and murder, and embodying an attitude Jesus would have regarded as evil. For this kind of wounded Christianity to become healed, it would have to grow big enough to integrate its own shadow, to acknowledge its own contributions to hatred, war and evil in the world today. Only then could Christianity have power to focus the profoundly good energies and ideals of that great religion. This is the task many liberal Christians are taking on, though they have an uphill fight.

And for a really broad current example of a script written by a shadow, I think of the U.S. and our claim that we are the only country on earth with the right to wage preemptive war against any country we choose, without provocation.

We do this while wanting to believe we are a peace-loving nation. It is already having effects that our administration seems not to have expected. William Kristol – who has been a shadow figure in U.S. neo-conservative politics for twenty years – has been interviewed on national radio and television, calmly acknowledging that yes, members of his group, including Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and others, had been urging that we invade Iraq and control it since 1991. Yes, he says, we will control Syria and Iran next, and think we can do it without using our armies. What would you expect the effect of these statements and plans to be in Arab and Muslim countries? When people all over the world know our blueprints to establish economic and military dominance of the world, including plans to prevent Asia or the European nations from becoming a threat to these imperialistic goals, what do you think the effect will be in Asia and Europe? Our media don’t carry the stories that we have become the most hated nation on earth, and that G.W. Bush is regarded as more dangerous and murderous than Saddam Hussein. But a quick check of world news outlets shows us this is the background against which our denial is operating.

North Korea has already made public its plans to mobilize and strengthen its forces in response to U.S. imperialism. Don’t we think Europe will too? Do we honestly believe we can boss the entire world around, invading wherever we like without consequences? We claim to be a nation of democracy, goodness and peace, but people all over the world, and a growing number here, see our behavior as arrogant, murderous and evil, as our shadow side acting out a kind of adolescent and deadly imperialism that we are publicly trying to pretend doesn’t exist.

There are encouraging signs that the shadow side of America will make it into our collective consciousness. The fact that “Bowling for Columbine” could win an Oscar and get a standing ovation, the fact that Michael Moore’s incendiary and angry book Stupid White Men rose to the #1 bestseller in non-fiction four or five times in the past year and a half, the fact that America’s imperialist plans are being discussed by some of our own journalists in prime-time spots, and by others all over the world, the fact that the protests don’t seem to be diminishing – these are much stronger signs that the citizens are awake than we had anywhere nearly this early in the Vietnam War. So maybe we will insist on facing our own dangerous shadow sides. Maybe not. Time will tell, along with the collective vision and courage – not of our leaders, but of our citizens.

We tend to think of our shadow sides as bad, like these examples. Often, it is. The shadow isn’t necessarily bad, though; it’s just invisible to us, not integrated into our consciousness, so it has great power to mislead us. But a lot of our very best traits are also hidden in the shadows.

Hero-worship is also projecting our shadow. And it’s dangerous to us too, if we then expect the hero to save us, as we become passive.

And falling in love is projecting parts of our shadow, when we fantasize that this person exists to complete us, then later get angry when we find they were, after all, just a human, and their job really wasn’t to complete us.

Still, sometimes someone can help us find our shadow in a way that’s healing. But even then the power hidden in the shadows usually blindsides us.

One of my favorite stories about this is a story about my oldest friend, John. We met in 1968, while I was finishing an undergraduate degree in music theory and he was working on his Ph.D. in psychology. John rode a big Kawasaki motorcycle, which he could take apart and put back together. He loved fixing things. He loved fixing people, too. And it seemed that every woman he dated had something wrong with her that he thought it was his job to fix. This produced a fairly colorful list of girl friends, none of whom lasted very long – usually because they got tired of being another of John’s work projects.

Once when he was between girlfriends, I said, “John, what would happen if you found a really healthy woman who loved you, was compatible with you, but didn’t need any work done?” “Oh,” he said, “that wouldn’t be at all appealing!”

About 25 years ago, after visiting England several times, he finally moved there. He said the U.S. felt like an adolescent society, and he wanted to live among grown-ups. A few years later, he wrote to say he’d met a woman named Mary, so I realized that, grown-up or not, England had some work projects for John. Mary was going through a divorce, and the legal and emotional hassles of dividing the assets from a successful travel agency she and her husband had owned. I couldn’t imagine that John would know anything about much of this, but I was sure he could find something to work on in her, so he’d be content.

Then they visited while I was living in Chicago, and I got to meet Mary. She was John’s worst nightmare: a perfectly healthy woman who loved him, was compatible with him, and didn’t need any fixing at all. I said I didn’t understand why she was attractive to him. He said it had blindsided him. Since she was stressed out when he met her, he thought she could be another good work project. When the divorce was over and the business had been divided, he suddenly discovered that she wasn’t broken and didn’t need fixing at all. But by then, he said, it was too late. They’d learned to love each other, and he had been seduced into a healthy relationship in spite of himself. They’ve been married over twenty years.

His shadow, the part of himself he hadn’t learned how to integrate, was the part that simply enjoyed living, that could find healthy people attractive because they were healthy. It was the part that trusted life and trusted others. He had moved to England because he wanted to live among adults rather than adolescents. And then he met one of those adults, and outgrew his own adolescence.

In some ways, I can identify easily with John and Mary. But in others, they are very different people from me. They are both into every screwy supernaturalism known to humankind: astrology, numerology, palm reading, crystals – they’ve got ’em all. They also told me that they had been together in a previous life, where they needed to work through some things, but this time around it was just about perfect.

I was alarmed by all that supernatural hokum, and I thought about trying to make them a work project. Then I realized I was in the presence of two people who had found their own path toward wholeness and happiness. I decided to leave them alone, and just bless them.

So much life comes from the shadows, you’d think we would get over our fear of them. Yet we are often afraid of the dark. We are afraid to go there, to find what hides there, to face it. We are afraid because we fear that the truth will be bad.

Betsy was afraid she could not live without her father’s approval. But in truth, she couldn’t really live until she no longer needed his approval.

Some Christians are afraid that if they welcome Islam and all other religions as equally legitimate paths to salvation, then theirs will lose its special appeal. In fact, for many people, a religion secure enough to build bridges rather than walls is much more appealing, and much more religious. Many Christian apologists feel that if they ever acknowledge the truth about a very human Jesus or the fact that there are many roads to spiritual fulfillment that need not go through Christian doors, that they’ll lose their flocks. Maybe. But I think what they lose through fear they might more than make up for through what they gain in trust and respect.

Our current administration seems to think we can only be safe by threatening everyone else on earth. That too seems unlikely.

It is easy and natural to wonder how the answers could come from what seems our weakest area. But thousands of years of mythology and religious teachings say it usually comes from the shadows.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, Isaiah says the stone the builders rejected will become the cornerstone. In the Christian scriptures, a voice asks, “What good could come from Nazareth,” a backwater place of low repute. Yet that’s where they said Jesus came from.

In virtually every great story we know, the hero comes from the fringes, the shadows. From Jesus to Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, to Frodo in the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, it is the weakest character who turns out to be the strongest, the one able to build bridges between parts of a disjointed world.

Within and among us too, it is often our hidden parts that hold the power and knowledge we need. And so we perch between two kinds of life, two kinds of belief: the belief that the truth will be bad, and the belief that the truth can set us free. We perch between fear and life, even as we know there are mostly two kinds of people in the world: those who are alive and those who are afraid. And the message I’ve tried to pass on this morning is a simple message, taken from ancient religious insights and modern Jungian psychology. It is simply this: don’t be afraid of the dark. Those things you need to know to be more alive are as close as clicking your heels. You can trust the shadow. The shadow knows.

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© Davidson Loehr

23 March 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

Spirit of life and love, Father/Mother God, we are joined today in a moment of gratitude for the warmth of this beloved community, for the comfort of this sacred space, for the moment of peace and contemplation in which to appreciate the precious gift of life. This moment of relative comfort sharpens our perception of an imperfect world.

We are reminded of the many innocent people in the world who are suffering hunger, terror, violence and loss. We pause to share our concern and care for the people of Iraq. Here at home, our thoughts are with all soldiers, on all sides of this warring, and with their families and loved ones, both here and abroad.

May we find it in ourselves today to work toward a better tomorrow. These are hard and bloody times, guided by imperfect leaders on all sides, prompted by a mix of motives, not all of which are proud. It is a deeply human moment arising from the always-present, always-dangerous mixture of good and evil that reside in the human soul, in human institutions and governments.

We have both good and bad spirits within and among us. Today we pray to the angels of our better nature. We seek strength from the still, small voices of understanding rather than arrogance, /generosity rather than greed, /peace rather than war. These are the voices, the angels, the spirits we need now and in the trying times ahead of us. We need these insights and strengths as Americans, as people of faith, as citizens of the world, and as brothers and sisters to all people on earth who cry when their hearts break, who bleed when they’re cut, and who, with us, hope and pray for a better tomorrow and a better world. Let us hope and pray, but not only hope and pray.

Amen.

SERMON: “She: A Salvation Story for Women”

In a recent USA Today poll, people were asked what one question they would most like to ask God. The overwhelming response was that they wanted to know the purpose of their life. That says at least two things. One is that they don’t know the purpose of their life; the other is that they haven’t found it out from God, either.

Some of this is a comment on our times. In ancient times, even medieval times, people felt that they had encounters with the gods regularly. They provided places for it to happen. They had shrines, where there were statues of the gods, fires lit to them, temples you could go to be in their presence. But today, about the only place people still feel the overpowering presence of the old gods is when they fall in love, and are connected either with Aphrodite, the older kind of love, or Eros, the adolescent kind.

Last week, I used a medieval myth of Parsifal’s quest for the Holy Grail as the archetype of a man’s struggle to grow up and grow whole.

The archetypal salvation story for women is far, far older and more complex. It’s the very ancient, even prehistoric, Greek myth of Psyche and Eros. Parsifal’s story was one of adventures and conquests; Psyche’s story is one of relationships and unfolding. Parsifal, like most men, had to grow up through experiences; Psyche, like most women, grows up through learning how to find and develop seeds already inside of her.

Psyche is the Greek word for soul. Eros was the adolescent god of love. Today, we call him Cupid and picture him as a fat little baby. But the Greeks knew he was an adolescent, and they saw the falling in love that he brought as an adolescent kind of love, too.

I want to move back and forth between real people and this old myth, as I did last week. Last week, I also talked about the labyrinth from the Chartres cathedral, which we had down for people to walk. That gave me three balls to juggle. I like having three things to juggle, so today I’ll also talk about a movie that’s been nominated for Best Picture tonight, “The Hours.”

The story of Psyche and Eros is very complex, as I think psychologically women are more complex than men. I’ll confess at the start, though, that while I felt pretty confident talking about the inner lives of men last week, every time I start to feel confident this morning, I hear a little feminine voice from somewhere saying “Shut up, you fool!” So, my dear women, this is the best I can do. You see if it fits.

The story begins in adolescence, as it did for Parsifal. Psyche is an adolescent girl, beautiful and mythic. The prettiest of the three girls in her family, she’s really too pretty. Boys admire her, maybe even worship her, but from a distance. She’s more like an image of an adolescent kind of mythic beauty than she is like a real woman.

Girls today are flooded with images of Psyche, images of that beautiful, mythic, vacuous look they are taught to emulate: Britney Spears, Christina Aguilara, J. Lo. Or Liv Tyler, in the Lord of the Rings movies, has this ethereal, almost mythic look. Teen and movie magazines carry their pictures, their stories, and young women know them the way they once knew the stories of the gods and goddesses.

There’s something about them that’s unreal, and unfinished. They don’t seem like grown women, or like wives or mothers. This is the age when girls play at grown-up roles they haven’t grown into.

These are girls known for prettiness and innocence, not depth or wisdom. That’s the age of Psyche, a beautiful unfinished woman. And the old myth is about what she must go through to grow up, to become whole. If she doesn’t grow up, she may still be trying to play the role of Psyche in her 30s, 40s or later – when it is known as playing an ingenue.

In the myth, her untouchable beauty finally makes Aphrodite angry. So Aphrodite decrees that she shall be married to death, since she isn’t playing a useful role among the living.

This sounds fantastical, but it’s more real than you’d think. If a woman gets stuck in the Psyche role of being a dream woman, an adolescent man’s dream, she stops before she becomes whole enough to be a woman. And to enter into a marriage at that stage is to come in playing a pretty costumed role that can be the death of the human woman in her who hasn’t developed.

There is a powerful character in the current movie “The Hours” that has some of this. Julianne Moore’s character “Laura” is this kind of a two-dimensional mythic image, and it is killing her. She even describes this picturesque life as “death.”

But here’s how the Greeks told the story, well over 3,000 years ago. Left on the mountain for death to take, Eros, the teen-aged son of Aphrodite, was sent to stick her with his arrow so she would fall in love with death – the myth was that once stuck with Eros’s golden arrow, you fell in love with the first person you see.

But Eros is so struck by her beauty that he sticks himself with an arrow, and falls in love with her immediately. He has her transported to a paradise to be just with him. This is one way you know Eros is an adolescent. This is an adolescent’s dream: transporting their mythic love to a paradise to be with them alone.

All paradises have strict rules, and Eros had strict rules for her in his adolescent paradise. He would join her at night, but she could never see him, never ask questions or know him at all. If she did – if she ate from the tree of knowledge – the paradise would end, he said. Still, it seemed like paradise, so she stayed, spending nights with him, waking to find him gone before the light could show her his face.

In the meantime, her sisters were jealous, and kept inquiring how she was doing. She told them she was with a wonderful man she didn’t know. This isn’t just an ancient story, you know!

They told her he was probably an ugly monster, and talked her into taking a light, and a knife, so she could see his face in the night, then kill him before he could destroy her. But when the soft light showed his face, she saw she was married to a young god. She dropped the knife, a drop of hot oil landed on his shoulder, he woke up, saw she had disobeyed, and left her, just like that. Paradise was over.

Women have these two tools, a light to shine and a knife to cut with. Even today people talk of the cutting remarks a woman can make to a man, or how she can cut him down. Just a well-aimed sharp comment can do it, and does so much damage it’s hard ever to undo it.

The light meant the Greeks thought women could usually see more deeply into men than men could, and a lot of that seems true. But lighting the light is tricky, too. It’s almost always women who do this in a relationship. It’s women who say “We need to talk,” who want to know what he feels about this, who he is, more personally and deeply than just small talk.

But she threatened to know him, so he left. The paradise was over as quick as a Hollywood marriage. And the end of paradise is the beginning of young Psyche’s chance to grow up, if she can do it.

The Jungian psychologist Robert A. Johnson sees Eros as the woman’s own unconscious masculine component. It’s an adolescent masculine component in girls, and is the voice telling them the role to play, that pretty but vacuous role that never asks questions – the kind of girl you see in beer ads or on The Man Show.

It’s the voice in teen magazines, movies, ads, telling girls how to look and act to be attractive to young men, or the adolescent parts of men of any age. Don’t know or be known, don’t probe deeply, don’t question. Be seduced by the glitter, the look, the charisma, and be present as glitter, looks and charisma. That’s adolescent love in its adolescent paradise.

The next steps are the woman’s version of Parsifal’s knightly adventures and fights. Her battles are inside, but every bit as hard. If she is to get beyond this adolescent role of Psyche and grow into a real woman, she had hard work ahead of her. Aphrodite, the voice of that grown-up kind of femininity, lays out the tasks for her.

First, she must sort things out. She is overwhelmed, and needs to sort out what does and doesn’t matter to her. In the Greek myth, she has to sort through thousands and thousands of seeds. In the movie “The Hours,” Laura is trapped in a picturesque 1950s marriage, surrounded by a hundred things that are killing her, and she has to sort them out. Clean the house, cook the meals, tend to her boy, tend to her husband, keep everything looking perfect, bake and decorate the perfect birthday cake, make this false picture convincing. Then, somewhere, care for herself, attend to her own soul’s needs.

She had to sort out what gave death and what gave life. Some Jungian psychologists have described the feminine aspect of the soul as “unfocused consciousness,” and Psyche’s task is to learn how to sort, and how to focus, so she can find and attend to the really important parts of her life.

The second task is to get the strength to go through this, and to do it wisely. In the myth, she must get some golden fleece from the dangerous rams. If she tried it in the daytime, confronting them, they could hurt or kill her, because she’s no match for their physical strength. But her wiser voices tell her to go at night, and pick some fleece from the bushes where it has rubbed off.

Both modern psychologists and ancient mythmakers are saying it takes a tough-minded masculine kind of strength here, and it’s safest for a woman to steal some masculine energy rather than try and take it by confronting the rams. I’ve heard so many stories of women who tried to confront the rams directly. A woman who confronted her father over his habit of demeaning her, and was withered by his anger and insulting outbursts. Or battered women who try to have a showdown, challenging their battering partner’s masculinity and authority, with brutal, sometimes deadly, results. It’s safer and wiser just quietly to gather the strength you need to do what you need to do. Don’t waste energy on unnecessary risks.

Psyche’s third task is like the first: to take just a little bit of life and develop it, rather than being overwhelmed by all the demands that are flooding her.

In the myth, she must go to the River Styx, the river of life and death, and take just one crystal goblet of water, no more. Just a little, just what she can manage. Take just that, don’t be overwhelmed. It’s about sorting things out, focusing on what gives life, and taking only those parts of life you can manage right then.

In the movie “The Hours,” the floodwaters of the River Styx are pictured graphically, almost shockingly. She is lying on a hotel bed, contemplating suicide. You view the scene from above, and suddenly the whole room is flooded with water from beneath, covering her. I’ve never seen a psychological mood given such graphic staging. It is scenes like this that make you aware of how deep the psychological insights of those ancient stories are.

All the tasks of keeping the house, baking the cake, keeping the picture pretty and absorbing all the unhealth in the family were the flood that was killing the character in the movie. Just take a goblet full, and choose only those parts that you can handle, the parts that give you life.

In the movie, she made a radical and surprising choice. After the birth of her second child, she abandoned her family. She left the children and her husband and fled to Toronto, where she became a librarian. That’s all the flood of life she could handle, just that goblet-full.

The costs of this sorting and choosing and leaving can be very high. In the movie, her role was to carry all the unhappiness and death of a very sick system. When she left, the unhappiness and death had to go somewhere. Fifty years later, when she appeared again after the suicide of her son, she said that whole 1950s Los Angeles scene had been death to her, and she chose life. Both her husband and her daughter later died of cancer. The death in the system had to go somewhere. In her life, both staying and leaving had costs, terrible costs. It’s not that her choices are recommended for others, just that they were the only way she could choose life.

She had used that second tool, the knife, to cut herself free from what was, to her, a deathtrap. Most women would have chosen children and family over the solitary life of a librarian in another country. She was almost a negative example, one that ran counter to type – or at least counter to stereotype.

Part of the story, both in the myth and in the movie, is that the tender mercies, the feminine kind of caring that are so often a sign of a mature woman’s depth and love, can be traps that keep her from making the hard decisions needed to grow whole. She had to have the strength to leave, and let the sickness and death go where it would: in this case, to all the rest of the family. That’s the masculine energy, the golden fleece. It just takes a little, but without a little of that kind of strength, it can’t be done.

The fourth task is implied in all this, though it is the most difficult. It is the inner visit to your own unconscious, to the place where you can discern your own soul’s calling, your own unique style: who you are, who you must be, how you must live, what you must do. But you see that this is now the exact opposite of Psyche at the beginning of the story, where her whole life was choreographed by others, and she went along.

Now she has done the hard work, of sorting out what mattered to her and bringing it to bloom. She has worked for, and gained, her own soul and her own life. It took a toll, and in the old myth it is Eros, who has also grown up some in the meantime, who finally reclaims her. This Eros is several things, it is a complex story:

1. It is the adolescent Eros, now grown up.

2. But since Eros never grows up, that means it’s really her own interior masculine and strong side that has come to complement her more mature feminine self. Eros and Psyche are parts of the grown woman, now complementing each other.

3. Eros is also love, for this is the story of the soul’s search for love. And only love can finally unite all the parts of our psyche into an authentic and happy whole.

Zeus sees all this, and decrees that Psyche and Eros should now be married. And so the wedding takes place, and Psyche is given a drink that gives her immortality so she can join the other gods.

That’s so lovely, it hardly needs translating. The growth of a woman from an adolescent Psyche to a mature and integrated woman is a sacred event, blessed by all the gods. And she bore a child, the old myth says, a daughter whose name was Pleasure.

She became one with the gods, found the integration of her soul through the hard work of sorting, focusing, choosing that which gave her life and bringing it to grown-up fruition. And when she was done, she found her grown-up self in a holy union with Love, forever.

Whether in an old Greek myth, a modern movie, or a real down-to-earth woman’s life, it sounds like calling the results “Pleasure” is a magnificent example of complete understatement.

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© Davidson Loehr

16 March 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

And a man said, Speak to us of Self-Knowledge.

And he answered, saying:

Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.

But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart’s knowledge.

You would know in words that

which you have always known in thought.

You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.

And it is well you should.

The hidden wellspring of your soul must needs

rise and run murmuring to the sea;

And the treasure of your infinite depths

would be revealed to your eyes.

But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure;

And seek not the depths of your knowledge

with staff or sounding line.

For self is a sea boundless and measureless.

Say not, “I have found the truth”

but rather, “I have found a truth.”

Say not, “I have found the path of the soul.”

Say rather, “I have met the soul walking upon my path.”

For the soul walks upon all paths.

The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.

The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.

– On Self-Knowledge – Kahlil Gibran

SERMON: He: A Salvation Story for Men

The myth of the quest for the holy grail began in the 12th century, the time many identify as the beginning of the modern world. One famous quote says that the winds of the 12th century became the whirlwinds of the 20th century, so this story may not be as foreign to us as you might think.

It’s the story of the wounded Fisher King, of Parsifal’s search for the Holy Grail, of fair and Hideous damsels. It’s a kind of salvation story, especially for men, a story of what’s wrong, where modern men find themselves, and a prescription for what to do about it. It is a spiritual story, with deep roots into what we today call depth psychology of existential psychology.

I want to talk with you about this old myth. I’ll move back and forth between real life and the old myth, kind of tying them together from the inside out. It will be a little like walking the Chartres labyrinth, where we start way out, seem to move quickly toward the center, then get directed away from it, winding up a long way from the center before finally reaching home.

When a boy reaches adolescence, he discovers a new world, charged with power he hadn’t been aware of before. He is drawn to it as though it were part of who he must become, and in a way it is. But he’s far too young to handle it, and the experience of this new supercharged world makes an impression and issues a call that may be part of the rest of his life. The question of what must be done with that power will be with him until he resolves it.

It can happen emotionally, if he gets involved with a girl or woman he is in no way prepared for. My favorite movie about this was “The Summer of ’42.” Newer films include “Something About Mary” and a hundred others about boys falling all over themselves the first time they feel the feminine presence and realize both how powerful it seems, and how foreign, how far beyond their power. This is the Fair Damsel, who awakens his desire to become a man. In the Summer of ’42, it was a 15-year-old boy who was seduced by a woman ten years older who had just received a telegram saying her husband had been killed in the war. She was in such shock and grief she may not even have realized she was seducing him, and when he woke in the morning she was gone, he was never to see her again. There’s an initiation into a supercharged world that can stay with a boy, and will stay with a boy, his whole life.

Or the world of power may not be sexual, just very macho. An action hero, a video game that creates an imaginary world supercharged with deadly weapons, evil villains, mortal combat, and the thrill of the kill. You can watch this one being played out all over the country, every day. These boys are being seduced into a world with more power, and a different kind of power, than they’ve ever experienced before – especially when experienced through the haze of their new hormones. As video game designers know, they can barely tell the difference between the fantasy world on the screen and the real thing. Here, they’re a hero. Here, they have unbounded power over life and death. It’s so intoxicating that many boys withdraw into these fantasy worlds for hours at a time, day after day.

You can see boys practicing the bantam rooster activities of the quest for the Holy Grail everywhere, not just in the television shows of gangs and punks acting tough. You’ll see it in sports, both amateur and professional. That’s where our boys slay a lot of their dragons. And you see it in business behaviors. That’s why you see books on business strategy with titles talking about how to swim with the sharks, or Attila the Hun as a business model (I read this: it’s really dumb). You watch some of these guys as they progress, and you’ll feel the testosterone. They are learning what power is and how to use it.

In the myth, the King is a deeply wounded man. He can’t really live, but can’t die. He just suffers. He lacks the creative power he needs to find authenticity in the real world. His relationships are often a kind of role-playing, acting out, posing in costume.

Every night there is a solemn ceremony in the Grail castle. The Fisher King is lying on his litter enduring his suffering while a procession of profound beauty takes place. Fair maidens bring in a procession of wondrous things, until finally a maiden brings the Holy Grail itself which glows with light from its own depth. Each person (except the king) is given wine from the Grail and realizes their deepest wish even before they voice that wish. The king is barred from the essence of beauty and holiness when just those qualities are right in front of him. We can be disconnected and incapable of perceiving beauty, it happens easily.

The court fool had prophesied long ago that the Fisher King would be healed when a wholly innocent fool arrived in the court and asked the question “What does the Grail serve?”

The Grail is the symbol of the power of life itself: the power of God, shared with all, sustaining all. The king’s wound means that for all his efforts, he really hasn’t gotten it. He really isn’t partaking of the transcendent power of the universe as it is meant to be used. He has power, but it’s a kind of reflected light, not a light emanating from him. The light is from God, from the power of life, the powers of the universe. All the power there is loaned to the Grail by life, God, the universe, everything transcendent, from the whole tapestry of which we are a part.

The king would think he’s got control of that power. After all, he’s a king. He’s the star of the football team, the CEO of the company, the head of his unit, the studliest stud in his fraternity. He’s The Man.

But he doesn’t own this power, and he has not yet found his connection to it. That’s his wound, that’s why he suffers. In spite of his crown, he’s still an adolescent, playing adolescent games that he thought would make him a man, make him whole, bring him salvation. But they don’t. That takes something else, and he hasn’t found it.

The hero, the one who could save the king, is named Parsifal, which means “innocent fool” or “he who draws the opposites together” – like the meaning of the Chinese word Tao. Parsifal is another part of the king, of us. The king has power, but he can’t put the whole picture together, the picture of him and his world, including that transcendent power that he uses without owning. That’s what he can’t do, and only the fool, the innocent part of him, might do it, and only if he can learn to ask the magic question: What does the Grail serve?

In other words, the Grail that contains some of this transcendent power, and we who contain come of the transcendent power of life, the world, the universe – what do we serve? What is the point of our lives, and of having this power? A man’s search for that answer is his quest for the Holy Grail.

The myth came from a time when only men would be knights, or CEOs, or scholars or lawyers or even preachers, so these were men’s problems. Today, many women are playing these roles, are finding and using this power. And so today, many women are also struggling to put their power into a transcendent perspective.

Until we can do it, we’ll keep slaying dragons outside of us, fighting battles in the bedroom or boardroom or on the playing field or in the courtroom, in search of the Holy Grail, in search of that source of power.

This quest drives much of our economy, and fuels much of the advertising industry. Sexy sports cars, SUVs pictured in ads with people driving up remote mountains to do extreme sports, while the vehicles are sold to families, 99% of whom will never drive off-road anywhere. Or those $50,000 Humvees, those rough-terrain military vehicles, for your family’s assault on the shopping mall. Or $30,000 diamond bracelets. You can sell a man almost anything if he thinks it’s the Holy Grail, the source of the power of reconnection he needs.

All of these products are being sold as Holy Grails, as things that possess that kind of transcendent power we’re seeking. The advertisers are saying “Come on, buy this and you’ll have made it, man. You’ll have arrived. You’ll be saved.” And as long as we keep looking for salvation through outside things we’ll keep buying them, filling our garages with them, charging them on our credit cards, then forgetting about them because, somehow, they just didn’t give us that power after all.

The quest for the Holy Grail is the price we pay for remaining adolescents, for staying in a cartoon world. It’s a world, like the world of video games, of pure good against pure evil, where the answer to conflict is to destroy the opponent, to win the victory. And it defines more of our world and our economy than you can measure.

Right now, we have a president who speaks in terms of good against evil, where there are only two sides, one must be destroyed, where a massive bombing that will slaughter thousands of innocent women and children – and a few soldiers – in Iraq is referred to as an evening of “Shock and Awe.” Not violent, bloody murder and dismemberment, not the slaughter of the innocents, people who never harmed us – or the thousands of “human shields” who have now flown to Baghdad from all over the world. No, our government is describing the slaughter of these innocents in the adolescent language of video games: an evening of Shock and Awe. That is the quest for the Holy Grail, on the national level. The quest for power over people, for peace through pacification rather than through peaceful means, the quest for the power to invade any country at will, without provocation, and the feeling that this will lead to the ultimate kind of power – this is the quest for the Holy Grail, by wounded kings and wounded nations who have not understood and have not asked What does the Grail serve?

Well, they do ask it, and we ask it. But we think the answer is us: that the power serves whoever grabs it, however they get it. We think we are the center of the world, if we can compel or destroy all who oppose us. That’s the kind of power video games and action movies are about. It is not the kind of power the great myths are about. It is not the kind of power great religious insights are about. And it is not the kind of power than brings wholeness or salvation, only blood, terror, and retribution.

But the wounded kings do not know it.

I’m not taking liberties with this 800-year-old myth. This is what it is about. These are the dynamics of people seeking the wrong kind of power that the myth is about. And it insists that the salvation we seek can only come through asking the question no one is asking: What does the Grail serve? What does the power of life, God, the world, the universe – what does it serve? For the power must be reunited with what it serves, or the wound will remain and we will remain anxious, the most depressed nation on earth, the nation with the highest youth homicide rate in the world, the highest rate of imprisoning and executing our own citizens.

The quest for the Holy Grail, the drive to succeed, to control some of this power in some way, defines the adult lives of most men. It isn’t all bad. It motivates men, makes them work hard, succeed, provide a decent living for their families, offer some of life’s finer things to those they love. It isn’t all bad at all.

But there comes a time when men wonder if it’s enough.

In the old myth, the bubble is popped by a character called the Hideous Damsel. She brings the questions neither the king nor Parsifal have wanted to address their whole lives. She asks what they have done with their lives, why they think their lives have really been worth anything. She questions the worth of all their achievements, asks if this hasn’t just been a kind of game, without any real purpose.

These are the questions that today we identify as the male mid-life crisis. After working for twenty years and succeeding, men are plagued by the questions of whether they have really succeeded at all, or just spent their life chasing shadows. These questions are an invitation, finally, to bring the struggles inside, to do the self-examination needed to find whether this is, in fact, the kind of life they wanted. Hard questions. We’ll do almost anything to avoid them.

This is the time when many men, not surprisingly, try to find a new Fair Damsel to take their minds off the Hideous Damsel. Maybe if they can convince themselves they’re still young, they can start again with a new wife, a new family, and somehow take a path that won’t run into the questions of the Hideous Damsel down the road.

The role of the Hideous Damsel doesn’t have to be a woman, or even a person. Yes, it could be the man’s wife or mother, but it could also be his son or daughter, his best friend, a preacher or a therapist. Or it may have been a character in a movie he saw, like the movie “About Schmidt.” These are the events that play the role of the Hideous Damsels, asking the questions of what meaning his life had, and they suddenly hit him, and he realizes that he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know.

My own father turned this story into farce in his determination to avoid life’s hard questions. He married seven times. The last two Fair Maidens were mail-order brides from a magazine called “Foreign Women Who Want to Meet American Men.” His last marriage came at the age of 68, to a 28-year-old woman who wanted, perhaps desperately, to leave the Philippines. They had two young children together, now teenagers, which she raised alone after he died eleven years later.

But if men keep trying to relive their adolescent dreams, they never become whole. Salvation eludes them. What a frustrating labyrinth!

So what’s the answer? It’s really one answer, though it comes from many directions, many cultures. The subject, after all, is the same: the human condition, and what to do within it.

About 170 years ago the great Frenchman de Toqueville observed after his visit to America that we have a misleading idea at the very head of our Constitution: the pursuit of happiness. One can not pursue happiness, he thought; if he does he obscures it. If he will proceed with the human task of life, if he can relocate the center of gravity of his personality to something greater, outside himself, happiness will be the outcome.

Psychologist Erik Erikson wrote that as we get older, we must find a way to give back to the world, that our power and our work must finally be grounded in something transcendent like life or the world.

And where is this transcendence, this source of power, to be found? Again, one answer, many versions. A wonderful and unusual medieval Christian proverb says, “To search for God is to insult God.” A Chinese story tells of a fish that heard some men talking on a pier about a miraculous substance called water. This “water,” they were saying, could do everything: support you, transport you, nourish you, and it was abundantly plentiful. The fish was so intrigued! “Water,” it bubbled to itself, “why, I need some of that stuff!” So he called his fish friends together and announced he was going in quest of this wonderful water stuff. A few years later he returned, long fish beard, and his old friends gathered around him. “Well,” they asked, “did you find it? This “water” stuff: did you find it?” The old fish sighed. “Yes,” he said, “Yes, I found it. And you wouldn’t believe it, you just wouldn’t believe it!” And he swam slowly away. And the most advanced teaching of Hinduism is “That art Thou” – we are one with all that is, and our efforts and our lives need to serve it.

What does the Grail serve? The myth of the Holy Grail is Christian, so in their language they say the Grail serves God, that eventually all our power and all our efforts must be put in the service of God or we will never be whole, never find salvation.

But there are many other ways of saying this. We would agree with Tocqueville that the object of life is not happiness, but to serve life or the world. The creative powers of the universe, of life, created us, and we do not find our completion until we find a way of reconnecting, returning. The stardust wants its connection to the other stardust. The stuff of life wants to become one with life again. Hindus have another wonderful story of the salt doll who was also in search of this “water” stuff and made its way to the ocean. Now the salt doll was made entirely of salt. When it reached the ocean, it just waded right in – and began dissolving, of course. Just before it had completely dissolved, the last sound it was heard to make was a quiet “Aaahh!” We must return the power to its origins. The power serves the whole, not the parts.

This same motif appears in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, now a major motion picture nominated for several Academy Awards. The power must be taken from those who would exploit it. In the Grail myth the source of power is given to the representative of God. In Tolkien’s myth the ring of power is taken from evil hands that would use its power to destroy the world and is put back into the ground from which it came. Current myths often speak of returning power to the earth before we destroy ourselves. Jesus said “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do also to me.”

This isn’t mythology, it’s real life stuff. Bill Gates, the world’s richest man, has now put about twenty billion dollars into a foundation to help some of the weakest, poorest kids in the world. Why? Not for a tax write-off, I think, but because at some level he may know what the Grail serves, and is trying to find his own completion by serving it too. Former Austin resident and UT graduate Rene Zellweiger, who was just paid $10 million for her Oscar-nominated role in the movie “Chicago,” was on television the other day saying we must protest the injustices she feels our country is threatening to inflict on the world, and said she knows she will be arrested for these actions, but doesn’t care. She has gained great power and seems to know already that it is seductive, that she can’t be whole when the world is not. I do think many women see this sooner than most men.

I suspect this is the real motive behind a lot of philanthropy: the need to feel connected with the mysterious powers of life that created us, sustain us, and will claim us in the end.

We have a model of the famous labyrinth from France’s Chartres Cathedral in our social hall today. Millions of people have found walking the labyrinth to be a deeply spiritual experience. In a way, the plot of the labyrinth is the plot of the quest for the Holy Grail, and of this sermon. You start walking, and soon feel that you’re getting nearer and nearer to the center. Then suddenly you’re taken in the other direction, and are soon in the furthest ring from the center. This is like hearing the questions from the Hideous Damsel, wondering what your life has been about and whether it’s worth it. It’s easy to get depressed, or to want to start over and see if there isn’t a quicker route. But when you stay with it, the path turns toward the center and, with one detour, you’re suddenly there.

You don’t have to do it over again. You don’t have to start your life all over again, even if you could. You can do it from where you are right now. You just have to relocate the center of gravity of your personality, to put your soul in the service of that which is truly transcendent, ultimate, and enduring. This is what the great religions have always said. Always.

When you do it, return the power to the service of life, God, the world, when you re-center your soul’s quest around that, you’re suddenly home. It can be just that quick, just that quick: in the labyrinth, in life, and even in this sermon.

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© Davidson Loehr

9 March 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

INVOCATION:

We come to seek beyond sight,

 to listen beyond sounds,

 to be opened to life

 at levels sometimes comforting

 and sometimes disturbing

 but always in that neighborhood

 where our minds, hearts and souls

 find their common ground,

 and their common purpose.

It is good to be together again, for

It is a sacred time, this

And a sacred place, this:

a place for questions more profound than answers,

vulnerability more powerful than strength,

– and a peace that can pass all understanding.

It is a sacred time, this:

Let us begin it together in song.

CENTERING PRAYER:

I want to share with you a short prayer, a Yoruban prayer from Africa. Prayers often sound funny to many modern people, kind of foreign, as though they are talking to an imaginary friend up above the sky. This prayer can also be heard that way. But I invite you to let it get inside of you by asking to whom or to what, for you, could this prayer be addressed? It’s very short, I’ll read it twice:

O Divine One! I give thanks

 to You, the one who is as near as my

 heartbeat, and more anticipated than my

 next breath. Let Your wisdom become one

 with this vessel as I lift my voice in

 thanks for Your love.

O Divine One! I give thanks

to You, the one who is as near as my

heartbeat, and more anticipated than my

next breath. Let Your wisdom become one

with this vessel as I lift my voice in

thanks for Your love.

Amen.

SERMON: The Soul’s Code

We need a fresh way of looking at the importance of our lives. We need better stories, more interesting plots to live out.

I don’t say this only because I recently spent four days in Lubbock, though it is related. I gave four talks there, one on a theological argument for abortion to an audience of Texas Tech students where I got over an hour’s worth of questions, almost all of them hostile. Lubbock doesn’t permit sex education in its public schools. It also has the highest teen pregnancy rate in Texas, which has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the U.S., which has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the developed world. So it’s not surprising that they are living out of some pretty sad stories.

One young man told me that it didn’t bother him that some local 15-year-old girls were having their second child, or that Lubbock led the nation in births to teen-aged girls who can’t care for the babies, because “If even one of those babies comes to know the Lord, it will have been worth it.” Worth sacrificing thousands of human beings who, in his story, just don’t matter.

In some ways, this is a problem of organized religions, which have been in denial since the loss of the supernatural world. When God can be no more than a concept, the concept has had trouble competing with other, sometimes better, concepts, and stories to live by.

But it isn’t just organized religions that have trouble coming up with adequate stories. Yesterday I read in the new issue of Newsweek about a 52-year-old French chef who committed suicide because his restaurant lost its three-star rating. What was that story about? And the suicide rate of America’s teenagers is the highest in the developed world; so we have a lot of people without a story worth living by.

In some ways, the most important human question we have is “How do I put the pieces of my life and my world together into a coherent life? How do I find a story worth living out?”

Now consider this: What if we already carry within us a kind of dynamic force that can help lead us toward the kind of life story we need? What if the style of our integrity comes into the world with us, and we just need to learn how to hear it and listen to it?

What if you had a kind of guardian angel that was always with you? That knew your soul, that could help guide you toward authenticity? And what if it had a kind of invisible presence and power that could help you, hold you on course, help you be true to yourself, if you just stayed in touch with it?

This picture is what billions of people for thousands of years have believed was the true order of the universe. It isn’t quite the world of the gods, it’s more ancient than the gods. It’s the world of the invisible powers within our lives, both individually and collectively.

Since ancient times, most people have believed this is really the case. The Greeks spoke of the daimon that comes into the world with each person, and can guide us toward the kind of life we must lead. The Romans called this our genius. It didn’t have anything to do with I.Q., it had more to do with the word “genie,” from which it came. Our genie, or genius, was a kind of invisible spirit that’s a part of us. The great geniuses of history are people who have followed the lead of their most amazing genies. I’ve known just a few geniuses, and found them to be very driven people. They didn’t really have a choice, they had to do what they were doing. Those I knew did it better than almost anyone alive. The genie that drove them also blessed them. But we can all be blessed by our daimon, our genie, our soul.

Christians have this notion too, though it isn’t as intellectual. For centuries, Christians have written about our guardian angel, who acts just about like the daimon or the genius. And both Hindus and Buddhists talk about our karma as that invisible force that seems to contain our script, to point toward what we must do and how we must live.

A few years ago, this ancient theory was given another look by the Jungian psychologist James Hillman, in a book called The Soul’s Code. That code is the invisible sort of message we carry with us that can point us toward who we must try to become. Our soul, you understand, isn’t a kind of little bag of gas. It isn’t a “thing” in that way. It’s more like a moving style, the way we are, the way we need to be in order to be true to ourselves.

Though Hillman seems to dart in and out of supernaturalism when he writes, there is nothing spooky about this. A few weeks ago I talked about the fact we’ve all observed, that each animal, including us, comes into the world with a unique sort of character or style, and they always try to live in that style. It’s true with dogs, cats, horses and humans, nothing spooky about it, and that’s what the ancients were calling the daimon or genius or guardian angel though I don’t think dogs, cats and horses are presumed to have angels in Christianity.

James Hillman calls all this his Acorn Theory, which holds that each person has a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived. (p. 6) That’s the sense in which our character is our destiny. That’s the soul’s code.

Since this soul or genius is easiest to see in the really exemplary people where it is most dramatic, Hillman uses stories from some of their lives to make his theory come alive.

Consider this event. Amateur Night at the Harlem Opera House. A skinny, awkward sixteen-year-old goes fearfully onstage. She is announced to the crowd: “The next contestant is a young lady named Ella Fitzgerald. “Miss Fitzgerald here is gonna dance for us”. “Hold it, hold it. Now what’s your problem, honey?” Correction, folks. “Miss Fitzgerald has changed her mind.” She’s not gonna dance, she’s gonna sing.” Ella Fitzgerald gave three encores and won first prize. (10)

Or take the story of Golda Meir, who led Israel during the 1973 war. Her career was launched by her soul’s calling while in fourth grade in the Milwaukee public schools. She organized a protest group against the required purchase of schoolbooks, which were too expensive for the poorer children, who were thus denied equal opportunity to learn. This child of eleven rented a hall to stage a meeting, raised funds, gathered her group of girls, prepped her little sister to declaim a social poem in Yiddish, and then herself addressed the assembly. Was she not already a Labor party prime minister? (20)

When you see a story this dramatic begin to unfold, it is just mesmerizing, though I think many of us experience something similar, if less dramatic. The highlight of my four days in Lubbock was a young woman who may well belong in this kind of company. Her name is Shelby Knox, and she spoke very boldly and articulately about the need for sex education in public schools. In fact, she presented her speech to the National Education Association two years ago, followed by a camera crew from HBO, which is filming a documentary on her because two years ago when she delivered that speech, she was fourteen.

My hosts invited her to a dinner with some of us, and I had a chance to experience this girl first-hand. She knows exactly who she is and what she must do, and has absolutely no doubts that she will do it. She has a 4.0 grade average, and after she graduates from high school in 2005, she plans to attend either New York University or American University and begin to learn how to change the direction of politics, our country, and perhaps the world. I wouldn’t bet against her.

She reminded me of the theme of this sermon, so I talked with her about this acorn theory, and she identified with it immediately. Before she knew who she was and what she must do, she said she was confused and scared. But then after she turned eleven, everything became clear. She discovered an inner beacon that shines like a laser beam.

She reminded me of the story of the greatest of all Spanish bullfighters, Manolete. As a child, Manolete was timid and fearful, delicate and sickly, interested only in painting and reading. He clung so tightly to his mother’s apron strings that his sisters and other children used to tease him. He rarely joined other boys’ games of soccer or playing at bullfighting. This all changed when he was about eleven, and for the rest of his life, nothing else mattered much except the bulls. (15-16)

Don’t let this sound spooky. We live among a throng of invisibles that order us about: family values, self-development, human relationships, personal happiness, and then another, more fierce set of mythical figures called Control, Success, Cost-Effectiveness, and the Economy. Were we in old Florence or ancient Rome or Athens, the invisibles would have statues and altars, or at least painted images, like the ancient invisibles called fortune, Hope, Friendship, Grace, Modesty, Persuasion, and the rest. But our task here is not to restore all the invisibles but to discriminate among them by attending to the one that once was called your daimon or genius, sometimes your soul or your fate, or your acorn. (96)

In ancient times, the world had been permeated with invisibilities, a condition that Christianity called paganism. (111) Throughout history though, in almost all cultures, people have had ways of relating to the invisible forces that help guide and inspire their lives. That’s what prayers are really about, too. At their worst, prayers sound like selfish petitions for supernatural powers to do favors for us. Sometimes, they’re just poetic thanks for being alive. But at their best, I think prayers are our efforts to stay in touch with the powerful but invisible dimensions of life that seem to know our name, know our story, have our best interests at heart, and hints of our best kind of future.

That’s what I think the African prayer was about that I used this morning. If I think of it as referring to somebody up above the sky, it makes no sense. But if I think of it as trying to communicate with my own soul, with the angels of my better nature, with the source of wisdom inside of me that knows my name and who I need to be, then suddenly the prayer becomes real and honest in a new way.

Listen to it again in this way, as a way of your speaking to whatever it is that you do count on for the wisdom, the direction, and the courage to guide your life, and see if it doesn’t speak to you:

O Divine One! I give thanks

to You, the one who is as near as my

heartbeat, and more anticipated than my

next breath. Let Your wisdom become one

with this vessel as I lift my voice in

thanks for Your love.

Amen.

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© Davidson Loehr

23 February 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Four Part Series

In the Beginning

Original Sins and Blessings

Reconsidering the Concept of God

The Legitimate Heir to Salvation

Introduction

With every new revelation of the Homeland Security Act that appears, it seems clear that individual and civil rights are being threatened wholesale, while few seem to notice. The second section of this act, which a guest discussed with Bill Moyers a week ago on his NOW program, makes it clear that the government can declare war against not only sovereign nations without provocation, but that they can also declare war against individual citizens of this country. I know some people who scoff at this, saying only a paranoid individual would think the government would really do things like this that are characteristic of fascist governments but not democracies. Maybe. Maybe we’ll just have to differ on that.

But with or without paranoia, I’ve been thinking all week of the few famous lines written almost sixty years ago by pastor Martin Niemoller, after the fall of the Nazi movement in his Germany. He had been an outspoken critic of both Hitler and the Nazis almost from the start, and ended the war in the concentration camp at Dachau, freed by the American army shortly before he was to be executed.

In 1945, he wrote this short confession which has been quoted thousands of times, and which is beginning to appear in e-mails and critical news stories. I want to remind us of it:

Prayer

Martin Niemoller

First they came for the Communists,

and I didn’t speak up,

because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,

and I didn’t speak up,

because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics,

and I didn’t speak up,

because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me,

and by that time there was no one

left to speak up for me.

For me, Niemoller’s warning applies to religion as well as it does to politics: maybe more. And the soul of his message is one Jesus put in even fewer words: We are all our brother’s and our sister’s keepers. We are all our brother’s and our sister’s keepers.

SERMON

Since I didn’t grow up in a conservative religion, most religious jargon isn’t loaded for me. So I usually think of the word “God” as a symbol for our highest ideals and values. And I think of the word “salvation” in its original meaning: as health, wholeness (it comes from the same Latin root as “salve”). For me, the terms are kind of safe and abstract.

But when I hear many of your stories about why you left the churches of your childhood, or why your family avoided churches altogether, I realize that in the real world, “salvation” had a very different meaning, and not a very positive one. It meant getting a group’s or a church’s acceptance only as long as you agreed not to think outside the lines drawn by their orthodoxy. Neither my definition of God or of salvation would have worked in those churches. That’s partly why I grew up unchurched: I didn’t respect the few churches I tried.

I can’t count the number of times I have heard Unitarians talk about how they felt when they knew they had to leave their old church. Some felt angry, some felt hurt, to realize that they couldn’t stay because they didn’t believe those things, and it wasn’t safe to say so out loud. Not that you’d be shot, but people would look at you funny if you had said you weren’t so sure about this God-stuff. They might have called you an atheist or a heretic, as though that were a bad thing. And they would have made you uncomfortable, as though you weren’t quite clean any more. So you left. It’s also why so many people – a majority of U.S. citizens – neither attend nor trust churches. The gods are the hand puppets of those who speak for them, and salvation is your reward for going along with their game.

So I suppose what I really want to talk about here isn’t salvation, but the legitimate heir to what was once called salvation. I love that phrase, and want to footnote it. It comes from my favorite philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), the thinker on whom I wrote my dissertation. I’d rate him as one of the four best philosophers in history (Plato, Aristotle, and Kant). When people finally understand him widely, it might change the nature of philosophy, and religion, in fundamental ways. At some point during his teaching years at Cambridge, another philosopher (could have been Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, or G.E. Moore, I forget) asked him what it was that he was doing: “It’s certainly not philosophy!” Wittgenstein’s response was “Perhaps not, but it’s the legitimate heir to what was once called philosophy.” Now I want to talk for these few minutes about the legitimate heir to salvation.

There are two facets to salvation, and it’s easy to emphasize the wrong one by thinking that all we have to do is just be honest and open about what we really believe, try to fashion beliefs that are true to both our heads and our hearts, then try to live them. But that’s the easy part, the part we don’t have to worry much about. Every one of you already has your sense of questions, yearnings, your way of saying what you do and don’t believe.

The second part of this salvation business – and the most important and most fragile part – is the thing Martin Niemoller was talking about in this morning’s prayer. It is a kind of atmosphere within which it is safe to voice your beliefs, whether theological, social, moral or political, without being made to feel that you are a second-class person, or a member of The Damned. That atmosphere is what was lacking in whatever church you felt you had to leave. Why was it lacking? Because are rules in all churches, and the church that offended you probably had the wrong rules.

In theological terms, these rules can be called an orthodoxy: a set of beliefs endorsed by a group, and used as the boundaries of permissible belief for everyone in the religion. Once an orthodoxy is in place, the choices are closed, even if you hadn’t finished choosing yet. And the theological word for choosing after some group has set up an orthodoxy is heresy. It comes from a Greek verb meaning, “to choose.” So heresy is only considered bad by those who closed off the choices before you were done. When you look at it this way, heresy is the sacred thing, and orthodoxy is the blasphemy. Heresy is the Holy Spirit, alive and well, helping you find beliefs that can make you whole. Orthodoxy is a kind of groupthink that would cut you – and God – down to the group’s size.

The Greeks had a different image for orthodoxy, in their story of Procrustes. He was this man with an iron bed. He was very friendly to his visitors, always offering them that bed to sleep on. But once on it, he tied them down, then either stretched them to fit the bed or cut off whatever parts hung over. He had his iron bed, and everyone had to fit it. That’s orthodoxy.

Another image comes from the television series “Star Trek.” It’s the group known collectively as The Borg. I suspect more of you watch Star Trek than read Greek mythology, so you probably know about the Borg. They are a kind of group, or cult, that simply assimilates everyone into them, erasing individual differences and essentially giving everyone the soul of the group, the collective, the cult, the Borg.

And that word “cult” is another one referring to the biggest obstacle to finding your salvation in a church. A couple weeks ago I was invited to a lunch with Daniel McGuire, a Jesuit scholar brought to town by Planned Parenthood to talk about religious sanctions for both family planning and abortion.

During his luncheon talk, he referred to his church, the Catholic Church, as a cult. This shocked one Catholic woman there, who asked what he meant. A cult, he said, takes away your beliefs and gives you theirs. It assigns authority only to its own teachings, draws the boundaries on what it is permissible to think, and seeks to exclude those who do not conform. In that sense, he said, the Church has always been a cult, and has always been an obstacle to salvation. And he pointed out what every religion student knows: that virtually every famous religious thinker in history was a heretic in their day, because they went beyond the beliefs accepted by their group. My favorite sound byte of the day was when he defined conservatives as “worshipers of dead liberals.”

I think all these images are good ones. So think of it as an orthodoxy, a Procrustean habit of cutting you down to fit someone else’s bed, of the Borg ignoring and absorbing your soul and giving you its own impersonal soul; or think of it as a cult that limits the acceptable beliefs to those that stay within the boundaries set out by whatever people got to define the beliefs of the cult, and turn the institution into their hand-puppet. Whatever you call it, it is the mortal enemy of your ability to find salvation in that community.

Think back on the anger or pain you felt in a church that wasn’t big enough for your questions or your beliefs, and see if this doesn’t describe it. You were being cut down to something so small your soul wouldn’t fit. Once the boundaries are drawn, once the “right” beliefs and opinions have been defined, everyone else becomes a second-class citizen, and slightly unclean. I know that you know the feeling, that all of us have experienced it at some time.

The most important facet of a quest for wholeness, authenticity, integrity, salvation, is the kind of atmosphere within which all sincere beliefs are equally welcome, equally “clean.” Without that atmosphere, no community is finally safe. Then it’s like Martin Niemoller wrote about in the confession of his that I used as our prayer this morning:

First they came for the Communists,

and I didn’t speak up,

because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,

and I didn’t speak up,

because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics,

and I didn’t speak up,

because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me,

and by that time there was no one

left to speak up for me.

That atmosphere was shattered, and so no one could be safe, let alone made whole or healthy.

I’m betting that none of you would have left your former church if they had been able to say “Look, we’re trying to explore what it means to be most fully alive and human, as individuals, partners, parents and citizens. Our tradition has had the habit of doing this in God-talk, or in terms of Buddha or Krishna and Brahman. But these are just ways of speaking. If you would put these common goals differently, please do. They’re only ways of talking, after all, not sacred words. And the more ways we can say it, the more likely we really know what we’re talking about. We’re enriched by a true diversity of beliefs on ultimate questions, so welcome!”

That’s the atmosphere I mean: the atmosphere or culture of the place that keeps all sincere opinions equally welcome. This doesn’t mean you have to respect those opinions, understand! Opinions have to get their respect the old-fashioned way: they have to earn it, in open dialogue. And I’m not talking about frivolous, narcissistic or sociopathic opinions – I’m remembering a church I knew where a disturbed member wanted to host a discussion group on the joys of pedophilia! But the people who hold sincere opinions have to feel welcome and “clean.”

Too often, to find yourself and your beliefs, you have to leave the community that wants to cut you down to fit their iron bed. We’ve had a couple examples of this in Austin, both involving Baptist churches. Several years ago, the minister of University Baptist Church had a story about him on the front page of the New York Times because that church ordained a gay deacon, in violation of the new orthodoxy of the Southern Baptist Convention. As a result, in order to live out their beliefs, they withdrew from the SBC.

And last year it happened again, when the First Baptist Church downtown withdrew from the SBC rather than conform to beliefs they felt were small and mean. The choices had been closed before they had finished choosing.

One of the least attractive things about human nature is our undying desire to make the world in the image of our beliefs: to turn our gods and our institutions into our hand puppets. If those beliefs are truly expansive and inclusive, that might be a good world. But they almost never are. They’re almost always partisan, following the party lines of some theology, some social ideology, some political platform. Iron beds. Iron beds, all of them. And the most abiding and mortal enemy of both the human spirit and the Holy Spirit.

Nearly all the great religious figures had to leave their communities in order to be saved, in order to find their distinctive wholeness and authenticity. Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, all of them. And it’s true on a less cosmic scale, too. In the Unitarian tradition, we celebrate the courage of a Congregationalist minister named William Ellery Channing, who defined a nonsupernatural Unitarian Christianity back in 1819, and is cited as the first American-born Unitarian.

But we almost never tell the other story about Channing, one that’s really more to the point for us. And that’s that at the end of his career, he resigned from the Unitarian church he had served his whole adult life, because they drew up a creed of expected beliefs for their members. He would not be spoken for, and he could remain whole only by leaving the church he had served for decades. His church became a cult, another iron bed, and he left rather than being absorbed by the Borg.

It can happen so easily. That expansive atmosphere is so very fragile, so easily destroyed. During graduate school, I attended an unusually liberal Christian church because it was healthier than the Unitarian church a block away. They really did welcome all beliefs, and said so. They practiced an open communion, the only time in my life I took communion.

It was hard sometimes being clear about just where the boundaries were there, whether anything could be presumed about all the members. Some of the more rigid Christians were always trying to bring back confessional tests of faith. Finally, someone suggested to the board that the church say that whatever beliefs people had, we could all agree that our primary purpose was to help establish the kingdom of God.

That was a metaphor for the best kind of world, the world with the most justice, fairness, and compassion. The church was involved in social activism, and the board thought it fit. I was doing my student internship there, and I thought it fit too. After all, how could that metaphor be turned into something small and scary?

It didn’t take long to find out. It was done by a man named Dan, a student preparing for the ministry. Dan was perhaps the most dedicated and courageous social activist I’ve ever met. He marched, and was arrested with, Chicago union workers in their strikes. He and his wife learned Spanish and spent dangerous weeks in both Guatemala and Nicaragua during the 1980s when Reagan’s Contras were killing so many people there. Dan was a good, brave man. He was very active in Chicago politics, too.

So nobody saw it coming when he stood one Sunday during Prayers of the People to remind us that we all agreed we were there to help establish the kingdom of God. Then he reminded us that Tuesday was Election Day, and said, “You will either be working for or against the kingdom of God Tuesday. If you vote Democratic, you are working for the kingdom of God. Otherwise, you are an enemy of God’s kingdom. Remember that!”

Everyone was stunned. No one ever successfully confronted Dan, because he knew he was right, and right for the whole church. For my remaining three years there, the church was never quite the same. The next year a retired professor announced, during a week that he stood at the table for our monthly Communion, that Communion was a Christian sacrament, and as such was open to all Christians who had accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. That really finished it. That fragile atmosphere was shattered, and no one knew how to repair it. Some of us just left, and no longer had a church.

Don’t think this sort of thing happens only in Christian churches. It’s part of human nature, it happens everywhere. I know this first-hand, because I served a church where this liberal atmosphere necessary for the legitimate heir to salvation was shattered. There was a small group of secular humanists, about 5% of the church, who were unhappy with a style of liberal religion that used a lot of ways of talking about religious questions.

Finally, they got three of their group on the board, and one bullied the others into making him president of the board. Within a few months, he gave me a small piece of paper with a list of words I was told that I was not to use from the pulpit. The list included words like soul, spirit, God, and miracle. He insisted that I still had freedom of the pulpit, but said those words offended the humanists, and my job as a minister was to care for their feelings, so to be an adequate minister I couldn’t use those words.

Of course, I did use those words. I would be a liberal even if I were the only one in the room. An increasingly vicious fight went on for over two years. They were so sure they were right that one of them finally made a public death threat against me, in front of a board member and the church administrator. I preached the second service that morning while police were outside taking statements. That’s a cult.

I had a nine-year-old stepdaughter who said she was sick, and missed the next week of school. When she still didn’t want to return to school the following Sunday, we finally thought to ask her why she didn’t want to go to school: “I’m afraid they’ll kill me too,” she said. Since cults serve themselves rather than truth or life, they can do great harm, and cause great “collateral damage.” The attendance at that church is now about half what it was ten years ago. Once that fragile atmosphere is destroyed, it can be almost impossible to create again, even ten years later.

The most dangerous people on earth are those who think something is so simple there is only one right position, which coincidentally happens to be theirs. In religion’s orthodoxies and cults, in political systems that claim the right to arrest dissenters, or in other social, theological or cultural ideologies that work like the Borg.

The reason it is so easy for us to recognize images like Procrustes’ Iron Bed, cults, or the Borg is because all of these come from something deep within our human nature. Dangerous, but absolutely natural. We would all be most comfortable in a world where we got to prescribe some basic beliefs and values for others, just as our gods become the hand puppets of those who speak for them. We create orthodoxies at the drop of a hat: theological, political, social, even down to dress codes.

Salvation is like democracy: only eternal vigilance can make it possible. So here you are in this very liberal church. Among your questions, you may wonder what you need to do to make this a place that can provide the legitimate heir to salvation. Remember salvation has two parts. The first is that you have to bring your own questions, your own beliefs, and be willing to work on them until they feel adequate to live by, then keep working on them as long as you want to keep growing.

I don’t worry about that one. You bring your questions with you, and aren’t likely to be talked out of them, here or anywhere.

But the other one, the maintenance of that fragile atmosphere within which all sincere beliefs are equally welcome and equally “clean” – that’s where you owe something here. That’s where you owe your own vigilance, to counter that unquenchable desire we all have subtly to trim the acceptable beliefs to fit the bed in which we’ve grown so comfortable.

I think the legitimate heir to salvation is only available in healthy liberal churches. And they are only healthy if that invisible, fragile, life-giving atmosphere is preserved, within which all sincere religious, political or moral beliefs are equally welcomed into dialogue in a community of moral equals who will ultimately never agree on the best way to be saved.

And what is it? How else can it be put? I think there is something about this “legitimate heir to what was once called salvation” that is more advanced and challenging than the mere notion of salvation, even in its traditional liberal interpretations (health, wholeness, integrity, authenticity, etc.).

It goes beyond mere salvation to say that even more important than our own growth is our duty – it is a sacred duty – to preserve and maintain that fragile liberal atmosphere within which all may freely pursue their different paths to the kind of wholeness we call salvation. The Buddhists speak of the sangha, or sacred community, as one of the essential parts of enlightenment. Some very few might do it alone, but most of us need to be part of a community of seekers, people who know to regard ultimate concerns as ultimate rather than secondary, as society does. Our spiritual roots grow deep and our branches reach high only in serious soil, in a “garden” kept safe by the mutual protection of all in the community who know – as Martin Niemoller learned the hard way – that finally none can be free or safe unless all are free and safe.

There is an ancient image for the understanding of “truth” that underlies this picture: it’s the old Indian story of the blind people and the elephant. The “elephant” is life, in all its complexity and mystery. Each “blind person” is one person, or even one discipline (psychology, geology, theology, history, etc.). They can see only what the deep biases of their discipline (or their personal biography) permit. No one will ever see the whole “elephant”: it isn’t a problem that existed only because the ancients were ignorant while we are smart. And even if it were possible to see every possible view, understand all disciplines with something to say about life and the human condition, it would still be paltry. In terms of the metaphor, you can’t understand an elephant unless you are the elephant – and even then, you’d be only one “elephant”: there are so many more.

The legitimate heir to what was once called salvation exists in a pluralistic world where humility is part of the whole intellectual and spiritual enterprise and where, because of this, all sincere beliefs, investigations, perspectives and feelings must be allowed into the never-ending open discussions about life’s ultimate concerns. And they can not be welcome unless we in the spiritual community, the sangha, covenant to protect and defend that essential, life-giving, fragile atmosphere within which all sincere people and opinions are welcomed into both discussion and fellowship.

If I understand the teachings of Jesus right, he would have called this the kingdom of God. Buddha might have called it a community of the enlightened who recognize the Buddha-seeds in all others, and who protect and nurture those precious seeds.

Joseph Campbell once said that an authentic person rejuvenates the world. They really do. Imagine what an authentic community might do!

The fact that your political or religious beliefs don’t work for me should be all the proof I need that mine aren’t likely to work for you. It sounds, and is, a bit messy. But that’s the mess of people trusted with their freedom. In a church where all sincere beliefs are equally welcomed into dialogue, we can find – if not salvation, then the legitimate heir to what was once called salvation. In fact, it is the only kind of church where we can find it.

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© Davidson Loehr

16 February 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Four Part Series

In the Beginning

Original Sins and Blessings

Reconsidering the Concept of God

The Legitimate Heir to Salvation

PRAYER

A. Powell Davies

May the life of our minds and breath of our being bring us once more to full remembrance of our greater calling. Strangely do we walk through the days of our years, unseeing, unhearing, inattentive, and the glory of life is all about us and we do not know that it is there. We wrap ourselves up in the petty and the trivial, and sometimes even in the mean and sordid, shutting out life’s promise. We are afraid of life – afraid of its truth and goodness and its mighty claim upon us – and we wall ourselves in, thinking to be safe: and so we scarcely live at all.

Oh, may the walls be broken down! Let winds that have swept the far horizons blow now upon the barriers that we have built to keep us paltry! Let them all be swept away! That the light of the heavens may light our lives, the vision of good enlarge our minds, and the love of all that is noble and true find room in our hearts.

How vain are all our hopes, how empty all our prayers, until we ourselves are ready to fulfill them.

SERMON: Reconsidering the Concept of God

The hymn we just sang was in 7/4 time. It’s an odd meter, you almost never hear or sing it, and it feels like you’re in strange territory, doing something you shouldn’t be. This sermon may strike you that way, too. How often have you even thought of reconsidering the concept of God?

God is discussed in our culture like a cartoon character, like a Critter. Almost the only “theological” question anyone thinks to ask is “Do you believe in God?” That’s a question that only makes sense if God is a kind of Critter. Then it’s like a simple true-false quiz: “God is a big Critter living up there somewhere: Yes or No?” And that’s really dumb.

So let’s get straight from the beginning. God is not and has never been a Critter, or a “being” of any kind that would have weight or occupy space. That’s Disneyworld, not religion. God is an idea, a concept. And theological questions are about the content and style of the concept, and it relevance to life.

Still, it may feel like we’re trying to dance in 7/4 time. So let’s start with a story.

One of my favorite stories from any religious scripture is the ancient story in the Bible of Jacob wrestling with God. Technically, it wasn’t God he was wrestling with, just a local deity guarding the river he wanted to cross. That’s how we know what an ancient story this is. People used to believe that all boundaries were guarded by spirits, that to cross over, to grow beyond a boundary, you had to wrestle with the god that guarded that boundary.

Modern psychologists also know this is true. To grow beyond a boundary that’s kept us too small, too ignorant, too enslaved, we must be willing to wrestle with the gods that guard that boundary.

That’s kind of what we’re about this morning: wrestling with concepts of God that are unhealthy and small, that enslave rather than empower.

Still, it’s a risky thing to do. In the Jacob story, he held on all night, finally receiving the blessing of the god and the ability to cross over the river, and even getting a new name: Israel, the father of the Twelve Tribes. But he was wounded in the struggle, and came out with a limp. He had that limp for the rest of his life. So it’s risky. But we’re brave. Besides, we’re just pretending. Maybe.

I’m trying to do something hard as well as odd: I want to persuade you of something you need to know about gods by convincing you that it’s something you already know. And that is that all gods are more like hand puppets than they are like puppeteers. Everyone who tells you what God is like or what God wants or says is using the concept like a hand puppet, either creating or choosing which words their God can and can’t say. So whether it’s a decent God usually depends on whose hands he’s in.

I want to persuade you that you know the difference between healthy concepts and bogus ones, and that only you can decide whether a god is good or bad, is worth serving with your life or not. I want to show you that the power is in you, not in the gods, and want to convince you that you have known this, at some level, all along.

Here’s what you already know: we already and automatically wrestle with almost every authority claiming power over us. For instance:

1. Automakers routinely tell us their machines are perfectly safe. But both governmental and private firms are always testing them, always doubting that they’re really telling us the truth, and are routinely exposing the design flaws the manufacturers were covering up. Why did they cover them up? Because it benefited them, even though it didn’t benefit us. But we check it out, because lives are at stake.

2. Or think about food. Governmental and private agencies are routinely inspecting the meat supplies and waste disposal processes at our largest food processing plants. The owners always tell us the meat and food are perfectly safe. But we know they have millions of dollars at stake, and we know they can and do lie to benefit themselves. So we expose a hundred tons of hamburger with e-coli, or Mad Cow Disease or other dangerous or deadly problems. The fact that an authoritative voice wearing a suit or a white lab coat tells us it’s safe doesn’t fool us until we have checked it out through our own agencies. Lives are at stake.

3. Or pharmaceuticals. To pick just one, I remember when the manufacturers of Fen-Phen were on trial, how they insisted that the drugs were just effective weight-reducing aids with no serious side effects, that they had done extensive testing, that everyone was safe. But the FDA wouldn’t take their word for it. They did independent tests and found that Fen-Phen damaged heart valves and could be fatal. A member of this church died here a year ago from heart damage from Fen-Phen. Authoritative people lie. Even if they really believe what they’re saying, we know they could be wrong. So we check it. Because lives are at stake.

The Three-Step

All of these claims and investigations have three parts. In every case I know of, all the truths, beliefs and gods we create have the same three steps. Just knowing them can give you a kind of User’s Guide to Hokum. Here is the three-step process by which truths and beliefs and gods are created. I won’t go through the steps in order, because the first step is invisible. It has to be invisible for the game to work.

The second step is that a company spokesman or other authoritative-looking person tells us something is true.

The third step is that they then say that, because it is true, we should go along with it, and everything will be all right.

But what all our investigations show is that there is a first step that they kept invisible. And the first step is that there is a set of facts or a state of affairs that would empower or enrich them, if it were really true. They have a stake in it; it’s how they see the world.

So the whole three-step process goes like this:

1. First, I want you to believe something because if you do it will empower or enrich me, or will confirm my view of the world.

2. Second, I convince myself, then tell you, that this is true and good and safe.

3. And third, since it is true and good and safe, you should follow it.

But when we want to know whether it’s really true or good or safe, we check it out. You don’t ask true believers to investigate their own truth-claims. You don’t ask Ford executives whether the gas tanks on its Pintos are really safe. You don’t ask the manufacturers of SUV’s whether they have a high likelihood of tipping over and injuring or killing the passengers. You don’t ask the manager of a Jack in the Box whether it’s safe to eat his hamburgers. You ask a nonbeliever. An outsider. You ask someone who has left the Garden of Eden, who can tell the difference between fact and fiction, good and evil, and let them investigate.

And that’s how we find out what we feel most safe believing is really true. This process looks a lot like the scientific method. Someone proposes a theory and says it’s true. So immediately other scientists who don’t believe the theory run the same experiments to see if the results are the same for nonbelievers. If not, the theory is false. If so, it may be true, at least for now.

And we do these tests, every day, because there are lives at stake. Now you already knew all of this. No news here. But this is how virtually every truth and every religious belief works, through the same three steps, with the same need for checking by unbelievers to see if it’s true or just familiar and convenient to the true believers.

We seem hardwired to respond to authoritative people and voices, so we are easy to fool. Advertising agencies, political advisors and slick preachers all count on it. I’ll tell you one more story that makes this point in a particularly enlightening way. You’ll be able to spot all three steps, with the invisible first step last, in an exceptionally clear and dramatic form:

The story is one Joseph Campbell told, about a tribe in Australia whose social order was maintained with the aid of “bullroarers.” These are long flat boards with a couple slits cut in them, which have a rope tied to the other end, and are swung around over one’s head, producing an eerie low kind of humming sound that seems quite otherworldly. When the gods were angry with the tribe, the gods would sound the bullroarers in the woods at night. No one, of course, ever saw them do this. The next day, the males of the tribe would explain what that gods were angry about, and what behaviors had to change.

This was far more than just a game. Campbell reports the time that a chief’s daughter found his bullroarer under his sleeping pad, brought it out and asked what it was: the chief killed her for violating this sacred object.

But the revelation comes at a key moment during the initiation of young men into manhood in the tribe. It’s all very dramatic, and very ritualized. In the evening, some of the tribe’s men, wearing masks, come to kidnap the young boy. The women pretend to defend him, though they know the routine, and eventually the men overpower them and drag the boy into the woods.

Once there, the boy is tied to a table, and a frightening and bloody initiation rite takes place. Technically, it’s called subincision, which means that, using a flint knife, a slit is made the length of the underside of the boy’s penis. (Men who have been through this have said that this makes them complete, with the genital marks of both a male and a female.)

But the revelation comes at the end. One of the men dips the end of the bullroarer in the boy’s blood, brings it up near his face, then removes his mask – so the boy will recognize him as a man he’s known all his life – and says the magical words: “We make the noises!” We make the noises we attribute to the gods. It’s equally true everywhere, it’s just seldom acknowledged as openly.

That’s what our independent investigations of defective cars, infected hamburger and deadly pharmaceuticals reveals, too. The authorities with the most to gain are the ones who make the noises saying we should believe them. And we have learned not to believe them until we have checked it out for ourselves. This is how concepts of gods are created.

There are thousands of examples from religion. To keep it manageable, I’ll only take three, and just take them from the Hebrew Scriptures that are common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All three of these come from the book of Deuteronomy, chapters 20 to 22. You can find dozens more like these in that book:

1. If a man is found lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die. (Deuteronomy 22:22)

2. If upon marriage it is discovered that a woman isn’t a virgin, the men of the city shall stone her to death. (Deut. 22: 20-21)

3.If a son is stubborn and won’t obey his parents, then his parents will bring him to the elders at the city gate and the men of the city will stone him to death. (Deut. 21:18-21, all RSV)

When you hear such things, you know that’s a horrible concept of God that no decent or healthy person would admit into their lives. Even those bible-shaking preachers who insist that every word of the Bible is literally true never seem to quote these lines. They don’t believe them, either, and would regard anyone who acted on them as psychopathic or worse.

And we know it too, intuitively. You hear this ancient speaker claiming that these things are the word of God and so you should obey them. But instinctively, you know better. Every parent of rebellious teen-agers can understand the frustration in that last one. But every parent knows that anyone who actually did that, who actually had their own child murdered, was a repugnant person following a repugnant god, not a god of life or truth or wholeness. You sense that these awful sayings must have originated in a particular time and place maybe 2500 years ago, where whoever made them up was having trouble with authority or social control, so put those bloody words in the mouth of his god, trying to give authority to them.

Last week, I talked about escaping from the fool’s paradise pictured as the Garden of Eden. For the first four centuries of Christianity, eating the apple was celebrated as the human freedom that let us learn about good and evil. Seen this way, it’s a profound myth, saying that the price of growing up and learning to make necessary distinctions expels us from a child’s kind of paradise.

This is the same kind of story. Only by doubting the authorities – in food production, car production, drug production or god production – and trying to find out for ourselves what is good and what is evil, only by doing that can we ever escape from the fool’s paradise of believing that all advertising companies, politicians and preachers are trying to empower us rather than themselves.

So far, this sounds like a simple story of courage, of challenging authorities, defeating them, and exulting in triumph – like a bad martial-arts movie. But that’s not all there is to it. Because every time we find another manufacturer’s claims proven false, every time another group of politicians is caught lying to us, every time religious claims are shown to have been false and self-serving, we lose some of our naivete and our trust.

That’s the price of leaving paradise, the price of leaving Eden. Wrestling with gods usually leaves us with a limp. It’s never a cheap victory. Remember when you stopped believing there was this one Santa Claus guy who came down every chimney bringing presents to every child every Christmas – even though you didn’t have a chimney? Remember what you lost? Some people mark that as the end of their naive childhood.

And what happens when you reconsider the concept of God? You look at whose hands God has been in, and suddenly God looks more like a hand puppet than a puppeteer. You investigate and you realize God was never making the noises. People were making the noises: parents, preachers, politicians, people with their own agenda for you. They made the noises they had been taught to make. Maybe they even believed them. But what happens when you realize they were not true?

This three-step model isn’t one I made up. It’s taught in the best divinity schools and sociology departments, and has been for a quarter century or more. And when you understand how it works, you realize that it creates a dilemma for us, especially in the field of religion.

On the one hand, if you forget about the invisible first step, and simply internalize and obey the “truths” you are taught, eventually they will not fit the times, the situations, or you. Then they become kind of demonic – as they would if anyone really took the instructions in those examples from the book of Deuteronomy seriously.

On the other hand, if you take the liberal route, if you challenge and debunk those claims for truth or God, then in some ways the price is even steeper, and the limp is even greater. For if even the idea of God you’ve taught can be wrong, that what can’t be wrong? How and where could you ever again find absolutely unshakable certainty? And where, then, would you find your moral bearing?

You can lose faith in God. Do you also lose faith in even the idea of God? Many do. You don’t think that’s a limp? It’s a limp. Do you lose faith even in the idea of truth, or goodness, justice or beauty? That’s worse than a limp. Don’t do that.

You can always try to return to the fool’s paradise where you stay ignorant and don’t learn the difference. But the God in the Eden story was also created by priests and tribal chiefs who were served by that compliant ignorance. Why would you want to exalt them, or their self-serving idea of God? You might as well wrestle with God yourself, and cross over.

But crossing over, wrestling with God, isn’t cheap. For God is like Santa Claus in that way. You lost the child’s magical Santa when your eyes were opened. And you lose the child’s magical god in the same way – by having your eyes opened and realizing that we make the noises.

To wrestle with our gods is often to wind up disillusioned. I’ve had ministers tell me that’s why they don’t encourage their people to question the concept of God too deeply: they’re afraid they’ll become disillusioned. That sounds bad. But think about it: Is being disillusioned really worse than being “illusioned”? I’d think, if you’re illusioned, you’d want to get disillusioned! Or you can get cynical or desperate, thinking that nothing, after all, is sacred but the integrity of your own mind. But that isn’t true either.

To wrestle with the concept of God and win, I think we need to be armed with some of the things we’ve been examining in the last two sermons:

that we are made of stardust, we are deeply at home in the universe, intimately tied to everything, that the dynamic power of the universe is also in us, and that part of our destiny lies in reclaiming our noble origins.

that all life on earth is linked, too. We are not alone here, we are connected as members of a family, all the way down. All people are our brothers and sisters. Here, in Iraq, in Nicaragua, everywhere.

And we need to remember that authoritative claims that would take away our power and dignity and transfer them to others are always lies, lies and blasphemies against life and truth and everything that is whole and holy.

Wrestling with the concept of God grants us both honor, and a task. Since we make the noises, it is now up to us to see that those noises are sacred noises: noises of truth that empower, not that enslave, truth that sets us free, not that puts us or others in heavier chains.

Part of growing up religiously is escaping from a child’s Garden of Eden, understanding who makes the noises, and understanding that most of our truths and most of our gods are the hand puppets of the politicians, preachers and churches who benefit from using their voice to control people. Those are false gods and need to be unmasked. But there is still wonder and miracle and mystery, and the magic of transformation in the world. We lose an excuse not to act. We lose an excuse for not getting involved. That’s our human calling: to escape from the fool’s paradise and search for truth and wholeness East of Eden.

And what is left of the concept of God? Perhaps the Buddhists can help here. They tell the story of the finger pointing at the moon, and the poor people who spent all their time looking at the finger, never seeing the moon. Perhaps we will gain a fresh view of the moon. And once we can see the light, that pointing finger is just a distraction, isn’t it?

Good magicians don’t reveal their tricks at the end of the show. But I’m not a magician, I’m a preacher, so I’ll reveal mine here.

I hope you see that what I’ve tried to do today follows the same three steps I’ve been taking about. I start with what, to me, is the most true and useful way to understand how we make our gods. Then I’ve tried to persuade you that it’s true, so you will adapt it for your own life.

Am I right? Is this the best kind of truth for you here? It’s all I can offer you. From here, it’s up to you. This is where I came out when I wrestled with the idea of God. Eventually, you’ll need to wrestle, too. I recommend it. Even if the ordeal leaves you with a limp, it will bless you, and might give you a new kind of name. After all, lives are at stake. And one of them may be yours.