The text of sermon is unavailable but here are the readings.
Readings:
Christopher Lasch
from The Culture of Narcissism
“The best defenses against the terrors of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs…
… Love and work enable each of us to explore a small corner of the world and to come to accept it on its own terms. But our society tends to devalue small comforts or else expect too much of them. Our standards of ‘creative, meaningful work’ are too exalted to survive disappointment. Our ideal of ‘true romance’ puts an impossible burden on personal relationships. We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.”
Paul Tillich
There are many things and events in which we can see a reason for genuine hope, namely, the seed-like presence of that which is hoped for. In the seed of a tree, stem and leaves are already present, and this gives us the right to sow the seed in hope for the fruit. We have no assurance that it will develop. But our hope is genuine. There is a presence, a beginning of what is hoped for. And so it is with the child and our hope for his maturing; we hope, because maturing has already begun, but we don’t know how far it will go. We hope for the fulfillment of our work, often against hope, because it is already in us as vision and driving force. We hope for a lasting love, because we feel the power of this love present. But it is hope, not certainty.”
Reinhold Niebuhr
from essay – Optimism, Pessimism, and Religious Faith.
” … Let man stand at any point in human history, even in a society which has realized his present dreams of justice, and if he surveys the human problem profoundly he will see that every perfection which he has achieved points beyond itself to a greater perfection, and that this greater perfection throws light upon his sins and imperfections. He will feel in that tension between what is and what ought to be the very glory of life, and will come to know that the perfection which eludes him is not only a human possibility and impossibility but a divine fact…
… These paradoxes are in the spirit of great religion. The mystery of life is comprehended in meaning, though no human statement of the meaning can fully resolve the mystery_ The tragedy of life is recognized, but faith prevents tragedy from being pure tragedy_ Perplexity remains, but there is no perplexity unto despair. Evil is neither accepted as inevitable nor regarded as proof of the meaninglessness of life. Gratitude and contrition are mingled, which means that life is both appreciated and challenged. To such faith the generations are bound to return after they have pursued the mirages in the desert to which they are tempted from time to time by the illusions of particular eras.”
This reading comes from an interview with the 14th Dalai Lama
“Recently I am emphasizing that due to the modern economy, and also due to information and education, the world is now heavily interdependent, interconnected. Under such circumstances, the concept of ‘we’ and ‘they’ is gone: harming your neighbor is actually harming yourself. If you do negative things towards your neighbor, that is actually creating your own suffering. And helping them, showing concern about others’ welfare – actually these are the major factors of your own happiness. If you want a community full of joy, full of friendship, you should create that possibility. If you remain negative, and meantime want more smiles and friendship from your neighbors, that’s illogical. If you want a more friendly neighbor, you must create the atmosphere. Then they will respond.”
PRAYER
Please join me in meditation.
Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.
We join together in meditation and prayer this morning seeking to realize that the fabric of our lives is woven by our own hands, every thought, every word, every action is a thread in the social tapestry. So as we weave let us always be mindful that each and every thread is a contribution, our contribution, to the whole. Amen.
SERMON: Means, Ends, and Karma
In Aldous Huxley’s 1937 work Ends and Means, he says:
“…far from being irrelevant, our metaphysical beliefs are the finally determining factor in our actions.”
Far from being irrelevant, our beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality are the foundation of our choices about how we live, about how we act, about what means and ends we choose.
Far from being irrelevant, our beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality frame our perspective on how we can and do act to create, sustain, and change the physical, social, and spiritual world of which we are all a part.
Karma is the concept of “action” – understood as that which causes the entire cycle of cause and effect.
Karma is not about the reincarnation or rebirth of the individual.
Karma is not a cosmic scorecard of good and evil deeds.
Karma is not a justification or a rationalization for the good or bad things that happen to people.
Karma is the concept of “action” – understood as that which causes the entire cycle of cause and effect.
There is a story in the Avatamsaka Sutra that tells of a wonderful net which stretches to infinity in every direction and has, suspended in each eye, a single glittering jewel, and in each of these infinite jewels is reflected the light of every other jewel.
UU’s often tell this story as an exemplar of the seventh principle: Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.
But I think that the story’s central metaphor is commonly misunderstood with the glittering gems in the net representing individual people. People reflecting each other, relating to each other, connecting to each other. This could not be farther from the truest meaning of the metaphor, the self is an illusion, the self is not the gem. This is possibly the most difficult and most often ignored teaching of Buddhism, but it is also the most fundamental and important. The self is an illusion. Let me see if these words from the Dalai Lama can help elucidate this point:
“All events and incidents in life are so intimately linked with the fate of others that a single person on his or her own cannot even begin to act. Many ordinary human activities, both positive and negative, cannot even be conceived of apart from the existence of other people. Even the committing of harmful actions depends on the existence of others. Because of others, we have the opportunity to earn money if that is what we desire in life. Similarly, in reliance upon the existence of others it becomes possible for the media to create fame or disrepute for someone. On your own you cannot create any fame or disrepute no matter how loud you might shout. The closest you can get is to create an echo of your own voice.”
The glittering gem in the net is action, the unit of karma is action, the basis of interdependence and the cause of the entire cycle of cause and effect is action. The chain of causality, or more accurately, the interconnected web of causality, is not made only of the actions of people, or only of the action of animate beings, it is made up of the actions of all existence. It does not stop for time, it does not stop at your comfort zone, or at the boundary of your skin, or at the edge of your thoughts. Each gem in the net is an action and in each and every action is reflected every other action that has happened, is happening and will happen.
To continue in the words of the Dalai Lama:
“Thus interdependence is a fundamental law of nature. Not only higher forms of life but also many of the smallest insects are social beings who, without any religion, law, or education, survive by mutual cooperation based on an innate recognition of their interconnectedness. The most subtle level of material phenomena is also governed by interdependence. All phenomena, from the planet we inhabit to the oceans, clouds, forests, and flowers that surround us, arise in dependence upon subtle patterns of energy. Without their proper interaction, they dissolve and decay.”
This is the religious root of karma, understanding the proper interaction of things, understanding the proper interactions of action, and more specifically, understanding the proper interactions of human action. There are the four laws of karma:
The first law is that results are similar to the cause. Karma and its results are certain and unfailing. Positive actions of body, speech, and mind will always bring the positive result of some form of happiness and benefit. Negative actions of body, speech, and mind will always bring the negative result of some form of suffering. Karma and its results are exactly like a seed and its fruit.
This first rule is often compared with Galatians chapter 6 verses 7 and 8:
“Don’t be fooled. You can’t outsmart God. A man gathers a crop from what he plants. Some people plant to please their sinful nature. From that nature they will harvest death. Others plant to please the Holy Spirit. From the Spirit they will harvest eternal life. (New International Reader’s Version)
There is a famous photograph from the 60’s with a woman holding a protest sign that says, “Bombing for Peace is like Fornicating for Virginity.” OK, the sign doesn’t say fornicating – But the idea is the same, the same as the first law of karma, the same as that expressed in Galatians, the same as core ideas found in every major religion – you will reap what you sow. You will reap only what you sow. You will reap exactly what you sow.
The second law of karma is that there are no results without a cause. Actions not carried out, will not bring results. Things do not just appear out of nothing. If the cause has not been created, the effect will not be experienced. Nothing is self-manifesting, nothing is exempt from the web of cause and effect.
The third law of karma is: once an action is done, the result is never lost. Once the stone has been dropped in the lake, once it sinks to the bottom, once the ripples spread, the lake can never be the same again. Once we have weaved a thread into the tapestry, it cannot be removed. Once the gem is reflected in the net, it’s image shall never be erased.
The fourth law of karma is this: Karma expands. Karma is organic, it is related to the nature of life. As in our prayer today, one way in which Karma expands is that actions lead to the formation of habits. So within one’s own life, each action sets a precedent for future action:
An old Cherokee was teaching his young grandson one of life’s most important lessons. He told the young boy the following parable:
“There is a fight going on inside each of us. It is a terrible fight between two wolves,” he said.
“One wolf is evil. He is anger, rage, envy, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, resentment, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.”
“The second wolf is good. He is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, empathy, truth, compassion, and faith.”
The grandson thought about this for a moment. Then he asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win this fight?”
The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”
This is the fourth law of karma, each action in your life feeds one of the wolves, your ignorance about which wolf is getting fed does not change it, your illusions about which wolf is getting fed does not change it. Like muscle memory, the act of feeding one wolf more often then the other becomes habit. Do you think that your life is kept more interesting by tossing the bad wolf the occasional bone? Do you think that every bone has to be intentional? As we grow older, we throw more and more bones out of habit. Yet the results of these actions stand.
There are good reasons that we form habits, there is a cognitive need for us to simplify the routines of our lives into repeated and comfortable habits. And I don’t think that habits are bad things to have, but we must recognize that the bulk of our contributions to the world, the bulk of the threads that we each contribute to the social tapestry are woven out of habit. One of the common religious prescriptions for this problem is to cultivate mindfulness.
I don’t think that mindfulness means not developing habits, it doesn’t mean that we develop some sort of hyper-vigilance. What it means is that we reflect upon, own, and take responsibility for all of our actions and especially all of our habits. It means that we apply ourselves to the difficult religious task of continuing to tear down the veils of ignorance and illusion that separate us from the true nature of reality. It means that we recognize that while part of karma relates to our intentions, our intention to do good or our intention to do evil, the fact of karma, the fact of causality is not altered. We can do evil and believe that we are doing good if we are not in right and honest relationship with the universe and with each other. We can feed the evil wolf over and over again, shoveling food into his mouth at an ever more fevered pitch because we believe that we are acting rightly and we cannot comprehend why our righteous action continues to bear evil fruit.
You can choose to be right, or you can choose to be peaceful, you cannot choose both simultaneously, you cannot feed the evil wolf and the good wolf the same morsel. You cannot weave the dark thread and the light thread with the same motion of the loom.
We have spoken a lot about karma this morning, but it is time for us to consider what it means to us when we are making decisions, making plans, and choosing courses of action in our lives.
When we talk about means and ends. Our means are simply our actions. They are the strategically selected thoughts, words, actions, and habits that we carry out in our pursuit of some ends. The means that we choose will create the ends which are their natural, logical, and karmic conclusion.
What about ends? You may choose any ends. But you must realize that ends only become realized by walking the path that leads to them, and that path is made up of the stepping stones of each and every means that is employed in their achievement.
Far from being irrelevant, laws of cause and effect are in operation.
Far from being irrelevant, these laws apply standards of good and evil to the actions of humanity.
Far from being irrelevant, these laws of karma govern our capacity to use means to realize ends.
No, you cannot bomb your way to peace, or fornicate your way to virginity.
You cannot reap that which you did not sow.
You cannot make a reality out of wishful thinking.
But you can create heaven on earth by learning and acting on the truth.
You can change the world with your love.
You can create the life that you want, one action at a time.
Good morning everyone. As one of your Unitarian Universalist neighbors from a stone’s throw across the Colorado River, I want to thank you for allowing me to speak here today, and I’d like to extend good wishes from the people of Wildflower Church, in south Austin. We all are well aware of the struggles you have been through in the past weeks, and hope for your community that good healing and reconciliation is happening among you as you begin to move through the wilderness of having let go of your minister, willingly or not, or from a place somewhere in between.
I also hope that at least something of what I have to say this morning will contribute to that healing. For while it’s true that several years ago, you all very generously and freely sacrificed some of your membership when Wildflower originally was born out from your congregation, and while it’s true that some others of your community have since wandered down our way or elsewhere for one reason or another, the most important thing I believe I can do this morning as the minister of Wildflower Church is to encourage you to work and stay together, to nourish this community of faith back into compassion, joy, love, and mutual respect.
Of course, that’s not to say those things do not already exist here. Obviously, I haven’t lived and worked and prayed and conversed here as you have, and I don’t want you to think that I think I know better than you how things have been in your hearts and souls and relationships. I simply hope to add something more of the good by being here this morning and sharing this time of worship with you.
Now, in my mentioning worship, if your congregation is like some other Unitarian Universalist congregations, the very word worship may raise a few sets of hackles here. And if so, that’s OK. I remember a new membership class I once attended, where the question was asked of prospective church members, “What do you seek in a worship service?” Well, many people couldn’t answer, because they couldn’t get beyond the language of the question; they were stuck on the very notion of worship, especially as it implies worshipping – bowing down to – the authority of someone or something that’s in a position of greater power. So if that’s brewing in your minds, I’d like you to take with me a short – very short – etymological journey, because, in my understanding, looking at the break down of the word, worship – worth + scipe or ship – simply means, “To hold as worthy.”
And we all, for better or worse, hold something, many things, as worthy. Among us, we hold as worthy, or we worship, for instance, democracy, money, peace and quiet, our cell phones, clean water, a double espresso, and so on and so forth.
Whatever it is we worship, it’s true, as our religious ancestor Ralph Waldo Emerson states, that “a person will worship something – have no doubt about that.” Sometimes, we can very proudly proclaim that we worship all that is good – love, compassion, equity, justice. And sometimes we need to own up that we are worshipping much that is a bit more ambiguous in its goodness – the perfect body (ours we wish for; someone else’s we long for), the nicest car, the need to be right. That’s why Emerson warns, “that which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and character.” That’s why he warns, “it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.”
With this Emersonian word of caution in our minds as we worship here together, let me ask then, what is it that we as Unitarian Universalists worship? What is it that we hold as worthy? We have no creed to tell us from on high. We don’t have any Unitarian Universalist equivalents of Popes or Bishops, Presbyteries or Deacons to lay it all out for us. What we have is each other: we can talk to one another, and listen to one another, and struggle together. And, sufficient enough, poetic enough, demanding enough or not, we also have our seven religious principles.
It’s three of those principles I would like to bring forward now, to help us further explore the question, “What do we as Unitarian Universalists worship?” Actually, that question itself invites us to enter into one of the principles I want to hold up; it invites us into the fourth principle, the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. But, as I said to members of my own congregation last Saturday as we began a day of shared leadership training, that juxtaposition of free and responsible is crucial to highlight here. For while the free search speaks largely to the first principle, the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and while the responsible search speaks to our seventh principle, respect for the interdependent web of all existence, it is the and of “the free and responsible search” that brings the two together, and it is that free-and-responsible search for truth and meaning that I believe we need to hold as worthy as if it were the very fulcrum of our faith. For freedom without responsibility is a kind of tyranny and responsibility without freedom is a kind of slavery. Only a collaborative, collective struggle for freedom and responsibility can lead us to a truly free and responsible community of faith.
Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams, in his 1953 essay we heard Margaret read from, referred to such a community as the “free Christian Church,” and, harkening back to earlier days, as “the radical left wing of the Reformation,” and back even further, as the “primitive Christian Church.” As we are descendents of all of these manifestations of the liberal, or free church, and as we are exploring what it is we worship, we would do well to heed Adams’ words when he says, “In our day [whether that be 1953 or 2009], we confront the impersonal forces of a mass society…” According to Adams, those impersonal forces, generated by what he calls “opinion industries,” and disseminated with increasing rapidity with our ever multiplying technological advances, create only a pseudo community – one which, in Adams’ words, serves as “an instrument manipulated and exploited by central power groups.”
Community as an instrument manipulated and exploited by central power groups: Go back for a moment to Emerson’s warning: “That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, our character.” And so think for a moment of what our society – our national community, so to speak – so often calls us to worship, to hold as worthy, and look at where it has led us: failed banks, scandals on Wall Street, home foreclosures, roller coastering gas prices, global warming, rising unemployment, and on and on and on. Think of Adams’ statement that such so-called “communities,” generated by “opinion industries” are there primarily for “support of special interests – nationalism, racism, and business as usual.” I would add to Adams’ list, global corporatism, media conglomerationism, and reckless individualism But that’s just me.
Now, I’m believing, with the inauguration of our first African American president this past week, and with such civil rights leaders as Georgia congressman John Lewis and the Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery there to witness, I’m believing that a shift from “business as usual” is among us.
But not only is it a shift into our future. Such a historical event and the words stated by the newly inaugurated president himself – words like hope, virtue, responsibility, unity of purpose, and mutual respect – such a moment and such words reflect back to us our own historical efforts as a religious people to confront those who would call or demand of us, to worship the false community – they reflect back to us our own efforts to confront those powers, as Adams says, “in the name of a more intimate, personal community dependent on individual dignity and responsibility.”
In our free and responsible search for truth and meaning, might that not be what we are striving for, what we wish to worship? “A more intimate, personal community dependent on individual dignity and responsibility”? If so, how do we work together toward that aim? How do we leave behind the “opinion industry” mode of being that’s so easy to get caught up in, for a more relational, more inclusive community of faith?
In his essay, Adams makes the central argument that, quote, “the free Christian’s [read our ancestors’] sense of responsibility in society issues from concern for something more reliable than the desire for personal success. It issues,” he continues, “from the experience of and demand for community. [such] responsibility is a response to the Deed that was ‘in the beginning,’ to the Deed of Agape It is the response to that divine, self-giving sacrificial love that creates and continually transforms a community of persons.”
Agape, love; what Adams himself calls “the love that will not let us go.” This must be the means by which we strive to create the community of faith we long for, and it is the end to which we will arrive, again and again, should we choose to act from a place of love – not that conditional kind of love that “opinion industries” like to sell and promote – that say you’ve got to be this way or think that way or look this way or associate only with these kinds of people. No, the love of Agape is the love of beloved community. It is the love of listening, it is the love of speaking, it is the love of caring. It is the love of reaching out, and it is the love of reaching inward, and asking ourselves, freely and responsibly, “What have I been worshipping? How is it determining my life, my character? What shall I worship, what shall I hold as worthy, to deepen my part in this community of faith?”
My hope for all of you, as you move through this time of unknowing, is that you can ask yourselves these questions not as a means of indicting yourselves or anyone else, but as a means of working and staying together, as a means of remembering our faith’s historical efforts always to freely and responsibly search for truth and meaning.
The task of the religious community is not an easy one, under any circumstances. Yours is and will continue to be for some time a particularly trying one. But try you will, and so will you journey to and reach the other side of this particular wilderness. May it be that you do so in the spirit of compassion, joy, love, and mutual respect. And speaking of love, may it be that all along the way you experience, and hold as worthy, that love will not let you go. For it is love, guiding you on your free and responsible search for truth and meaning, that will see you through.
I have a dream today! I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”
This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.
With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
Reading 2
Untitled Poem
Carl Wenell Himes, Jr.
Now that he is safely dead
Let us praise him
Build monuments to his glory
Sing hosannas to his name.
Dead men make
Such convenient heroes: They cannot rise
To challenge the images
We would fashion from their lives.
And besides,
It is easier to build monuments
Than to make a better world.
So, now that he is safely dead
We with eased consciences
Will teach our children
That he was a great man … knowing
That the cause for which he lived
Is still a cause
And the dream for which he died is still a dream,
A dead man’s dream.
Reading 3
Creation Spell
Ed Bullins
Into your palm I place the ashes
Into your palm are the ashes of your brothers
burnt in the Alabama night
Into your palm that holds your babies
into your palm that feeds your children
into your palm that holds the work tools
place the ashes of your father
here are the ashes of your husbands
Take the ashes of your nation
and create the cement to build again
Create the spirits to move again
Take this soul dust and begin again
Reading 4
Barak Obama
From a speech following the New Hampshire Primary
We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics. They will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks and months to come. We’ve been asked to pause for a reality check; we’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.
But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds; when we’ve been told we’re not ready, or that we shouldn’t try, or that we can’t, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people.
Yes we can. Yes we can. Yes we can.
It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation. Yes we can. It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights. Yes we can. It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness. Yes we can.
It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.
Yes we can to justice and equality. Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity. Yes we can heal this nation. Yes we can repair this world. Yes we can.
Homily & Sermon:
Disembodied Dreams
First Movement
Let me take you back to Thursday, April 4, 1968 on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. The late Dr. King’s body has been taken away. But for his close colleagues returning from the hospital, there is a grim reminder of his having been here: a pool of blood on the balcony floor. Jesse Jackson approaches and sinks to his knees before the puddle. He places both of his hands, palms downward, into the blood of his friend. He then stands and wipes the front of his turtleneck shirt with his hands, taking the blood of Martin onto himself.
Dr. King was murdered as he was about to join the efforts of striking garbage workers in Memphis. It was a somewhat unplanned initial step on what was to be the most ambitious endeavor of King’s career; the Poor People’s Campaign. This effort was envisioned to culminate in a multiracial army of the poor descending on Washington D.C. until Congress enacted a Poor People’s Bill of Rights, which would include a massive government jobs program.
Having learned a little bit about the levers of power in our nation while he fought for desegregation and equal rights, and then while he spoke out against the war in Viet Nam, Dr. King was determined to hit at the root of exploitation in the Poor People’s Campaign. This carried him well beyond the field of race politics and into the much more dangerous field of economics. In Selma and Washington D.C., King was trying to change the way people in and out of power thought about race. What he was about to do was change the way people in and out of power thought about power.
His inner circle thought this too diffuse and a departure from the work they had all been doing up until then. They began to fracture and he was loosing patience with them. And when the invitation came for him to go to Memphis, King was counseled that it was too paltry an affair in addition to being part of a venture his associates weren’t entirely on board with. But it was neither insignificant to King, nor was it anything less than exactly the kind of systematic sin he was hoping to root out of America. And so he went.
The day before his assassination he assured an audience that has subsequently grown to include the whole world that he had been to the mountaintop, that he had seen the promised land. “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!î
I think King was wrong. If there is a place to get to, I think he will get there with us. He was murdered. But he was not ended. His action lives on in his disciples and in the trajectory upon which he set this nation. And what are we if not our action?
There is no end there. Just more means to further means, action birthing action, character in mitosis.
You see, when Reverend Jackson knelt down and dipped his palms in King’s blood, he was physically enacting a kind of resurrection. After all, the great work hadn’t got done. So Jackson was, in a sense, taking onto himself the properties of his friend. But he wasn’t just taking them onto himself alone. Because we see it ñ we’ve seen pictures in the past or we see it in our mind’s eye today ñ because we see it and understand it’s history and significance, we know that the properties of Martin, in transferring to Jesse, have also been transferred to us. For while Jackson remained focused primarily on racial questions, there were other people and organizations that took up the post-racial agenda that King had begun. Nonetheless, on that night in Memphis, it was Jackson who embodied a transference that unwittingly would take root in many of us and pave the winding way to this Tuesday’s inauguration.
It turns out, evidentally, that blood is both medically and poetically a rampant vehicle for the transference of properties from one person to another. And because were using the poetic sense here, properties means the character of or the meaning of that blood. What Jesse did was only what mankind has been doing for millennia. It’s either hard wired into our DNA or the vestige of humanity’s hero myths, but there seems to be a repeated practice among our species of taking on some properties of a beloved martyr through the martyr’s blood. An obvious example of this is the Christian Eucharist, wherein the blood of Christ is swallowed.
While we understand the Eucharistic blood of Christ is symbolic, in Jesse’s case, the blood was both symbolic and all too physical. When he dipped his hands into that blood, he took part in an impromptu ritual that ratcheted him, and ourselves as well, to the continuing action of Dr. King. So, Jesse still has blood on his hands. Barak Obama has blood on his hands. And the blood is still on our hands. It reminds us of the guilt in which our history implicates us. But that historical indictment is only worthwhile if it also reminds us that we continue ñ all of us, regardless of our heritage, skin color or economic status – to participate, to varying degrees, in a vast system of repression and exploitation that pollutes our character by a lack of awareness and a lack of intentionality. The good news is there are things we can do about that. Yes we can.
So, on one hand the purpose of the blood is to remind us of our transgressions. And on the other hand, is the transferred properties, a reminder of hope, and heroism, of faith in humankind, a reminder of fallibility, forgiveness and true power, and the life and work of Martin Luthor King Jr. That blood has become ours. It is our heritage. If we don’t want it, that blood becomes only an indictment.
And yet, if we accept it, if we take it in, if you let it seep into our imagination and into our heart, that blood becomes, not only an indictment but it also becomes a force in our own veins, a meaning in our own life. For that is the blood in which the murdered prophet still lives. And we are worthy of it. And we are guilty of it. As worthy and as guilty as the prophet himself. So, if we accept it, if we accept that blood, if we accept this story, then we can hold up our own bloody hands and see death (hold up left hand) and life (hold up right hand), guilt and hope, and change these disparities from a posture of the convicted, to a posture of conviction (clasp hands in prayer).
Let us pray.
We come hear today to be nurtured by one another,
with hopes of hearing a healing word, of singing a song that helps us, of celebrating, of walking back into beauty.
Our lives are fraught with trouble, and actions that miss the mark and cause damage to ourselves or to others.
But our being here confesses our awareness of our imperfection and hopes that such an awareness must necessarily understand and thus forgive the failings of others as well as of ourselves.
Just as our joy is a beacon, so to can our sorrow be a guide.
Let this awareness be the seed of empathy then, and this fellowship be the soil to nurture that empathy, so that its fruit can feed many.
Amen.
Disembodied Dreams
Second Movement
I saw a bumper sticker the other day. It displayed an image of Obama in red, white and blue, above the words, “Yes, we did.î Now, I know this person was just slapping a celebratory flag on their car. I know they were just feeling proud, feeling good. And they should. Yet, I confess that I was somewhat troubled by that bumper sticker. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the layers of significance that an Obama presidency promises. I most certainly do. I have high hopes and deep gratitude.
It’s just that, “Yes, we did,î suggests that the work is over when, really, the work is just beginning. The phraseÖ is, “Yes we can,î not “Yes, we did.î And therein is a message of both political and spiritual consequence. The work is not yesterday. The work, the joy, the pain is always and ever arising. If I can hearken back to King for a moment the view from the mountaintop of equal rights is of the mountain of unscrupulous warfare. The view from the mountaintop of unscrupulous warfare is of the mountain of economic exploitation. The mountains get bigger. The work is never over.
The difficulty is that once you start down the path of justice, it is easy to be overwhelmed by where that path leads you. You start in a soup kitchen and you wind up waving a defiant ladle at the World Bank. It seems like an impossible task. But then we also know, as our soon-to-be President has reminded us, that, “nothing can withstand the power of millions of voices calling for change.î And what do you know? It works. At least its working to shift the face of the power structure in Washington. But the real work, as we know all too well ñ as we witness Palestine unraveling, as Pakistan and Mexico stand on the brink of collapse, as our own economy teeters on the precipice of national terror and a crisis of character ñ the real work has only just begun.
So, not, “Yes we did.î “Yes we can.î And maybe that implies, “Yes we are,î right now, right here. If the work the joy and pain is ever arising, then it is arising now, right here, as you sit.
After all, being here is an action. And what are we if not our action? Being here has an effect; on you, on the people next to you, on the world you encounter away from here. Being here is an action. But the question we must ask ourselves, as participants in this corporate body ñ sitting here, are we active enough? What does being here do? More to the point, what are we doing here?
So, when I go to church I know that most of the time I’m there I’m sitting and listening. Right? You’re listening, aren’t you? Okay. That’s a start. I know that my listening is reinforced by my standing to sing and by my singing (apologies to those within earshot). So, that’s also a step. I watch candles be kindled and light some of my own. That’s good. But in a religion that has no central text, in a religion whose cosmology, ontology, theology is intentionally vague, in a religion that is essentially new ñ despite the braided histories we claim ñ and lacks a rich tradition – is listening enough? Are these actions enough to embody our purpose? Or do they leave us entirely without “a tradition, an ontology and a rich understanding of the human condition, its malaise and its cure,î as has been suggested.
The way I see it, the problem is not that we do not have an ontology and a rich understanding of the human condition, its malaise and its cure. The problem is that our understanding comes from such a broad spectrum of sources that it is all too easy to miss the forest of consensus for the trees of our variety. Maybe because of that, our understanding has not been taken into our bodies in any kind of communal, central ritual. And so it is that our religion has been damned to a mere haunting, all too often remaining in the realm of ideas, a dream without a body to be in.
In short, we’re a religion without any religious experience because we are a religion of disembodied dreams. T.S. Eliot comes to mind.
“We are the hollow men.
Our dried voices,
when We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass”
“Shape without form,
shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion.”
I don’t think Eliot was talking about us, but he sure could have been. Emerson, however, was definitely talking about us when he called Unitarianism “corpse cold.î But we can change that. We can live into the dream of our forebears and we can and must do this together. Oh, yes we can. In fact, we will.
Some of you may know, I am currently studying for the ministry at Austin Seminary. This past semester, a small group of my colleagues began meeting once a week to create some sacred space in our lives. We would gather, splash our hands and faces with water (a practice borrowed from Islam), do some physical action which we often drew from yoga. We would then sing ñ to clear away the ego. And finally, we would relax in silence for a half an hour, ala a Quaker meeting. This was followed by the sharing of snacks and some discussion. I can assure you, our theologies all varied radically from one another. And yet we could create that space together. It was a deeply enriching experience each and every week.
Now I could have, and have, done something like this on my own, alone. But the fellowship was important. The fellowship elevated the experience. Fellowship taps into love and that’s why we’re here this morning, right?
So ritual embodiment creates space. It also articulates faith. After all, what is Islam without Mecca-facing prayers in prostration? What is Christianity without the Eucharist? What is Buddhism without meditation? What is Unitarian Universalism without… umÖ We claim these traditions as sources. There is wisdom in the fact that they ALL ritualize their bodies in order to reinforce and articulate interpretations of the world.
The Buddhist author Jack Kornfield writes, “Spiritual transformation Ö doesn’t happen by accident. We need a repeated discipline, a genuine training, in order to let go of our old habits of mind and to find and sustain a new way of seeing.î In other words, we have to practice cosmology. We have to practice ontology and theology. We will neither grow, nor be effective, nor, in my opinion, even survive as a religion without also thriving as a religious practice.
Now, I’m not just going to whine at you. I want to try and find a solution. So what kind of ritual embodies our values and beliefs and theological liberality? How shall we practice? The Buddhist teacher Achaan Chah described the commitment to practice as “taking the one seat.” He said, “Just go into a room and put one chair in the centerÖ open the doors and the windows, sit in the chair, and see who comes to visit. You will witness all kinds of scenes and actors, all kinds of temptations and stories, everything imaginable. Your only job is to stay in your seat. You will see it all arise and pass, and out of this, wisdom and understanding will come.”
So we will take our cue here, with a few minor changes. I’m actually going to ask you to move a bit. Indulge me. Let’s see how this goes. So, as you are able, shift in your pews toward the center aisles, so that you are seated close to each other, right next to each other. Thank you.
SoÖ we are going to do a ritual, a ritual that embodies our theological and ontological openness, our social vision, our scientific grounding and our spiritual aspirations.
Now if you would, hold out both of your hands, palm up. This is a gesture of openness, of asking and receiving. If this next gesture makes you uncomfortable, it’s okay. Ritual, principles and honest religion often, in integrity, take us out of our comfort zone. So, see if you can come in to this next step. If you would, keep your left hand open. But with your right hand, place two or more fingers on the wrist of the neighbor to your right. Try to find a pulse, over here on the side a little and under the thumb. If you’re unable to find a pulse, it is enough to know that it is there. If you are on an aisle or sitting by yourself, place your free fingers on your own neck.
You may close your eyes or not. However you are comfortable. Now I’ll ask you to breath in and exhale slowly, as if you were meditating. And keeping that breath intentional, consider how this gesture recalls our principles, how touch affirms the inherent worth and dignity of every person and compassion in human relations.
Consider how touch embodies acceptance of one another and is a first step towards the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.
Consider that through your fingerprints, you can feel the pulse of your neighbor, through your singularity, you touch the life force.
Consider how this reveals our fragility, just as it reveals the miracle of the human machine.
Finally, take a few breath cycles on your own, increasing your sensitivity to your neighbors life force. See if you can syncopate your breathing with the rhythm of their heart and let that syncopation expand in your imagination to include the rhythms of everyone here and then onward so that your thoughts turn at last to the interdependent web of all existence and the sum that is greater than all these parts. Listen now to breath and blood and life. At one time, be grounded, be here, transcend.
Amen.
I hope that gave you an idea of what I am talking about. Actually doing it hopefully made the idea more clear than if we had just left it at talk. And that is precisely the point. I hope it is an idea we can build on. It doesn’t need to be the ritual we performed today, but I would encourage some kind of exercise that embodies our faith to become a regular part of our service, our related board and committee functions and your personal practice. I’ll submit it to the worship committee for some deliberation. Consider today the first line of a conversation. But it must not only be a conversation.
Allowing our thoughts only to be in our mind and allowing our minds to be only in our brains does each component, as well as their sum ñnamely our lives and the gods in which we live them ñ a great penalty. Meanwhile, using our bodies to express our consciousness in ritual will lead to using our bodies to express our consciousness to each other and to the larger world. This can help in troubled times. And as a church and as a nation, these are troubled times. We can start healing without a word. We can take that wisdom and apply it to ourselves and our world. We can live this dream of Unitarian Universalism. We can heal this nation. We can repair this world. Yes we can.
Minister of Live Oak Unitarian Universalist Church
January 4, 2009
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.
Readings
Excerpt adapted from Disturbing the Peace
by Vaclav Havel, translated by Paul Wilson
The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.
Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. Hope is… the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
Hope
by Emily Dickenson
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune – without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
Origami Emotion
by Elizabeth Barrette
Hope is
folding paper cranes
even when your hands get cramped
and your eyes tired,
working past blisters and
paper cuts,
simply because something in you
insists on
opening its wings.
Prayer
O Spirit, fill our lives this morning.
Let love enter our hearts as we think of our beloved family members, trusted friends, and mentors. We know that some of our loved ones have been wounded or fallen ill. We pray for their health and wholeness. We are filled with compassion even for strangers: the homeless, hungry, and hopeless. Let this compassion serve to open our hearts even more.
May we feel the full range of emotions – the inspirational beauty of nature; the surprising joy of unexpected generosity; even the depth of sorrow that washes over us as members of the human race.
Let us extend our compassion to the people of the world, thinking especially of the Israelis and the Palestinians who have not yet found their way to peace; thinking of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan and our own citizens who labor to achieve stability; thinking of the people of Darfur to whom our youth decorated and sent a large tent to house a classroom; thinking of people across our own land of plenty who lack basic necessities.
We are blessed to have one another. We are astonished to witness an historic inauguration in this new year. We are filled with hope that we, together, can do the work that needs to be done – here and throughout the world. Let us enter the Silence…
SERMON: Is Hope Enough? What Else, Then?
“Playing for Change” is a video circulating on YouTube and, of course, on its own website, playingforchange.com. It was the brainchild of Mark Johnson, who lives in Santa Monica. He got the idea ten years ago in a New York subway where he saw a huge crowd that surrounded two Buddhist monks in robes who were singing in a language probably no one understood. Yet two hundred people stood there listening, missing their trains, and even tearing up. Instead of rushing to work as isolated individuals, they were held in a rare sense of community. Mark could see with his own eyes what he already knew: Music brings people together. Music touches something within us that goes beyond words.
Mark Johnson said, “I traveled around the world and discovered that music opens the door to a place where we can come together as a human race. It is my belief that we can celebrate our differences and still connect our hearts. One Love.”
His first video is in production now. It took three years of traveling in four continents to record over one hundred musicians and edit the results into a unified product. You’ll see a choir in South Africa backing up a New Orleans guitarist and a Russian cellist, with a saxaphone riff from Italy. In an interview, Bill Moyers asked him if people ever told him he was being naive. Mark said, “Well, naive is thinking we have any other choice… Let’s make a difference together.”
When Mark was recording musicians in South Africa, he asked what they needed in return. They wanted a place to teach music to young people and give them a chance to perform and learn the technology Mark was using. He started raising money and will soon be selling CDs and videos to support Playing for Change. They built the concrete block Ntonga Music School in Guguletu, South Africa: a place of poverty, HIV and AIDS just outside of Capetown. Guguletu is a place in dire need of assistance, inspiration, and hope for its youth and young adults. The school will be equipped with cameras and recording equipment as well as computers so young people can share their music with the world and receive inspiration in return.
Playing for Change is also working to rebuild and enhance the Tibetan refugee centers in India and Nepal, and to support a writing school in Johannesburg, South Africa. It may be naive, but these musicians and their fans are making a difference in this world of ours.
Such positive change makes me forget the country’s problems for a little while: a long-term recession with a rising level of unemployment, bankruptcies, and foreclosures; two long-term wars that will go on for many months to come; global warming and environmental destruction; spiritual malaise. We can’t just go shopping anymore to resolve all this, and we don’t have the extra money! And though we have elected the presidential candidate who ran on Hope, we can’t expect him to save us by himself.
There has been a great shift from the patriotic fervor after the 9/11 attacks when American flags began flying everywhere. At a border crossing from Canada into the United States there was a billboard of an American flag with the image of shopping bag handles at the top. We were to thwart terrorism through shopping. This year we were horrified after Thanksgiving to learn that a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death in the rush to shop for bargains. Customers continued to shop even after employees tried to close the store out of respect for a hideous event. The guy who died probably made minimum wage as a temporary, seasonal worker. Our wallets feel thin; tips are down for waitstaff; bargains prices just make us wait for even deeper discounts; and some of us have lost jobs, lost our sense of security.
“Do we really need more stuff?” Leonard Pitts asked in a recent column. We’re learning that we probably have enough stuff. It’s time to save our spirits through understanding that there is enough to go around. Enough material goods, enough money, enough food, enough love. It’s time to change the dream and change the world by using hope as inspiration for action.
In exploring the idea of hope, I dipped into Barack Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope ; the words and wisdom of Cornel West’s Hope on a Tightrope ; and Paul Loeb’s collection of essays he entitled The Impossible Will Take a Little While: a citizen’s guide to hope in a time of fear.
I, for one, hope that my faith and values can make a positive difference, yet it seems they often clash with opposing values. Obama writes, “We think of faith as a source of comfort and understanding but find our expressions of faith sowing division; we believe ourselves to be a tolerant people even as racial, religious, and cultural tensions roil the landscape. And instead of resolving these tensions or mediating these conflicts, our politics fans them, exploits them, and drives us further apart” (p. 29).
Later he points out that in the 60s, the status quo was overturned. Along with civil rights for citizens of African descent, other groups came streaming through the gates: “feminists, Latinos, hippies, Panthers, welfare moms, gays,” all of whom wanted a place at the table of democracy (p. 34).
Unitarian Universalists have worked to hold the gates open among the early adopters of this kind of diversity. Along with a diversity of politics came a diversity of spirituality that has strongly influenced society at large: Buddhists show us the benefits of mindfulness; Muslims inspire us by their prayer life; Earth centered religions celebrate the cycles of life; Jews emphasize forgiveness and atonement; Christians teach love of God and love of neighbor; and all of us try to put the best of these into our own lives. Austin Area Interreligious Ministries works to bridge gaps among faith groups. This very congregation is a microcosm of diversity in spirituality.
On the other hand, we are sometimes less willing to appreciate political views that differ from our own. Obama met tolerant evangelicals, spiritual humanists, rich people who want poor people to succeed, and poor people who hold high standards for themselves (p. 63). Obama suggests that liberals should acknowledge that hunters feel about guns the same way that liberals feel about library books; conservatives should recognize that most women feel as protective of reproductive freedom as evangelicals feel about their right to worship (p. 70).
All of us have values that are worthy of respect. Values move us to action. Shared values should shape politics, not the other way around. Standing up for your beliefs is a way to plant seeds of the possible. More difficult, but still possible is to understand other points of view so that multiple sides can be satisfied with a win/win. Getting down to the level of common values makes a huge difference in resolving incompatible opinions or strategies.
I remember working in a shelter for battered women. Our core value – our hope – was that all people deserve to live in safety – physical, emotional, and spiritual. Shelter residents needed skills for assuring safety at home for themselves and their children. They needed parenting skills like effective discipline without hitting. Sometimes the women would go back to their abusers, believing their promises or seeing no other options. Even when that happened, we knew that the women had seen a different way to live and they did have new skills. They knew where to find shelter for themselves and their children. We had planted seeds of hope for a better day. Sometimes they did have to come back for shelter, but they seemed stronger and more self-confident.
We don’t have to be famous like Nelson Mandela or Mother Teresa to make a difference. One anonymous protester held a placard opposing nuclear weapons. He stood day after day outside the entrance to the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, about 50 miles east of San Francisco. One senior official there told of the impact of passing that solitary individual on a daily basis. That lone protester played a significant role in the official’s eventual decision to resign his job even though the two of them had never met.
Cornel West says it’s the ordinary people just like us who can change the world. Tavis Smiley asked him, “Who you gonna call? Ghost Busters?” They laughed, then Dr. West said,
“You’re going to call on the people, you’re going to call on everyday people, you’re going to call on ordinary people. They must shatter their sleepwalking; they must become awake, they must shake the complacency and the conformity and the cowardice and become maladjusted to injustice, give up being well adjusted to injustice, cut against the grain, and stand tall, organize, mobilize, for public interests and common good. In a democracy if you can’t call on the people, then the people lose the democracy and in the end, the democracy, so fragile, so precious, is lost, and the people find themselves run by tyrants.”
Sonya Vetra Tinsley is an African American singer, songwriter, and activist in Atlanta. She knows there are plenty of reasons to give in to cynicism and defeat. She also sees another group of people who work for change even if they don’t know how things will turn out – people like Martin Luther King, Alice Walker, Howard Zinn. And she says,
“There are times when both teams seem right [the cynics and the change agents]. Both have evidence. We’ll never know who’s really going to prevail. So I just have to decide which team seems happier, which side I’d rather be on. And for me that means choosing on the side of faith. Because on the side of cynicism, even if they’re right, who wants to win that argument anyway. If I’m going to stick with somebody, I’d rather stick with people who have a sense of possibility and hope. I just know that’s the side I want to be on.”
I want to stand on that side, too. Hope grows when we take even a small step, a solitary stand, a community affirmation based on rightness, value, and truth to heal our world or to heal and strengthen a congregation. Though I don’t know all of your names, I know you have dozens of members who are making great efforts to carry out the mission and vision of this great congregation. You have faithful witnesses who invite others to join them but continue to do the work with or without additional help. There is no doubt in my mind that there is plenty of work to go around! Even a thank you once in a while keeps the wheels turning.
I’ll leave you with story that’s been passed down from one minister’s sermon to another. One route was from Art Severance to Bruce Southworth to Anita Farber-Robinson to me. No doubt it has taken on a life of its own in multiple other directions. It’s a story about New College, at Oxford University in England. It is, as far as we know, a true story, told by the late Gregory Bateson, a renowned anthropologist and husband of Margaret Mead.
New College was founded in the late 16th century, when its physical structure was built. The College was designed according to the style of the times with a great dining hall that had huge carved oak beams across the ceiling. Apparently a survey was done of the condition of the property and it was discovered that these great, carved beams were infested with carpenter beetles, so seriously compromised that the building itself was in danger.
The report was transmitted to the College Council whose members were very much dismayed. Where could they ever get oak of that caliber today to replace those great old beams? One of the Junior Fellows took the risk of making a suggestions- there might be some oak growing on the college lands of which there was considerable acreage which had accrued through years of bequests.
The Council called the College Forester in from his work in the country and asked him about the oak. “He pulled off his cap and scratched his head and said, “Well sirs, we were wondering when you’d be asking.”
Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the college was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the great hall when they became beetle-y in the end. This contingency plan, he told them, has been passed on from Chief Forester to Chief Forester, generation to generation, for over four hundred years.
That’s the end of the story, but not the end of the lesson. To plant even one tree is an act of faith and hope. You as a congregation will be planting trees and seeds of hope for your future. Thanks to previous generations, your roots run deep and your branches reach out across the City of Austin. Some of you will prepare the soil for new trees; others will plant; still others will water. Generations will come after you to enjoy the shade and the fruits of your labors, but there will be still other trees for them to plant. Countless individuals whom you do not yet know are seeking what you have to offer – hope in a hurting world. Let there be more love, hope, peace, and joy among you as you move into this new year.
So plant trees or take a stand or dream a new dream – and turn challenge into opportunity. Tell me, what else should we do other than bring hope to life?
Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button above.
Reading – Brian Ferguson
Today’s reading is from “My Grandfather’s Blessing: Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging”by Rachel Naomi Remen.
Sometimes the very things that threaten our life may strengthen the life in us. David was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes two weeks after his seventeenth birthday. He responded to it with the rage of a trapped animal. Like an animal in a cage he flung himself against the limitations of his disease, refusing to hold to a diet, forgetting to take his insulin, using his diabetes to hurt himself, over and over.
He had been in therapy for almost six months without making much progress when he had a dream. In his dream, he found himself sitting in an empty room without a ceiling, facing a small stone statue of the Buddha. David was not a spiritual young man, but he was at least a familiar with the image of a Buddha. In his dream he was surprised to feel a kinship toward the Buddha, perhaps because this Buddha was a young man, not much older than himself. The statue seemed to have an odd effect on him. Alone in the room with it, he had felt more and more at peace when, without warning, a dagger was thrown from somewhere behind him. It buried itself deep in the Buddha’s heart.
David was profoundly shocked. He felt betrayed, overwhelmed with feelings of despair and anguish. From the depth of these feelings had emerged a single question: “Why is life like this?” And then the statue began to grow, so slowly that at first he was not sure it was really happening. But so it was, and suddenly he knew beyond doubt that this was the Buddha’s response to the knife.
The statue continued to grow, its face as peaceful as before. The knife did not change either. Gradually, it became a tiny black speck on the breast of this enormous smiling Buddha. Watching this, David felt something release him and found he could breathe deeply for the first time in a long time. He awoke with tears in his eyes.
As David told the author his dream, he recognized the feelings he had when he first saw the dagger. The despair and anguish, and even the question “Why is life like this?” were the same feelings and questions that had come up for him in his doctor’s office when he heard for the first time that he had diabetes.
As he put it, “when this disease plunged into the heart of my life”
His dream offered him the hope of wholeness and suggested that, over time, he might grow in such a way that the wound of his illness might become a smaller and smaller part of the sum total of his life.
Prayer – Brian Ferguson
As we gather today we are a community in pain. We are a community which feels divided and disconnected from each other. Our religious community last night made perhaps the most difficult decision a religious community can make – the act of dismissing a minister.
For some this may feel a vindication for their pains and wounds of the past. For others this may be a fresh wound and dashing of their hopes for the future of this community. For some it is both hopeful and painful.
For those who find hope may they have the compassion to reach out to help those hurting. For those who are hurting may they find the strength to embrace the help of others.
While each of us is acutely aware of our own pain, past or present, may we reach out to others in a spirit of compassion and empathy to remember the pain of all others.
We are at a time where all of us are asking what next, what now? What does this mean for us as an individual and our religious community?
We are a community in shock and in grief. Regardless, of what we thought should happen last night – we are here together today, at this moment and in this place – this sacred time and this sacred place.
This is an act of hope and perhaps from this small seed can emerge the first small step in an act of healing. An act of healing ourselves, our relationship with our religious community and our relationship with the sacred.
We profess our hope of healing our world. The need for healing seems very close to each of us at this time. Let us be guided in all we do by the better angels of our natures.
May we all find the capacity to grow from our wounds and not become our wounds. May we grow so our wounds become a smaller and smaller part of who we are.
And may each of us find the guidance and strength we seek to be an agent of healing for ourselves, for our community and for our world.
Amen
Sermon: Now What?
Rev. Susan Smith
The text of Rev. Susan Smith’s sermon is not available but you can listen to it or watch it by clicking on the play buttons above.
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Remen, Rachel Naomi. My Grandfather’s Blessing: Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging
This is a service borrowing from and centered in some of the Jewish tradition and thought about these topics of repentance and atonement that are the center of Judaism’s highest holy days. Rabbi LeBurkien is now a member of this church, and was gracious enough to provide many materials – and some basic education for me – on these two holidays. He also brought his shofar and played it at the beginning and end of the service. Most of the ritual words here were taken or adapted from Jewish materials, while the sermon was my attempt to incorporate some of the wisdom from these stories and traditions into our own tradition of doing honest religion in ordinary language. Since it’s an unusual service, I’ve included almost all spoken parts of the service, to give a more rounded feel for it.
– Davidson Loehr
BLOWING OF THE SHOFAR
Give heed to the sound of the shofar,
The sharp, piercing blasts of the shofar,
Splitting the air with its message,
Renouncing unworthy goals and selfish behaviors.
Instill in your hearts a new spirit.
Heed the sound of the shofar,
Sounding its message of warning,
Its cry of alarm and awakening –
Urging us to work with our brothers and sisters
To combat the ills that beset us all.
Accept the challenge to triumph
Over the forces of anger and destruction.
And all their poisonous fruit.
Heed the sound of the shofar,
Bringing bright hope to a people
Long scattered and stricken with sorrow.
Heed the sound of the shofar,
The blast that is blown within our spaces like the voice of God, O my people.
SOUNDING OF THE SHOFAR
According to some Jewish writers, the sound of the shofar is like a prayer, or even like the voice of God in our midst. We welcome both. Please join me in the responsive invocation written in your order of service.
RESPONSIVE INVOCATION
LEADER: We gather to seek, to find and to share the promise of honest religion:
PEOPLE: TO COME ALIVE, TO SEEK TRUTH, AND TO HEAL OUR WORLD.
LEADER: And so it is a sacred time, this, and a sacred place, this.
PEOPLE: A PLACE FOR QUESTIONS MORE PROFOUND THAN ANSWERS
LEADER: Vulnerability more powerful than strength
PEOPLE: AND A PEACE THAT CAN PASS UNDERSTANDING.
LEADER: It is a sacred time, this. Let us begin it together in song.
READING: THE STORY OF JOSEPH
The sons of Jacob were twelve in number, Now Jacob loved Joseph more than any of his other sons, so he made a coat of many colors for him. When his brothers saw the coat they believed that their father loved Joseph more than any of them, and began to hate their brother.
Joseph had a series of dreams which he told his brothers about. The first was of binding up of sheaves in the field., and Joseph’s sheaf rising and standing up, and the brothers’ sheaves gathered round and bowed to Joseph’s. This dream stirred the brothers’ hatred again. Joseph came to them again with another dream in which the sun, moon and 11 stars bowed down to him. His father scolded him “am I and your mother and brothers to bow down to you”? The father pondered his son’s dreams and wondered what these meant. And again his brothers increased their hatred of their brother Joseph who was unaware of their feelings against him. After his brothers left to pasture their father’s flocks at Shechem, Jacob spoke with Joseph about following them and bringing back word of their work with his flocks.
And so Joseph set off but his brothers saw him at a distance and began plotting the murder of their brother because of their hatred and jealousy. They wanted to kill Joseph and throw him into a pit but the oldest brother, Rueben, wanted Joseph to be saved from being murdered and said “do not shed any blood; throw him in the pit here in the wilderness, but do not lay hands on him.” When Joseph reached his brothers they took his coat of many colors and after stripping him of it they threw him into the pit. After these deeds, the brothers sat down to eat a meal and as they ate, they watched a caravan of Ishmaelites from and in doing so saved my life, Gilead coming with their spices, balm and laudanum bound for Egypt. Brother Judah went in another direction and said to his brothers “Instead of slaying Joseph and leaving him in the pit for wild animals, let us sell him to this caravan of Ishmaelites and not lay hands on him. After all he is our brother.” His brothers agreed and sold Joseph for 20 shekels of silver, and the Ismaelites took him to Egypt. They returned the bloody coat to their father and Joseph was believed to have died from animal attack.
Joseph did well in the land of Egypt. He worked very hard and bought himself out of slavery, and rose in importance to become close to the king or Pharaoh. Eventually drought and famine came to Canaan where Joseph’s family lived and his brothers had to come to Egypt to buy food. He had his brothers brought before him and contemplated taking revenge against them but could not. His brothers did not recognize him as a man but were fearful of his power and when they were again brought to the palace he began weeping and all heard him say, “I am your brother Joseph whom you sold into Egypt. Be not grieved nor angry but hurry back to my father and speak to him from his son Joseph: You will live near me, you, your sons, your grandsons, your flocks and herds and all that belongs to you and I will provide for you through the years of famine to come. You must tell my father who I am in Egypt, and all you have seen and bring him back here to me.” All the brothers, the 12 sons of Jacob, wept upon each other’s shoulders.
PRAYER: A RESPONSIVE LITANY OF ATONEMENT
Leader: For remaining silent when a single voice would have made a difference.
LEFT SIDE: WE FORGIVE OURSELVES AND EACH OTHER; WE BEGIN AGAIN IN LOVE.
RIGHT SIDE: FOR EACH TIME THAT OUR FEARS HAVE MADE US RIGID AND INACCESSIBLE
Leader: We forgive ourselves and each other; we begin again in love.
LEFT SIDE: FOR EACH TIME THAT WE HAVE STRUCK OUT IN ANGER WITHOUT JUST CAUSE
RIGHT SIDE: WE FORGIVE OURSELVES AND EACH OTHER; WE BEGIN AGAIN IN LOVE.
Leader: For each time that our greed has blinded us to the needs of others
LEFT SIDE: WE FORGIVE OURSELVES AND EACH OTHER; WE BEGIN AGAIN IN LOVE.
RIGHT SIDE: FOR THE SELFISHNESS WHICH SETS US APART AND ALONE
Leader: We forgive ourselves and each other; we begin again in love.
LEFT SIDE: FOR FORGETTING THAT WE ARE ALL PART OF ONE FAMILY
RIGHT SIDE: WE FORGIVE OURSELVES AND EACH OTHER; WE BEGIN AGAIN IN LOVE.
Leader: For those and for so many things big and small that make it seem we are separate.
ALL: WE FORGIVE OURSELVES AND EACH OTHER; WE BEGIN AGAIN IN LOVE.
SERMON: Atonement
We are reflecting on two of Judaism’s high holy days this morning, Rosh Hashanah, which was September 30-1 October, is their spiritual New Year. And Yom Kippur, which ended the ten days of repentance and atonement this past Thursday.
Rosh Hashanah is a time of repenting for bad actions toward other people, a time for looking inside, asking what kind of people our actions have shown us to be in the past year. Before forgiveness can happen, we have to confess to the people we believe we have wronged.
Yom Kippur, the end of this ten days, is called the Day of Atonement. “Atonement” is a wonderful theological term, and its spelling is its meaning: at-one-ment. Being at one with yourself and your highest and most life-giving values – or in theological language, with your God. To do this, you first have to be at one with your neighbors, so it’s really a complete kind of at-one-ment. We’d all be happier if we had it.
Most of Judaism is for Jews, just as most of Christianity is for Christians. But there are parts of all religions that are ours for the taking, and we want to learn from them if we can. Those parts are the insights into the human condition, and the wisdom for living more wisely and well. That’s part of what theologians call the Wisdom Tradition, and wisdom is always free, offered to all who are willing to hear it and take it to heart.
As we sometimes do on New Year’s Eve, Jews also make resolutions for the new year. And like the rest of us, they usually fail to keep many of them. The world seldom cooperates with all of our resolutions, and then what do we do? They’re harder than we hoped they would be when we made them. Life can put us in a hole or back us into a corner or frighten us, and we lower our expectations and our standards.
This is part of the religious lesson of that story of Joseph that Rabbi LeBurkien told you earlier. It’s a wonderful story, and I want to visit it from a different angle this morning. Joseph’s brothers were horrible to him. If you looked in the Hall of Fame for Dysfunctional Families, their group photo would be there. Some wanted to kill him, others to throw him into a deep hole so the wild animals would eat him, and the kindest of them decided simply to sell him into slavery. If you got to choose your brothers, nobody would choose them.
Years later, Joseph has risen to power through the strength of his own character and the luck of life. His brothers – due to bad luck, which in this story is also meant as a judgment on their character – are brought before him. Joseph can take all the vengeance he wants now. He can get even with them in spades for everything they did to him and everything they thought about doing to him.
But what would he gain? Sure, it would give him a wonderful cheap thrill, getting even. And you know how good that feels, don’t you? But then he would have stooped to their level. He would be showing that he was their brother in the worst way rather than in the best way. It wouldn’t be anything you could be proud of if you thought God was watching – and in these stories, God is usually watching.
What Joseph did in this ancient myth by acting out of love, out of his highest and proudest ideals, is more than most of us might do. That’s why the story has remained so powerful all these centuries. It calls us to a higher plane of being, to live out of only our proudest ideals. That’s important because life can still frighten us away from those high ideals if we let it.
Unless we can forgive a past that cannot be changed, we will carry anger, resentment and the hope for vengeance or anger or a paralyzing fear into the future. Then we won’t be starting a new year after all, but repeating some of the poisonous parts of the one we just had – like the movie “Groundhog Day,” reliving the same sorry situation again and again. So instead, we forgive ourselves and each other and begin again in love.
Joseph forgave his brothers, redefined them as brothers rather than enemies, they embraced and went into the future together, and into our common mythology as one of the most challenging and inspiring stories we’ve ever told. This isn’t just about forgiving some awful brothers. It’s really about forgiving life for not pleasing us. This makes it easy to see that this old story isn’t really about Joseph. It’s really about us, and about life. What do we do when we’re scared, angry or resentful? Because the world really isn’t made in the image of our desires. And every once in awhile, it rises up to remind us of that, and to say, “Now what will you do?”
Think of the current economic mess our country and growing parts of the world are in. It isn’t fair. You’ve read the same stories I have. The whole situation is more complex than I understand, and maybe there’s a lot more to it than we’re being told right now, I don’t know. But stocks have fallen, some people have lost thousands from their retirement funds, and other countries are panicked as well.
Nonprofits and churches are also worried because right now, in this panic, charitable giving is slowing down. People are afraid want to put their money under their pillow, or under a rock. And under the heading of Really Interesting Timing, we’re in the middle of our own annual pledge drive just as this whole subject of money has become one people don’t want to talk about. We don’t have anywhere near enough people on our stewardship committee to share the tasks without burning out. It’s hard to talk about money because people are afraid and don’t want to hear about it or think about it. A lot of people are afraid that the light at the end of the tunnel might be an oncoming train. This shows us once again that Denial isn’t a river in Egypt – the river runs right through us.
We are Joseph, thrown into a hole. Not by this or that Republican or Democrat or Congress, but by Life. Sometimes, it favors us, sometimes it doesn’t, because life isn’t created in the image of our own wishes or needs.
We are Joseph. Do we allow ourselves to be ruled by fear and anger? People could understand if we did, because it’s what many of them are doing. So many strong winds blowing us in so many directions right now. Which winds do we let blow us around?
Should we give up on the pledge drive, cancel the wonderful building campaign we have planned for our children, our programs, our future, cancel all two dozen of our split-the-plate recipients and sell the church for spare parts?
Now when we start thinking this way, we know we’re wrong, because this is a church where we are here because we want to learn how to serve high and brave and life-giving ideals, not fears that make us shrink back from life. We will not be frightened away from life.
We need to back off a little to ask whether it’s realistic to stay in a hole of doom and gloom, whether the sky is really falling as Chicken Little always, always believes, or whether there are life-giving and healing insights that are also true. They can come from folk wisdom and stories, but also from straight facts, so let’s start with some of those.
I read an article from a company called Resource Services Inc. this week that our new executive director Sean Hale passed around, and then went online to learn more about this company. It was founded in 1972 by two evangelical classmates from Baylor University, to help churches plan successful capital campaigns, and at one point, of the 25 largest successful church capital campaigns in history, all but one of them was planned by this company. So they have learned a lot about the vicissitudes of economics and economic history.
Here are just a few facts from a paper they published six years ago, during the panic after 9-11 (“Christian Giving in Uncertain Times” from the NACBA Seminar, a Presentation of Bill Wilson of RWI, July 9, 2002):
o The total amount of giving in the U.S. has increased every year but one for the past 40 years, including through wars, recessions and other crises. Each year we have given more than the previous year.
— These crises do tend to paralyze us for a short time, but in the calendar year following crises, the giving grew at a greater rate than it did during the crisis year.
— The larger a church is, the more likely their members are to support it. About 70% supported churches under 100 members, while about 87% supported churches of 500 or more.
— People in the South and West give more per capita than those in the Midwest and Northeast.
— “People with the strongest convictions are the most likely to support their worldview financially….” (from George Barna)
— Commitments to capital campaigns aren’t usually affected much by economic crises, partly because they’re received over a three-year period.
They suggest thinking about it this way: everything we give, Life gave to us first. It isn’t so much a giving as it is a giving-back.
The economy always recovers. Even if this is going to be compared to the great scares like the 1987 stock market crash, or the one way back in 1929, the economy is now far more global. As we’re seeing, economies all over the world are affected and working on it. Too much is at stake for too many people to let everything slide off a cliff.
In other words, it is safe to act as though our highest values are still our best guides to living now. We don’t cancel our split-the-plate practice, because we want to heal our world, not withdraw from it. We want to be people, and a church, that are conspicuous because we choose to serve life, to come alive, not to stay in the hole we’ve been thrown into.
As the preacher Robert Schuler once put it, “Tough times never last; tough people do.” We don’t get to choose our crises, but we do get to choose how we will act in them.
The next year or two may well be tough. Tough times are a part of living. They are the times that show us what we’re made of when we’re in that hole.
I can tell you that I’d rather be representing a church right now than any other kind of business. Because we’re not defined by productivity or the bottom line, and we don’t outsource your souls to another country. We’re defined by the power of the ideals we serve, and their ability to steer us through even – and especially – these wonderfully challenging times.
This past Wednesday I attended the Kol Nidre service at Congregation Agudis Achim, a local conservative congregation, and heard a new version of an old story. I want to share it with you.
An older man was out walking on the beach one day when he noticed, far ahead of him, a young woman who would bend down, pick something up, throw it into the ocean, then walk on until she stopped and did it again. Curious, he walked toward her, and as he got closer he saw she was picking up starfish, one at a time, and throwing them back into the ocean.
He walked up to her and said, “Why are you doing that?” “I’m saving starfish,” she answered. “The ocean washes them up onto the beach where they’ll die. I throw them back to their home.”
He laughed. “Why are you wasting your time? The ocean has been doing this for millions of years. Millions of starfish have died on the beach, and always will. Do you honestly think you can make any difference?”
She walked over to another starfish, picked it up, and threw it back into the ocean. She turned to the man and said, “It made a difference to that one.”
The man hadn’t expected this, because as you know, negativity and cynicism can usually silence most arguments, even when it’s wrong. But it forced him to think, and to act. As she walked on, he joined her, and before long he bent over, picked up a starfish, threw it back to the sea, and a big smile broke out on his face.
Some other people on the beach who had been watching this interchange began getting up and walking toward the ocean, picking up starfish and tossing them into the sea. Soon nearly everyone was doing it, and kept doing it until they had covered the whole beach. When the last starfish had been thrown back to its home in the ocean, the people all cheered and hugged one another.
Like the story of Joseph, that beach is a metaphor for life. Bad stuff is part of life, and sometimes we actually come to believe that we’re powerless – what difference could we possibly make? But the real truth about us is just how powerful we really are if we will act on our highest values, no matter what life brings us. Because people are watching. We are watching. We’re watching each other, and the courage of a few people can have an amazing effect in giving others the courage of their own convictions. Then before you know it, we’ve cleaned up the beach, kept this exciting and life-giving liberal church on its healthy path, and built a lovely new building for our children, our programs and our future. Then comes the laughing and cheering. Cheering ourselves, for having the courage of our deepest convictions, the courage to come alive, embrace our most life-giving truths, and begin healing ourselves and our world.
If you have hesitated to come into our pledge drive, or have entered it hesitantly and would be prouder to invest more of your money, time and spirit here, I advise you to come in boldly. Come join us on this wonderful and challenging beach of life. Help us clean the fearful and paralyzing debris off of it. Help us return everything to life.
Make the kind of strong and confident pledge you’d really like to for next year. If it takes us all a little longer than we think to restore health to our economy and you need to adjust your pledge next spring or summer, of course you can do that. But for now, be hopeful and bold because that gives life both to us and to you.
This isn’t an economic matter; it’s a religious mission. It is a mission of at-one-ment, coming to be at one with our proudest ideals and highest values. So come join us on this beach, and help us maintain it and ourselves as beacons of light, life and hope. The work together is inspiring and fun. And afterwards, there will be this party and this cheering that you don’t want to miss. Join us!
BLOWING OF THE SHOFAR
Now once more, hear the sound of the shofar,
Splitting the air, reminding us to let go of unworthy goals and selfish behaviors, and instill in our hearts a new spirit.
Heed the sound of the shofar,
Sounding its cry of awakening –
Urging us to accept the challenge to triumph
Over the forces of anger and fear.
And all of their many poisonous fruits.
Let us heed the sound of the shofar, O my people.
SOUNDING OF THE SHOFAR
Together we have celebrated the creation of the universe, the creations of nature, and the power of creation which is within each one of us. We are the creators and co-creators of our lives, our world, and our future. We have, each of us, a small power of creation like unto that of God. Let us go forth from here reclaiming our ability to know good from evil. We go forth as creative and powerful people, called again to serve only our highest callings, to come alive, to seek truth and to heal our world. Please join me in our responsive benediction.
RESPONSIVE BENEDICTION:
PREACHER: We leave this sacred time and place,
PEOPLE: But we carry its promise with us.
PREACHER: The world needs the spirit that we can carry forth.
PEOPLE: Let us become the life, the truth and the healing that we seek.
Imagine it is 2,500 years ago and you are a Greek with a question. This question has been bothering you for quite some time and you just can’t figure it out. So one day you decide to consult the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, one of the ancient world’s most intriguing and unusual establishments. For there at the ancient temple located beneath the shining rocks of Mount Parnassus, the God Apollo spoke through a Pythia, or human priestess, and offered inspiration and guidance to all who came.
Legends tell that Delphi and its environs had long been considered to have mystical powers. A few years ago I went to Australia for my 50th birthday and actually turned 50 while visiting Uluru, formerly know as Ayers Rock, the largest monolith in the world. I was nervous about going out into the middle of the desert to a giant sandstone monolith for such an auspicious occasion – ironically, I had always thought I’d go to Greece and turn 50 at the Parthenon but I’ve got to tell you, Uluru has a magic to it that has to be experienced and cannot be described. If Delphi was like Uluru, then I understand exactly why the ancient Greeks put an oracle there and why they thought the very land held special power.
When you arrive at Delphi, you approach the entrance to the temple and notice something carved into the wall, something that has come down to us as the best known of all the Delphic injunctions: in Greek it reads: GNOTHI SEAUTON, which we translate as “know thyself.” Some sources say that “know thyself” is the answer the Oracle gave to Chilon of Sparta who asked: “What is best for man?” It is, interestingly enough, the same advice that the Oracle in the 1999 movie The Matrix gave to Neo, only in the movie the phrase was written in Latin over the entrance to the Oracle’s kitchen. Times change, but the questions (and some of the answers), do not.
Now it seems self-evident that knowing yourself would be a good thing. But just what does it mean to “know thyself”? It is a question as old at the Delphic Oracle itself. Socrates said that it meant that “The unexamined life is not worth living,” that it was important on a daily basis to look inward to discover the true nature of our beings and to consciously make decisions about our lives and our dreams. In The Matrix, know thyself meant to know the essence of your inherent nature, which for Neo meant to know, the way we know we are in love, with every fiber of our beings, that he was the One, the savior of mankind. And when asked what he thought of the injunction “know thyself”, St. Augustine replied, “I suppose it is that the mind should reflect upon itself.”
Nowadays we call such self-reflection “metacognition,” the ability to think about your thoughts, to engage in self reflection, to introspect. This ability was for centuries thought the sole province of human beings, but animal research has challenged that old prejudice’some animals seem to have the ability to reflect upon their internal mental states, if only at a rudimentary level. That aside, while I think that knowing yourself certainly includes self-reflection, I think it is more than that. For modern science has shown us quite dramatically that we are more than just our conscious selves, and knowing oneself, truly knowing oneself, would include understanding all the layers of our beings, conscious, subconscious, and unconscious.
So let me suggest that simple – or even complex self reflection will not get you where you want to go. One thing that has become clear over the years is that we humans are not monolithic beings – we are not simply a conscious being that makes fully informed choices about life. We want to think we are, and we certainly behave as if we are, but modern research on the sometimes surprising science of us has revealed that often, our control is an illusion, and that there is something very powerful and very deep going on that we don’t even know about at a conscious level.
Research shows that our subconscious and unconscious selves play a big role in who we are, how we feel, and what we do. More fundamentally, new studies reveal a subconscious brain that is far more active, purposeful, and independent than previously thought. Generalized goals, like eating, mating, traveling, and the like, appear to be instigated by neural software programs that can be run by the subconscious whenever it, and not we, chooses.
Let me give you a couple of examples:
In a recent experiment, psychologists at Yale were able to alter people’s judgments of a stranger by handing those people a cup of coffee. It’s true. What happened was this: the subject of the experiment was handed either a hot cup of coffee or an iced latte in a social setting. Afterwards, the people who held the iced latte rated a hypothetical person they read about as being much colder, less social, and more selfish than did the students who held the hot coffee. As improbable and strange as this seems, this result is consistent with others that have poured forth over the last few years. For example, new studies show that people are more tidy if there is a tang of cleaning liquid in the air, and they are more prone to be highly competitive in their negotiations with one another if there is a leather briefcase at the end of a long table rather than an old, worn backpack, in which case they are more laid back.
Psychologists say that what is going on is a demonstration of how everyday sights, smells, and sounds can selectively activate goals and motives that people already have in their brains. What is going on is that the subconscious is running preexisting programs that strongly influence our choices and our behavior – all without us actually having any conscious awareness that we are being manipulated by our own brains.
These findings help to explain how we can be happy one minute, then for no apparent reason, unhappy the next. I’m sure everybody in here has experienced this phenomenon – you show up to a party feeling great, then, without apparent reason, you get depressed, turn sour, and want to get away. No amount of self-reflection can explain the change, but it could be that one of the women is wearing the same dress that your ex-girlfriend was wearing the night she tossed all your possessions onto the street or perhaps the smell of the house triggered repressed resentments about your childhood. You didn’t consciously realize any of it, but your subconscious did, and initiated a hard-wired program that actually changed your basic equilibrium.
I’m going to go a little further and say that I don’t think that self-reflection is enough to know thyself for yet another reason. No matter how hard we try, I don’t think it’s possible to get a true picture of who we are simply by looking inward. While it’s true that only we can see our deepest thoughts, our deepest desires, and our deepest motivations, one thing we simply cannot see is how others see us. We need more data, data that reflects the who that we are in the eyes of others. In short, to fully know ourselves, we need feedback on the self that others know and experience.
And thanks to the Internet, all of us can do something that the visitors to the Oracle at Delphi could not: While they could ask a god for advice, we can Google ourselves. How many of you have Googled yourself? According to a Pew Research Study, by the end of 2007, about half of all Americans have come a little closer to knowing themselves, at least as others see them, by Googling themselves. But whether one Googles oneself or simply listens to what others who know and care about you have to say, I don’t think we can get close to truly knowing who we are without input from outside of ourselves. That perspective allows us, at the very least, to check on whether who we think we are matches with how we are perceived by others, and, if there is a discrepancy, as there often is, figure out what happened, and correct it.
Another thing about human beings is we are not static. We change as we grow older, more experienced, and, as Billy Joel might say, earn a few scars on our faces. I certainly don’t think I am the same person I was in my early twenties, before my experience with advanced Hodgkin’s disease and all that went with it. I have a sense of continuity, certainly, but deep inside I know that I have changed at a very fundamental level, a conclusion that has been confirmed by many of those closest to me over the years.
While these assertions may seem to run counter to the strong current in our culture that we each have an essence that is eternal and at some fundamental level, unchanging, recent findings in neuroscience and neuropsychology tend to support my experience. I do not dispute that we are born with certain aspects of ourselves hardwired. Nor do I dispute that this hard wiring is sometimes quite difficult to change. Nonetheless, research is showing that while older brains may be less efficient than younger brains, and may in fact, show signs of memory loss and the like, older brains may actually be wiser brains. It has to do with how information is accumulated and processed, but the point is that for this and other reasons, our brains – and with them, us – change over time. So unlike some people who think it’s better to be consistent than right, I think it’s OK to change your mind because, in fact, your mind changes. We change. We become different people with different desires, different wants, different goals, different values. And keeping up with ourselves, not living in the past, is a big part of knowing ourselves.
Which brings me to the point that knowing thyself doesn’t just mean knowing and understanding one’s essence. It also means knowing our dreams, our abilities, our real virtues and even our frailties. It means knowing ourselves in all our aspects, including how we change over time, at least as well as we know the world, our jobs, and those around us. But this often isn’t the case. Just as we are generally good at helping somebody else figure things out, whether it be their love life, money situation, problems on the job, or whatever, we are often not so good at taking care of ourselves, and the same applies here. As I’ve gotten older I have realized just how much I was unaware about my younger self and I think many people have had the same experience and that some, some go almost all the way though life as complete strangers to themselves.
So does all this mean it’s not possible to fully know yourself? I think that’s a fair question. There are those who say that it’s not possible to understand oneself, that an accurate definition of self is impossible from an objective point of view. Others think that the exploding field of neuroscience – the study of the brain at an anatomical, but in particular, at the cellular and even molecular level – is the most hopeful candidate for providing scientific answers to the questions that have perplexed human beings for thousands of years, including who we are and what is our true nature.
Neuroscience is expanding at a fantastic pace. My son, TJ, who is doing the lay leading today, has his masters degree in neuroscience and so I have some idea of how far we have come since the old days of stone knives and bearskins when I was studying biochemistry in graduate school.
But you know, while I think neuroscience is going to be able to teach us a lot about what we are and how our brains work, I think it’s going to be less good at telling us who we are and how we should live. So while it is clear that we are comprised of conscious, subconscious, and unconscious beings, and that our feeling of total conscious control is something of an illusion, no matter what science says, no matter what the limitations, it is vital that we get to know ourselves to the best of our ability, and be honest and accepting of what we learn. If you insist on being ignorant or if you insist on being somebody else, then who will ever be you?
All of which brings me to William Shakespeare. Thought by many to be the world’s greatest playwright, Shakespeare’s greatest play may have been Hamlet. In Hamlet, Polonius is preparing his son Laertes for his travel abroad. Polonius directs his son to commit a “few precepts to memory”, the most famous of which is, “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
Much has been written about this quote, and I certainly am not going to do any literary exposition here. But I do think it’s interesting that Polonius assumes that Laertes knows himself, for how can one be true to oneself without first knowing oneself? Thus, before following Polonius? advice, we first must follow the advice of the Oracle at Delphi, something that is at best a daily exploration, and at worst, impossible. But leaving aside for the moment the very real issue of how do we know ourselves, what does it mean to be true to that self? What does it mean to be true to the self we know and understand today, who needs to get about with the task of living, and hopefully living well?
Well, the first thing we know is that Shakespeare was not trying to grant Laertes permission to behave however he wanted. If you are an axe murderer, it will not avail you to say you were simply being true to yourself. So that’s not what’s going on here. Unless we live in solitude, being true to oneself will always mean being true in the context of culture, society, and law. Thus, one of the most difficult aspects of being true to yourself is how to navigate in a complex society that presents us with scores of often complicated, difficult, and even ambiguous relationships.
And we do live in a complex society that demands much of us, and that, for almost all of us, requires some level of compromise. It is inevitable. So we tend to wear masks, masks that have the Good Housekeeping seal of approval, that are safe, that don’t rock the boat. Sometimes we wear them because we have to, one of those accommodations to reality that just has to be. But sometimes we wear them out of fear, and sometimes we wear them out of a lack of self-confidence. Those are the masks we need to work on, need to shed, if we are to live a truly authentic life of integrity.
Still, we are left with the difficult question of how to choose our path, when to fight and when to yield. There are many answers to this question, of course, but let me quote what Thomas Jefferson had to say: “In matters of style, swim with the current, in matters of principle, stand like a rock.” Looking back on the 1970s, I’m not sure I agree with Jefferson on matters of style, but I do certainly agree with him on matters of principle.
Which begs the question, of course, which principles? Well, if we are being true to ourselves, then the principles we are being true to are the principles we found within ourselves, while we were following the Delphic command to know thyself. You know, taken seriously, this position is a pretty radical one in our culture, one that sits at the core of what I understand it means to be a modern Unitarian Universalist and an adherent of liberal religion.
I’ve been coming to this church for 31 years, and have always believed that one of the important missions of this church is to help people get to know themselves, their real selves, and then assist them in being true to themselves as they live their lives and participate in our world. This is, I think, a very different mission from many other churches. In many other churches the mission is to convince you to distrust your humanity, to almost disavow it, in favor of revealed truth that comes from God, truth that is unchanging, that is to be accepted and obeyed. Our church, and all those like it, are very special places, are sanctuaries of humanity in the broadest sense of the word and I, for one, am grateful for them.
But did you know that some of the people in this church are among the most disliked people in America? It’s true. And I’m not talking this time about being gay or lesbian. According to a study conducted by sociologists at the University of Minnesota, atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers are among the most disliked persons in America. They fell below Muslims, homosexuals, and recent immigrants in a poll that measured the respondents? view of whether and how much a number of different groups shared the respondents? vision of America and what it means to be an American. Unitarian Universalists, as free thinking adherents of liberal religion, and by that I mean us – you and me – we are not much liked or trusted by many in mainstream society, something it pays to know when you are out and about in the world.
Having noted that, we all know that no matter who you are, sometimes being true to oneself and one’s principles takes enormous courage and may even put you at risk of harm. It sometimes means having to stand against the majority, or your friends, or even your family. It means engaging in a regular pattern of behavior, and of making choices that are consistent with your espoused values and with the person you claim to be inside. It means having the courage of your convictions, and of being willing to put them out on the table, even when they are not popular. And I suggest to you that it all begins with knowing yourself, and then of accepting yourself, fully and completely, both the good and the bad, in order to be true to the good and change the bad.
Now, I don’t mean to imply that we are always alone in our lives and in our quest to be true to ourselves. Certainly, we have our friends, our family, we have this church, and we have a community of thought and feeling that goes back hundreds of years. All of that is enormously important.
And yet, we are a creedless religion that honors the individual conscious; which leads me to one of the scariest things about liberal religion and trying to know and be true to oneself.
There isn’t anyone else to blame.
When it’s up to you, when you are being true to yourself, then that’s all there is. This is another reason why living authentically, living the life of personal integrity, takes so much courage. Sometimes we’re all we’ve got.
And on this topic, it occurred to me that some Christians wear WWJD wristbands “What would Jesus do?” At first I thought we could wear WWED wristbands – you know, What would Emerson do?” Or even perhaps just get our own WWJD wristbands – only they would stand for What would Jefferson do? But ultimately I realized that none of these would be authentic, that if there was going to be a UU wristband it would have to read: WWID? What would I do?
Finally, there’s more to life than principles. There’s dreams, there’s goals, there’s fun. Yes, even tortured soul UUs get to have fun. But strange as it sounds, being true to your dreams, your goals, and your potential can sometimes be just as scary and intimidating as standing up for unpopular principles. Once we take off our blinders, once we see for real, we begin to understand just how much is possible in our lives and we wonder if we’re up to it. We look out at the vista of possibility and it can be overwhelming.
The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard put it this way: “There is nothing with which every person is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.” We talk about becoming the true beings that we are and then of being authentic and living lives of integrity, and it certainly sounds good, even exciting, but when it comes down to it, sometimes those prospects can be intimidating and scary. Sometimes it’s as if we are waiting for somebody to give us permission to be ourselves and pursue our dreams and our potential.
My message to you is don’t wait for anyone or anything to work on yourself and your dreams. You see, when we know ourselves, then we come into focus, our dreams become clearer, our path becomes straighter, and our sense of purpose and meaning grows until we feel such power and such of sense of belonging to and being right with the world, that as night follows day, we almost cannot help being true to ourselves.
So let me close today by suggesting this: I think there is a way to both know who you really are and at the same time, be true to who you are. And it’s not through ruminating, or self-reflecting, or taking classes, or any other inward looking activity. Ultimately, I think knowing yourself and being true to yourself is best accomplished simply by engaging fully in life and making choices and standing by them.
In the hit move Batman Begins, Rachel Dawes tells Bruce Wayne that it isn’t who you are underneath, but what you do that defines you. You are the choices you make and the actions you take. So if you want to know who you truly are, then put yourself out there, in situations that are challenging, that call for action, because then you’ll know. “There will be an inner voice that will tell you how you are doing.” You can sense it if you are honest with yourself and listen carefully.
So let me ask you to do something today, something we should do every day of our lives. Do something that is you. Do something that is true.
We pray from a place that knows there is much beauty in the world to behold.
We pray from a place that knows there is endless love that has the power to connect us all.
We pray from a place that knows that it matters what we believe.
The Angels of our Better Nature call us to notice the beauty.
The voices of our Higher Selves call us to remember love.
Let us listen to them.
There are voices that would have us judge someone else’s worth to be less because their approach is different than our own.
There are voices that would make us feel “less” because we don’t match someone else’s set of ideas.
There are voices that would focus us only on ugliness, and disconnection and tearing down.
But we know there is more love somewhere.
Let us listen to the Higher Voices.
The ones that add life to life; the ones that encourage us to come alive, and allow for everyone and everything around us to do the same.
Let us listen to those voices.
SERMON
This sermon started over breakfast one morning. I sat across the table from my husband and saw a man who looked like he had something exciting to tell. “What,” I asked. Well, he had spent the morning brainstorming things he tells himself that he should or shouldn’t do/ be/think/feel. Several pages later, he felt quite light.
That’s when we sat down to breakfast.
“I should like cats!? He said. – I always thought that I should like cat’s because my sister liked cats and not dogs.”
When we were first married 8 years ago, there was some discussion about whether we’d get a cat or a dog. He was a cat person. I was a dog person. I’d grown up with dogs. Beyond that, when I was very young, my dad developed severe asthma and cats were one of the triggers. So in a very serious way, I learned that we should not have cats and that stayed with me into adulthood.
I had to laugh at David’s revelation because sometime during our college years, my sister Mary announced that all dogs, as pets, should be big and black. She had read that somewhere and seemed to put stock in it, so I adopted the idea.
In 38 years, Mary has never had a large black dog. In 36 years, neither have I. But for some reason the idea had weight and for years I thought that if I got a dog, it should at least be big, if not dark. But that didn’t appeal to me and I wondered if something was wrong with me because of it. It’s likely that Mary forgot about this “should” shortly after our conversation, but I held onto it because it came from my wiser older sister. It’s funny how that can happen.
David and I now have two cuddly 12-pound miniature dachshunds. One is red, and one has white, brown, and black spots. Getting them was his idea, and I happily obliged.
My dad now lives happily in the same house as a cat. His allergies are under control.
Each one of us let go of a “should” and we are all happy for it.
The funny thing about “shoulds” is that they often originate as an appropriate response to a specific situation. And then they turn into absolutes inside of us so even when a situation changes, the “should” stays. It may or may not be relevant or even helpful anymore. And it can hold us back from some really great experiences.
My resistance to cats well beyond the years I lived with someone who was allergic (and apparently beyond the years they were detrimental to his health) to them is a light-hearted example.
There is a story about a woman who always cut the front and back ends off of a ham before putting it into the oven to bake. Her husband asked her one day why she always did that. She didn’t know precisely, but that’s how her mom had always done it so it must be the way to cook a ham. She called her mom to find out why. Her mother laughed and explained that her baking pan was too small to fit the entire ham so she had to make it fit somehow.
The behavior was a relevant response to having a small pan. It wasn’t so relevant in the daughter’s life. And she had thrown away a lot until she examined the ‘should.?
From the time we’re born we take in messages. Messages about how we should behave, what we should like, how we should act, who we should be, and how to apply these standards to other people or situations. These “shoulds” affect our lives and they affect our souls, often in profound ways.
What might our lives be like if we consciously examined our “shoulds” ; if we figured out where they came from, who they belong to, and whether or not they are helpful in our lives now; if we looked at what choices are presented to us by our “shoulds” , and what choices are denied.
What might our lives look like?
That’s what I’d like to consider this morning.
So dogs and cats were the lighter side of the breakfast conversation that David and I had one morning. It turns out that I needed to give the church a sermon topic that day and now I had one.
Of course the next thing to do was to have a party. I invited my girlfriends over for good food and drink and thoughts.
Only some of the time did we directly talk about ‘shoulds.?
But we talked about them all night.
We told stories about growing up. We talked about motherhood a lot ? either about our own mothers or the newness of being a mother that many of my friends are now experiencing.
We gathered to talk about “shoulds” ? and talked about motherhood.
Interesting.
I don’t think that is a coincidence.
As girls, we often try to emulate our mothers, or be the opposite. Either way, we define ourselves by them for at least a while. Then we become the age our mothers were when we first tried to emulate them, maybe we become mothers ourselves, and we try to figure out what womanhood means in light of her. There is bound to be a lot of “shoulds” there.
The same could be said of a man’s experience.
It is from our parents that we learned that we shouldn’t run out into the street, or touch a hot stovetop, or pull the ears of a dog. It is from our parents that we learn we should say “please” and “thank you,” brush our teeth, and get a good night’s sleep.
And things much more profound.
Things like self-respect, or shame. Things like self-care, or denial. Things like trust, or fear.
And so on.
We learn these things from countless other places too. But they start at home.
The “shoulds” and ‘shouldn’ts? that we learn build the essential framework for the codes we live by. I don’t think our experience of life can be separated from these codes, or even (should) be. After all, it’s these codes that make groups of people able to function together. They give us identity. They give is direction. They keep us safe.
But they can also do the opposite. And then they’re detrimental.
And then, of course, there are the “shoulds” that start out as appropriate responses to a certain situation, and stay with us long after the situation has changed and the should is no longer helpful.
So much of what we believe we should or shouldn’t do comes from layers of indirect conditioning. Then we are compelled to live by a code that we’re not fully conscious of or can’t really articulate. We just know somewhere deep in our fibers certain do’s and don’ts.
We tend to assume others live by the same do’s and don’ts
And we get surprised when we discover that they don’t.
And we even get offended when someone doesn’t live up to our unspoken ideas about what should and should not be.
Then we set ourselves up for a lot of struggle and a lot of trouble and a lot of missing out on neat things.
Examining our “shoulds” ? and choosing our “shoulds” ? is a helpful thing to do.
There is a saying that goes, “We give ourselves away one inch at a time.” How far can you go before there’s nothing of You left?
I think it’s also true that we can chip away at another person one inch at a time. How much can we chip before there’s nothing of that person left?
I think so much of what allows us to give ourselves away one inch at a time is to believe that another person’s “shoulds” are more legitimate for our own lives than what our own soul tells us.
And I think so much of what allows us to chip away at someone else is the belief that our own set of “shoulds” is more valid than his or hers.
Jim Hightower spoke here about a month ago and he quoted someone ? I can’t remember whom, and I may not even accurately remember the quote, but it went something like, “Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.”
That’s a little hard to do without consciously examining what should messages we live by, who they really belong to, and then choosing the ones that work for us now.
We formulate our “shoulds” and ‘shouldn’ts? one inch at a time, too. And we rarely notice.
But it’s helpful to notice.
It is helpful to notice because then we can actually decide which ones add life to life; which ones make us come alive; and which ones allow us to be wholly ourselves.
This has everything to do with the soul. It’s really no different than examining and consciously choosing one’s religion ? both are about what we fundamentally believe, and how we intend to live, and what we want to pass on.
Becoming conscious of the “shoulds” we live by allows us to discern which ones belong to the voice of our Better Nature, our Higher Selves, or something more squashing.
How many people choose a profession, or a partner, or make other major life choices that kill their spirit a bit more each day because of an adopted should?
And then how many other people suffer because of that person’s frustration?
Becoming conscious of our “shoulds” is not about navel-gazing. It is about coming alive.
It is an essential part of being able to find the path that makes us come alive, because we can only do it if we shed someone else’s idea for us.
What might our lives look like if we examined the choices presented to us by our “shoulds” ?
A few stories came to mind as I was thinking about this theme.
One is a story about Gandhi. It may be true, it may be legend, it may be a bit of both. But it’s good?
A woman came to Gandhi and asked him to please tell her son to stop eating sugar. It was ruining his teeth and hurting his health. Gandhi thought about this for a minute, then asked her to come back in a week.
A week later she returned and made the same request, and Gandhi thought again, and again asked her to come back in a week.
This happened a couple more times before Gandhi finally advised the son to stop eating sugar.
The mother was both relieved and exasperated. If that’s all Gandhi was going to do, why did he make her wait so long and come back so many times?!
Well, he had to successfully stop eating sugar himself first, and it was much harder to do than he had expected.
There is a “should” in that story. A big one – and it’s not about sugar. One that makes us go, “Ahhhh – yesss.” The “should” has something to do with integrity ? and the Angels of our Better Nature recognize a kindred voice here.
There is another story about Lance Armstrong in the 2001 Tour de France. Lance and his strongest competitor, Jan Ullrich, were neck and neck. Then Ullrich crashed. Armstrong pulled over and waited until his rival could return to the race. He said that he couldn’t imagine taking advantage of the situation.
There is a “should” in that story. A big one. One that makes us go, “Ahhhh-wow.” The “should” has something to do with humanity, or respect ? and our Higher Selves recognize a kindred voice.
So please don’t hear me saying that “shoulds” are bad and we need to throw them out the window. They can be very life giving. They are even necessary for life. It’s just helpful to think about the ones we’ve got and the ones we want, and how that affects our lives and those around us.
I’ve been reading a book by Renee Peterson Trudeau called The Mother’s Guide to Self-Renewal. I’m not a mother, but my neighbor, who is a new mother, discovered it and invited a group of friends ? new mothers and non-mothers alike ? to join her in reading a chapter a month and then getting together to discuss it.
Last month’s chapter observed a “should” that is alive and well in our culture ? the “should” that says we must be strong and independent and not need to ask for help if we’re going to be worth much. The author observed how demoralizing this can be, especially when one is trying to figure out how to be a new parent while keeping the rest of life functioning.
Then she shared the story of a woman whose husband travels often for work. When he goes out of town for a week or more, Sarah, mom of two toddlers, has her sister babysit one night so that she can go out to dinner with a girlfriend. She also has a high-school neighbor come over a few evenings to help with dinner, baths and bedtime, and she makes sure she has easy-to-prepare food going into the week. Sarah says, “I used to dread these business trips and would want to dump the kids on my husband the minute he returned from his trip. Now I have learned that I just have to build in extras support when he’s away on a trip. Not only is the week more peaceful and enjoyable, but my husband returns to a family that’s happy to see him. Rather than being resentful that he’s been gone.”
She examined a should ? the one that told her she should be independent and able to take care of everything in her life herself. She challenged it and found a way to invite others in. What she came up with has added life to her life, and to the lives of the ones she loves the most.
What might our lives look like if we examined the choices presented to us by our “shoulds” ? And then found the courage to choose a better path?
Here’s a different kind of story. One with weighty consequences.
I knew a woman when I lived in Chicago who had a very strong Christian faith. Her particular understanding of the faith was that, when someone dies, one should celebrate and only be glad because that person was now experiencing the ultimate eternal life. This is not every Christian’s understanding of an appropriate response to death by a long shot, but it was hers, and she is not alone in it.
Penny was very close with her mother, and during the last years of her mother’s life, her mother lived with Penny. One of the things that brought mother and daughter together so strongly was their shared faith. Her mom told Penny that when she, the mother, died, Penny should not feel sad. She should only feel happiness and rejoice that her mother was in heaven.
Her mother probably meant these words to be comfort.
And Penny expected to only feel happiness and rejoicing.
But that’s not how she felt when her mother died. Penny felt the awful aching hole that gets wrenched in us when someone we dearly love dies.
And it scared her.
It made her feel very ashamed.
Grief naturally brings crisis of it’s own. Penny’s was layered with a confusion and self-doubt that made her feel worthless, and it was all because of a ‘should.?
What kind of faith did she actually have if she felt sadness at the loss of her mother, instead of joy? Did it mean that she didn’t believe strongly enough? Would God reject her because of her unfaithfulness? Could she show her grief and still be acceptable to other people? How selfish must she be to feel pain for her own loss, and not exuberance at her mother’s gain? Did she not love her mother enough to be happy for her? And her list went on.
Her beliefs about what she should feel and ‘shouldn’t? feel, how she should and ‘shouldn’t? respond were so ingrained in her that when she was confronted by her actual experience, her “shoulds” shredded her.
It’s helpful to take notice of what should and ‘shouldn’t? messages we live by. It’s helpful to ask ourselves whose voice they belong to. Is it a voice that builds up, or beats down?
Only when we ask ourselves these questions can we actually decide which “should” messages add life to life; which ones make us come alive; which ones allow us to be wholly ourselves and present with others. And which ones would be better given back to their source.
We would choose to keep many ‘shoulds,? but now they would belong to our own voice and that kind of should feels very different. We would choose to let go of other “shoulds” and while that wouldn’t always be easy or pain-free, it would ultimately feel good and be a step toward gaining our own lives back.
What might our lives look like if we examined the choices presented to us by our “shoulds” ?
A couple of weeks after my party, I sat with one my friends on her front porch well into the night.
At the party, she seemed to redirect the topic anytime a “should” came up. “I figured out why I didn’t want to talk about “shoulds”,” she announced. “I feel so bad anytime I think of them. They’re just a weight hanging over my head or a finger waiving at me. I think of all the things I’m not getting to, or the person I’m not being with my son or my husband or at work, and I feel overwhelmed and like I’m falling short. And I feel stuck.”
Exactly.
She shared that she was trying something new. Anytime she thought she should be doing something, she changed the “should” to a “could” to see how that felt. It always felt freeing. It gave her choices.
This has everything to do with the soul. Not just our own souls, but those around us. We give ourselves away one inch at a time. We chip away at another’s soul one inch at a time. We also affect people around us by the well-being of our own soul.
I don’t think it’s accidental that all religions end up with a list of them. We recognize that there are certain codes that make life meaningful and full and larger than our own meiopic world and these codes deserve the qualification of “holy”.
As we spoke together in this morning’s reading:
“It matters what we believe.”
Some beliefs are like walled gardens. They encourage exclusiveness, and the feeling of being especially privileged.
Other beliefs are expansive and lead the way into wider and deeper sympathies.
Some are like shadows, clouding children’s days with fears of unknown calamities.
Others are like sunshine, blessing children with the warmth of happiness.
Some beliefs are divisive, separating the saved from the unsaved, friends from enemies.
Other beliefs are bonds in a world community, where sincere differences beautify the pattern.
Some beliefs are like blinders shutting off the power to choose one’s own direction.
Other beliefs are like gateways opening wide vistas for exploration.
Some beliefs weaken a person’s selfhood. They blight the growth of resourcefulness.
Other beliefs nurture self-confidence and enrich the feeling of personal worth.
Some beliefs are rigid, like the body of death, impotent in a changing world.
Other beliefs are pliable, like the young sapling, ever growing with the upward thrust of life.?
It matters what we believe. And our “shoulds” have everything to do with that.
Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below: [display_podcast]�
Invocation:
A wise person once said to me, you get to choose how to live, and there are basically two choices, you can choose to be right or you can choose to be peaceful.
The more I have reflected on this the more clear it has become that choosing to be right is about ego, while choosing to be peaceful is about wisdom.
Peace be with you.
Let us join together in song.
Prayer
How can we become more compassionate?
It is helpful to think of a generic situation where you are engaged with another person.
You perceive their actions, and from this perception you normally confer onto them motives and thoughts.
It is by these motives and thoughts, which we have imagined, that we determine how we will react to their action.
One form of compassion happens when we are clear and honest about the actions of others, but kind and generous when we infer thought and motive.
There is an expression for this in English, it is called ‘giving the benefit of the doubt.’
One way to cultivate our capacity for giving the benefit of the doubt is to keep in mind that we do not know what others are thinking.
Another way is to confer to others a range of possible thoughts or motives, and to be intentional when we treat them as if their motives are the noblest ones.
One of the side effects of this practice, is the way that it helps and encourages others to live up to the generosity of your interpretations.
Let us pray this morning that we can learn to become masters at giving others the benefit of the doubt.
Sermon: Understanding Evangelical Christianity
My first chosen religion was evangelical Christianity, I was a holy roller, I sang and danced and spoke in tongues, and I shouted Amen, whenever I was moved. My second chosen religion was Atheism, I was a professional skeptic and debunker, proud in my claims not to believe in anything that hadn’t been proven. And now my chosen religion, they say the third times a charm, well my chosen religion now doesn’t have a name, I attend this Unitarian Universalist church and I stand in this pulpit from time to time, I search for the truth, and I am honored that you have agreed to spend this morning with me so that I can share some thoughts with you about this journey.
In the home where I grew up religion was not a serious issue. We subscribed to the pedestrian mainstream American view that Christianity was true, but that you didn’t have to go to Church to be a good person, and good people go to heaven, which is important, because hell is not a very nice place.
During my childhood I spent summers with my maternal grandparents. When I was twelve they moved back to rural Illinois where our extended family lived. My Great-Uncle Web was a preacher at a Free-Will Pentecostal Church there, and since all my cousins who were my age went to Church three times a week, I wanted to go with them.
Now, I had been to Church before, but I had never seen a Church like this. I don’t think I will ever forget the first time that I saw someone speak in tongues. I didn’t have to wait long, it was about seven minutes into my first service when my Great-Aunt Rose got to her feet and began making noises not unlike ululation at first, and then transforming into a kind of wailing string of syllables. It was eerie and a little frightening, but by the end of that service, I knew that this wasn’t just an eccentricity of my Aunt Rose, but a normal part of how these people, many of them my family, worshiped.
Three weeks later I was saved, the next week I received the spirit of the Holy Ghost and spoke in tongues for the first time, later that summer I received the gift of healing and performed a faith healing on my great-grandmother’s chronic headaches, which she swore lasted a whole week. I also participated in casting out my first demon that summer, it was a spirit of man-hating in a young woman in the congregation who had been abandoned by her father, and who later went on to marry one of my cousins. As the summer drew to a close, I became concerned about how I was going to continue ‘walking in the light’ when I returned home. My uncle’s Church didn’t have any affiliates in my area, but he assured me that if I prayed and searched, God would find me a home congregation.
I returned home, filled with hope, not only of finding a spiritual community, but of rescuing my family from their religious malaise and bringing them once more under the direct protection of Jesus Christ. Both of these quests were disastrous. My family rejected my evangelical advances and my search for a local congregation was even worse, I was told by many ministers and preachers that speaking in tongues was wrong, that it was a misinterpretation of scripture, that it was even the work of the devil. This practice of Speaking in tongues had become central to my way of worship, as had dancing in the spirit, and raising my hands in the air, and shouting Amen when something the preacher said really resonated with me. Sitting quietly and listening to someone talk, standing still with a hymnal in hand singing dirges, I couldn’t reconcile these methods with my desire to worship and glorify God. I searched, and after a while I stopped searching, I read my Bible, and after a while I stopped reading, I worried about my salvation, and after a while, I stopped worrying.
My life became much as it had always been and when I returned to my Grandparents’ home the summer of my 14th year, I inititialy refused the invitations to go to Church, I didn’t want to repeat the cycle, I preferred to forgo the ecstatic experiences of church to avoid the pain of losing them again. And I also felt let-down by God because I believed that he had not helped me to find a home congregation.
But it didn’t last long, a month maybe, and I was back at Church, on my knees weeping, asking forgiveness for my failure to stay on the path. So I sang, and I danced, and I shouted Amen, and I spoke in tongues. And this time when I went home, I didn’t struggle. I rendered unto Caesar the things which were Caesar’s, and unto God the things that were God’s. In this case, the God that I worshiped was in rural Illinois and my normal life; school, immediate family, friends, these things belonged to the secular world of Caesar. That was my last summer in the Church.
Religion once again became a non-issue in my daily world, but that all changed during my first semester at college. I was taking a philosophy course on contemporary moral issues, and when the topic of homosexuality came up, the quiet (or sometimes not so quiet) bigotry of rural Christianity was waiting there in the back of my brain, ready to argue the point of why homosexuality was wrong. I bolstered my claims with biology, with logic, with everything but the kitchen sink. But when the professor asked me what was wrong with two people loving each other, with two people wanting to be each others’ best friends and helpmates, I had no answer. Like most people who had never actually known or been friends with any gay people, I was all focused on the sex act. Once I was forced to step beyond the bedroom into the world of life, where people love each other, where people care for each other, and where sex is simply a physical expression of that love, I was left without a leg to stand on. On that day, in that class period, I abandoned the God of rural Illinois, I publicly changed my position on homosexuality, apologized if I had offended anyone, and began to self-identify as an atheist. Because my professor was right, hate and intolerance are incompatible with love. And I knew then that Love and justice were more important to me than the God of the Bible, than the God of rural Illinois.
I spent the next few months reading psychology texts and talking with people, trying to reframe my religious experiences into this new atheistic framework. I rewrote my narrative of those years using terms like: social pressure, group think, and brainwashing. I researched the Bible critically, embracing a deconstruction of both the text and the life of Jesus. I believed that I had been duped, that I had been sold a Santa Claus type lie, the only consolation was that the people who sold it had believed it to be true. In reality, this simply increased my feelings of condescension toward grown-ups who had failed to realize that the Jesus story was just another myth. I patted myself on the back for being smarter than they were.
Luckily for me, my journey was not over. It took two other mentors to help me find a deeper and more honest view of the truths of those years. The first one was a Sociology professor named Lonn Lanza-Kaduce. He issued a challenge at the beginning of his Sociology of Law course. He said that anyone can read a theory and tear it apart and find all of its weak points; deconstruction is easy. What is hard, he said, and more rewarding, is to give each author their strongest possible reading. What problems or issues is the author most concerned with? What truth or truths are they trying to deal with? As a reader, can you give the author the benefit of the doubt and confront him on his strongest ground, instead of searching for his weaknesses. It was a serious challenge and it had a profound impact on the tenor of the class, every week we had serious discussions about the merits and strengths of different theories and we looked at how different theories actually addressed different domains of problems, and how much of the criticism that was written about them was really missing the point. We learned how to build better theories.
The second influence was Dr. David Hackett, a religion professor, I took the Sociology of Religion course primarily as a way to improve my background knowledge and debating skill when I challenged the evangelical literalist Christian missionaries who regularly visit college campuses with their confrontational style of ministry. It had become a favorite pastime of mine to spend hours in the middle of the day debating them, challenging them, winning over the crowd. I wish I could say that I had done it with love, I wish I could say that it had meant more to me at the time than winning the debate, in the background was always this justification of keeping them from preying on students’ insecurities and feeding them lies, but, in reality I knew that I was preaching to the choir. My sparring with them was about my own ego, my need to show my superiority, so I got what I deserved when I took this Sociology of Religion course.
When I found out that the professor was a practicing church-goer, I almost dropped the course, luckily for me, my ego was too big for that. Just like the philosophy professor had pulled the rug out from under my homophobia by asking the larger question about love, this professor pulled the rug out from under my sense of atheistic superiority by asking if there was value in the story. He claimed that one didn’t have to believe that the Bible was the literal word of God in order to be a Christian, that one did not have to subscribe to the divinity of Christ, or the resurrection, or miracles, or any of the things I had spent the last two years lambasting. If the Roman myths served Roman culture, and the Greek myths served Greek culture, why couldn’t the Christian myths in the Bible serve as a moral framework for Western Christian culture.
Well, he had me there. If we had permission to view the Bible as a collection of stories, a collection of myths, then we could apply the same ‘strongest-reading’ approach that I had learned in the context of social theory. I became a fan of Jesus, of Buddha, and of Mohammed in that class. I read their words, and the words from other world religions in that class, I looked for the passages where they saw the truth most clearly and didn’t worry about the parts where their culture, or their fear, or their greed, or their other human frailties got in the way. I began to believe in the universality of truth, in the idea that we are all seeking this truth, that it is a fundamental part of our nature, that it is this truth that unites us and makes us whole.
In graduate school I began to integrate my love of the prophets with my own narrative. I began to critically evaluate both my early religious experiences, my atheism, and my atheistic contention that those early experiences had been meaningless. Ultimately, I was able to reconcile my understanding with my history and reclaim the genuine aspects of those early religious experiences.
I no longer find it surprising in retrospect that one of the most socially bizarre and controversial aspects of my early practice, speaking in tongues, has ended up being one of the most important to me. When I was an atheist I was ashamed of this part of my past, ashamed because I believed that I had been socially pressured into faking a religious experience. But the more I reflected on the experience, the more I realized that I had been wrong. The social pressure theory wasn’t true to the story, it wasn’t true to my experience. The pressure I felt was not pressure to fit in, it was not pressure to please my family or the church, it was the pressure of what to say when you believe you are face to face with God. When you are in that moment of prayer and you feel yourself in communion with God, with the Universe, what do you say? What can you say? Such immense beauty, such immense pain, such immense love? That is what speaking in tongues taps into. When you want to shout your feelings to God, but you can’t put them into words, you just let those raw feelings out in the form of sound. And in that church, you were allowed that freedom and I experienced it, and I cherish it still.
Now, I’m not suggesting that UU’s should start speaking in tongues, it wouldn’t be genuine, and it wouldn’t produce the desired result. What I am suggesting is that we start thinking, individually and collectively, about how we can foster an environment, how we can produce a spiritual haven here in this sanctuary every Sunday, where people leave their self-criticism and their criticisms of others at the door. A space where people can clap, sing, dance, meditate, sit quietly, hum, think, pray, do whatever they do, but do it without worrying about being judged or without spending any energy judging or thinking about what others are doing. Can we, the distracted intellectuals that we are, find a way to experience communal peace and joy here together every Sunday? I think that we can.
I think it starts with looking inward, with using this time we have here together with the unconditional love and support of our community to bask in the light, love, and joy of the truth. Because the truth is joyful. Let me reiterate that for all of us intellectual doubting Thomases who have a much easier time seeing everything that is wrong with the world, and I include myself. The truth is joyful. This didn’t sink in for me until I went to see the Dalai Lama when he came to town, and I tell you friends, the truth has set that man free. And that freedom radiates from him like a warm light of love and joyfulness. He is not joyful because he has comforting illusions, he is joyful because he has spent his life smashing the illusions that separate us from the truth. There is ever-present in his life the radiance of God, the radiance of an interconnected and interdependent universe, the radiance of the power of life and love.
That radiance, the radiance of the truth, is the light that has inspired all religion. It is the same light that the Evangelical Christians are seeking to capture when they go to church, the same light they are trying to share when they come knocking at your door, the same light that you were searching for this morning when you made your way to this sanctuary. The truth is not fractured, but we are often fractured. The truth is not exclusive, but we are all too often exclusive.
The next time you are confronted with someone who has a religious symbol system that you don’t share, I want you to try and translate. You don’t have to subscribe to God language in order to use God language. Maybe internally, you prefer to use the word Universe instead of God, or maybe you don’t like to assign a word to that concept at all. That’s OK. You can translate into their language, and if your heart and intentions are in the right place, your translation into their symbol system will work out.
This doesn’t only apply to Evangelical Christians, it can apply to anyone. If you remember that the differences are often differences in religious language, differences in symbols and not differences in ultimate truth, then you come to realize the possibility of breaking spiritual bread with any of your brothers and sisters. This does not negate the reality of differences in belief, those differences are real, they exist. What I am suggesting is that when we focus on our differences in opinion, we create divisiveness and discord. When we focus on what we agree on, on the magnificence of the universe, the beauty and the pain of living, the importance of love and compassion, the comfort of human companionship, when we focus on these core truths of religion, we create peace and joy. The choice is up to you, you can choose to be right, or you can choose to be peaceful.
Benediction
I would like to close today with a greeting, because today’s sermon, if given its strongest reading, was about changing the way we meet people, it was about conferring the greatest benefit of the doubt to all of our brothers and sisters, without any reason to do so but faith, without any reason but love.
The greeting is Namaste and it means ?I see the light in you that is also in me.?
Do we have it in our power to begin the world over again? If it were possible, would you want to ?Do things seem to you to be worse than ever, straining painfully toward a doomed future?Are there people you would like to see get what’s coming to them? There are a lot of people who feel this way, and to them there is strongappeal in the picture of a cataclysmic end of the world, where the good are rewarded and the evil “get theirs” and everything burns up and crumbles, leaving a cleansed planet where a good world can finally begin.
There have been people writing down their visions of the end of the world since ancient days. The Egyptians have their Apocalyptic literature (apocalyptic means “the revealing of hidden things), the Akkadians, and the Jews.In the Hebrew Bible, the books of Ezekiel and Daniel are the ones that speak of the end of time.
[Daniel 2: Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. A great image, frightening and bright. Head of gold, arms of silver, belly and thighs of bronze, legs of iron and feet partly of iron and partly of clay. A stone was cut by no human hand, struck the image, and it all broke into pieces, and the wind blew the pieces away. The stone became a great mountain and filled the earth. Daniel interpreted it as the rise of successive kingdoms, each inferior to the king’s. In the days of the kings of mixed iron and clay, God will establish his kingdom.
Daniel 7: Daniel dreams of four great beasts from the sea. First was like a lion, with eagle’s wings. Then its wings were plucked off and it stood like a man, and was given the mind of a man. The second beast was like a bear, and it had three ribs in its mouth between its teeth. The third was like a leopard, with four wings and a bird on its back, with four heads, and dominion was given to it. The fourth had iron teeth and devoured and stamped things to pieces. It had ten horns, and among them was a little horn.
The ancient of days took his seat on a throne and the books were opened. The son of man came and the ancient of days gave him dominion and glory.
Daniel was told that the fourth beast was a great kingdom that would rule the earth, and ten kings will arise, and after them a king who will put down three kings, and speak against the most high, and will wear out the saints of the Most High, and shall think to change the times and the law… (Antichrist)
Daniel 9: Gabriel comes to Daniel and says 70 weeks of years are required to put and end to sin and bring in everlasting righteousness. From the rebuilding of Jersalem to the coming of an anointed one will be 7 weeks. Then it will be rebuilt then after 62 weeks the anointed one will be cut off, and someone will come destroy the city with a flood. …etc.
This is the flavor of the scriptures people try to interpret to tell them what is going to happen at the end of time.The writings are obviously allegorical, which means each image corresponds with asomethingin the writer’s external world. The interpreter of the allegory has to decide what the images mean and how they fit together.
Interpreters in every age have found things in their world that correspond with these images since they were first written, and declaring that the end was at hand.Many Jews in the time of the Romans thought they were living in the end-times.Certainly the writers of the New Testament, having just witnessed the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE thought they were going to see the end soon.The book of the Revelation of John, the book that ends the New Testament, seems obviously to be talking about the Roman Empire, where the Caesars claimed Divinity, and where the persecution of Christianswas beginning as he was writing.
The world didn’t end during the Roman Empire, though, and there was no more country calledof Israel about which so many of the prophecies spoke.That didn’t stop people who wanted to believe they were living in the last days, though.Martin Luther, in the 1500’s, interpreted all the scriptures to support his belief that he was in the last generation on earth.Sir Isaac Newton, after he discovered gravity, spent most of the rest of his career puzzling out the dates and sequences of the events at the end of time, poring over Revelation, Daniel, Ezekiel, and writing reams about what the nations could expect. Some critics commented dryly that as a Bible scholar, he was a pretty good scientist.
When the Europeans discoveredNorth America,they called it the “New World”; it fired their imaginations and many crossed the ocean to start their world over again.Some camebecause they were convinced that they could make a perfect Christian society if they could just start everything from scratch.Believing that God was on their side, they braved tremendous hardships.Believing God was on their side, they eventually forced the land’s inhabitants onto reservations. America became the New Israel, the land of people who believed they wereGod’s new chosen nation.That belief has remained at the core of American self-image. That is just one of the ways in which prophecy belief has had a tremendous impact on US domestic and foreign policy. I want to mention just two areas: our relationship with Israel and our nuclear policy.
Prophecy beliefgained momentum with the re-founding of the state of Israel. Finally one piece of the puzzle did not have to be interpreted allegorically any more! Also, seeing America as the shining New Israel was getting harder by 1948, so it was good to have the real Israel back.
The founding of Israel was helped in powerful ways by the prophecy beliefs of policy makers.In Great Britain, Lord Anthony Copper, Earl of Shaftesbury, argued in 1839 that the Jews must be returned to Palestine before the Second Coming. Through his influence, the British opened a consulate in Jerusalem. The consul, a devout evangelical, was instructed to look out for the interests of the 10,000 Jews living there under Ottoman rule. Many Christians are taught that the Jews are God’s Chosen people, and that whoever helps the Jews will be looked on by God with favor, and whoever hurts the Jews will be punished.
Bible believers saw Palestine as granted to Israel by God, and looked to the reconstitution of the nation of Israel as a necessary event to bring Christ back.
In 1891, 400 business and religious leaders signed a letter urging President Harrison to support establishment ofJewish homeland in Palestine.
When the nation of Israel was established in 1948, one Bible teacher out of LA said this was the most significant event since the birth of Christ.Manywere disappointed by the secularism and even Marxism of the Zionists, but managed to be happy for them anyway.
Evangelical tour groups come through filled with folks who believe Israel is the only nation to have its history written in advance…
In the NT book of Matthew 24, Jesus is quoted as saying: “Now learn a parable of the fig tree: when his branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh;
So likewise ye, when ye shall see all these things, know that it is near, even at the doors.
Verily I say to you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things shall be fulfilled.” Many interpreters said the establishment of Israel was the leafing of the fig tree. They figured a generation as 40 years, so 1948=40=1988…or the fig tree’s “budding” in 1967 when they took the old city, that makes 2007.Take away the seven prophesied years of terrible tribulation (the time when plagues, wars and cruelty will ravish the earth)and you get the “rapture” where all the Christians are taken up into heaven before the real bad stuff starts–in 2000! Do you remember all of the hype about planes falling out of the sky? People were stockpiling water.It passed, as do all the prophesied dates, with just a murmur.
When I was living in Jerusalem I used to travel sometimes alone and attach myself to tour groups, where I would hear preachers say things like “if we need our return tickets…”
It is in our nuclear policy, though that the prophecy beliefs have exerted a frightening influence.(read 2 Peter 3:10) Until the creation of the atomic bomb, the “burning day” of II Peter 3:10 and the terrifying astronomical events woven through the three short chapters of Joel (O Lord, to thee will I cry; for the fire hath devoured the pastures of the wilderness and the flame hath burned all the trees of the field…the sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come.)Also evocative is Zechariah’s description of the people’s flesh consuming away while they stand on their feet, and their eyes shall consume away in their holes, and their tongue shall consume away in their mouth.. ..typically were interpreted in terms of natural disaster: The earth’s core exploding or earthquakes, fires, etc.Since 1945 technology has caught up with scripture in that now there is something that actually could catch the heavens on fire.
A country music hit in 1945 “Atomic Power” by Fred Kirby talked about brimstone falling from heaven, and atomic energy as given by the mighty hand of God.
Even Truman, in his diary, mused that the A-bomb may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates valley era after Noah and his ark.
My fundamentalist grandfather Donald Grey Barnhouse suggested in one of his books that when Zechariah asked “Who has despised the day of small things?” that he was alluding to nuclear fission. He felt that NYC was Babylon, whose obliteration “in one hour” was foretold in Rev. Not to worry, because believers will be in heaven the next second after the bombs fall.
Prophecy writers dismissed efforts to ban nuclear weapons, or to improve relations between countries. The unity of governments was a sign of the coming of the anti-Christ. World government increases the potential for world tyranny.
People who think they are going to heaven the very second after the bombs fall aren’t interested in preventing such a thing from happening. They say things about the state of the world like: “The only way out is up.”Jerry Falwell taught that nuclear war would make room for the new heaven and the new earth.Pat Robertsonsaid, “I guarantee you that by 1982 there will be a judgment on the world.” He predicted the ultimate holocaust, the world in flames.When he ran for President he backed off the doomsdaystuff a little.
If preachers believe nuclear war is prophesied in the Bible, that’s one thing, but we have government officials who believe that too. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, in 1982, when asked about the end of time replied ” I have read the book of Rev. and yes, I believe the world is going to end–by an act of God I hope–but every day I think that time is running out.”
Reagan?s Interior secretary James Watt, when asked about preserving the environment for future generations said “I do not know how many generations we can count on before the Lord returns.”
In the 80s, Regan’s interest in prophecy alarmed some. In 1971, then Governor Reagan spoke to a groupat a dinner in Sacramento after a leftist coup in Libya (One of the nations mentioned in Ezekiel as invading Israel) “That’s a sign that Armageddon isn’t far off… Everything is falling into place. It can’t be long now. Ezekiel says that fire and brimstone will be rained down on the enemies of God’s people. That must mean they’ll be destroyed by nuclear weapons.” In 1983 Reagan told a lobbyist for Israel: You know, I am turning back to your ancient prophets in the OT and the signs foretelling Armageddon, and I find myself wondering if we’re the generation that’s going to see that come about. I don’t know if you’ve noted any of those prophecies lately, but believe me, they certainly describe the times we’re going through.”
Our current President, that young man from CT who tries to claim to be a Texan is in this same stream of thought, as are many of the folks in the administration.Who cares if Armageddon comes? The good stuff comes next!
If you think it is futile to try to prevent nuclear war, you lose your energy to do that.Why spend energy on peace activism if it is doomed to failure?If you subscribe to the idea that nuclear competition among nations is part of God’s plan for the world; if you believe that prophecy must be fulfilled in order to bring about the return of Christ; if you believeGod is in control, and he is going to use nuclear war to end all things, who are you argue with that?
Now let me talk about “The Beast” sometimes the same as The Anti-Christ, sometimes different. The Beast is a character who controls the economy, who keeps the good guys fromgetting the food they need, and forces them into terrible hardships.There is a sense among prophecy writers that society has become depersonalized, centralized, and that individual autonomy is doomed. The more centralized government becomes, the easier it would be to take over.
Every bit of evidence that power is being centralized, that automation is replacing human involvement, that governments are merging or currency is becoming alike is seen as a sign of the end time. The debit card is one step away from having your own bar code tattooed on your hand that will be how you pay for everything. Those who don’t conform or obey will not be able to get one. When I was in Jerusalem people were saying there was a new computer in Brussels for the Common Market that could control world currency.They said “They call it—The Beast”
The UN (p.264) is bad. Peter catches 153 fish in the gospel of John, which was in 1979 the membership of the UN minus Israel. To some writers, that signifies the UN’s destruction.
There is a sense of a “web of intrigue” linking the world’s most powerful families. In this way the prophecy buffs are parallel to the New Angers.
The space program was dangerous because it might encourage people to think in terms of “one world”, making it easier for Antichrist to rule over it all.
Computers now link the world, making world domination technologically possible.All talk of oneness, global consciousness is dangerous.
666 is from Rev 13:16-18. quote p. 281
Do these beliefs make believers unwilling to become involved in the world? “We have maintenance crews to maintain our buildings even though we know they won’t last forever.”Hal Lindsay said “I came here to fish, not to clean the fishbowl.”Now fundamentalists are getting more involved in politics. That’s good. Now sometimes they espouse “Dominion” theology, a version of postmillennialist theology. Make it happen here.
What is the appeal of all of this? It feels good to know that there is a symmetry, rationale, harmony coherence and overarching meaning to history. People feel they can understand what is going on. Maybe there are other reasons for the enduring appeal of thought about the End. Maybe it’s like the Flannery O’Connor story called “The Misfit,: where a family runs their car into a ditch, and an escaped bad guy comes along with a couple of henchmen. The family’s grandmother, who up until this point in the story, has been a self-righteous complaining harridan, says the thing to the Misfit that is the last straw, and he holds his gun at her head. As she realizes he is about to killher, she is transformed in some way, reaches a hand to touch his face, and says “Why, you could have been one of my children.”He shoots her. At the end he turns to one of his men and says “She could’ve been a pretty nice lady if she’d had someone to shoot her every day of her life.”Maybe it’s easier for people to be kind and good if they think it’s not for very long, and that their enemies will get what’s coming to them soon. If you believe the world is going to go on and on and on, your priorities are quite different fromwhat they would be if things were going to be over in a week.I think it is a profitable spiritual exercise to try it on both ways, to ask yourself what you would want to do if it were all going to be over in the year 2010, who you would spend time with, what things you would say. Then imagine it’s going to go on forever, and see what seems important then. Each perspective has its own insights to uncover.
