The second element in Buddhism’s Eightfold Path is “Right Intention.” Your intention is the lodestar by which you steer your life. What is that, given your understanding of life, you intend to do and be?
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What is fundamentalism? Why is its world view compelling? What is destructive about it? How do you let go, not only of the content of its thinking, but of the structure of its thinking?
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“A Juicy Slice of UU History: Theodore Parker,” “The arc of the Universe bends toward justice,” he said. Parker was a Unitarian minister, a tireless and militant abolitionist, and a proponent of women’s rights.
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When you think of God as female, how does that change thoughts and feelings about God? When you think of God as a huntress, what kind of stories does that evoke? How would people, animals and the planet be affected by this picture of God?
The highest wisdom of the world tells us that there is no accurate or complete way to talk about God, however you define or think about the concept of God. “The Tao that can be named is not the Tao,” says Lao Tse. If you can describe the Mystery, you know you haven’t grasped it. This does not prevent there being many things to say about the One, the Mystery, the Force. In many cultures, even though the wise mystics at the top of the mountain of most faith traditions assure everyone that It is One, people describe Its facets as if they were separate gods. There is the king of all gods, but then again there is the king’s mother. There is the thunder god, the goddess who dwells by the sacred springs of water that come up through the earth to green the land and sustain the creatures. There is the god of creation and destruction, the goddess of love, the god of the rivers, the goddess of the crossroads, in whose cauldron all eventually go to die and emerge transformed. Some would call these spirits, others still call them gods, you might call them archetypes.
What I want to ask you to consider this morning is how a culture’s way of speaking about the Divine might shape its behavior, its sense of itself, its governance and the paradigms within which it understands humans and animals relationship with one another and with the Divinity, what is important, what is expected.
The view of God most people in the US have grown up with is a male god. He is spoken about in many metaphors in the Jewish and Christian scriptures: God of the mountains, El Shaddai, which might also mean “the breasted one.” He is the whirlwind, the warrior, the mother hen (I have heard preachers on the radio say “God is like a hen taking his chicks under his wings. I’m guessing that guy didn’t grow up on a farm.) The images most often used in our culture, though, are God the king, God the judge, and Jesus (God) the kind shepherd.
If your god is a king of everything, and he exists outside of you, your relationship to him is as a subject or as a rebel. Those are your main choices. Your concern is for what might please him. To displease the king brings bad luck and trouble. You must keep the king happy with you and yours. I’ve noticed, though, that the god who lives outside you also lives inside you. This seems to occur whether your relationship with this God you picture is as a believer, or if you are a faithful non-believer in this image of God. If this god lives in you as a part of you, you feel called always to be in control, and if people and events don’t go your way, you rain down consequences . Your question is “Am I pleased? Is everyone doing what I want them to do? If not, am I grieved? What am I going to do about it?”
If your god is a judge, and he exists outside of you, your primary relationship is as the one being judged. Your concern must be for the laws, and how to keep them in a way that makes the judgment come out in your favor. You can argue and you can appeal, you can have reasons and excuses, but you are always being evaluated. If this god is part of you, then you might always be evaluating, always judging “is this good or bad, right or wrong.”
If you think about god as a shepherd, your primary relationship to him is as part of his flock. You follow him. You don’t go off on your own or he comes to gently bring you back to the herd. His job is to fight off the bad things, and your job is to stay close by. You’re either a good lamb or a lost lamb. Those are your choices. He doesn’t need your help.
Our poet with the yellow beret bought one of the auction items in the fall, the one that enabled him to invite me to preach about a particular topic of his choosing. He chose “God the Huntress.”
I remember in seminary being introduced to feminist theology. The feminine face of God. I was steeped in Protestant culture, so my first thoughts were along the lines of : How do you imagine the king and the judge as female? Would she rule more compassionately? No one who knows history would say yes to that. Would she understand women better? Probably. My classmates and I spent time re-imagining God, having discussions about how different it felt to have the king and judge more womanly, even motherly. Thoughts about God the Mother varied with our individual experiences of our own mothers. She seemed more understanding to some, less powerful to others. Then thealogian (spelled this way to indicate the femaleness of god) Mary Daly, a wild and brilliant woman from Boston University, challenged us all. “A female god is not just Yahweh in drag,” she wrote. She was far ahead of us in lifting ourselves out of the paradigms in which we had been raised.
What if your god is a huntress? In order to be a good hunter you have to be comfortable in the wild. You have to be able to be quiet, alone, you are able to immerse yourself in the mind of the thing you are hunting. You have to be able to lose yourself, to wait, to be quick. You must be peaceful with taking life, with getting bloody.
The huntress we know the best is Diana, also called Artemis. She was one of the most important goddesses in the Mediterranean world. The Christian scriptures describe a riot in the city of Ephesus when a crowd gathered around the Apostle Paul as he was preaching and shouted him down for two hours “Great is Diana of the Ephesians!”
Her mother Leto was a consort of Zeus, so Zeus’s wife hated her. When it came time for her to deliver her twins, Hera hounded her across the globe, and there was no place on the land or sea for her to rest from her labor pains. Finally, a swampy and unstable mix of land and sea firmed up in order to allow her to give birth. Swans surrounded her. Artemis was born first, painlessly, it is said. She helped her mother deliver her twin brother Apollo, whose birth, by contrast, took nine days and nights. She was the moon, and Apollo the sun. Artemis/Diana is portrayed as a young woman, a virgin. What that meant in the ancient world was that she belonged to herself. The woods were sacred to her, and you disturbed her trees at your peril. In some places, in ancient times, it was in her woods that the contest between the current king and his challenger was held. Her voice, her power decided who would rule. The animals were sacred to her, especially the deer. Some stories have her traveling with a pack of dogs, and some with a pack of maidens. Diana does not say yes when she means no. She is not sweet. She is not accommodating. She is fierce about her body’s unassailability. When she caught a young man watching her bathe one afternoon, the faith story says that she turned him into a stag and confused his pack of dogs so that they tore him to pieces before he could go brag to his mates about having seen her naked.
If your god is a huntress, and she is outside of you, you are her helper or her prey, or she is your protector. What is she hunting? If it’s food, she’s showing you a way to feed your family, a way to take a life without displeasing her. If she is hunting you, she’s waiting for you patiently, she knows your mind, she sees you clearly, and she will take you completely. If she is hunting truth, she will track it inexorably. She glimpses it in all its forms, and she draws in its scent until that is all she is aware of. If she is within you, as I imagine all the gods you attend to are, she is that part of you that belongs to yourself, that is inviolate, the part of you that protects you, the part that can hide and wait and listen to the leaves rustle as what you seek moves ahead of you. She is a still point inside you, saying yes when she means yes and no when she means no.
We are in the Unitarian Universalist tradition here, and our forbear Ralph Waldo Emerson said “a person will worship something.” Whatever it is that guides you, whatever it is you steer by, that shapes you. To some degree you have a choice in the way you picture God, or the Divine, or the spirits or the Mystery. You choose what to believe and how, and it’s okay to try on different ideas. If Diana is the one you choose to explore, happy hunting!
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The Eightfold Path. Buddhism teaches that there is a way to overcome suffering by coming to an understanding of the way the world is, and by living in a certain way. There is no requirement that you believe in it, they say, you just try it to see if it works.
I don’t know how many of you have seen the classic Buddhist movie “The Matrix.” In it, Keanu Reeves plays a young computer hacker who wakes up to the reality of the Matrix, a vast virtual reality grid that feeds off of human energy. Humans are kept asleep in embryonic eggs while a virtual life is played in their brain. The first message he gets from the deeper reality is: “Wake up Neo!” In the movie, once Neo woke up to the fact that the reality of the Matrix was an illusion, he grew capable of grasping that the bullets coming at him weren’t real, and he was able to move around among them. He was able to move around in the pseudo reality of the Matrix, aware of it as an illusion, more and more aware of the deeper reality.
This is the first of eight sermons, over the upcoming months, on the eightfold path of Buddhism. The Eightfold Path is not like eight steps, or little boxes you check off one by one as you accomplish them. It is a path of eight elements interwoven, braided together, having to do with understanding, practice and behavior that Buddhism says will take you on a journey away from suffering and toward freedom. The first component of the path is “Right Understanding.” “Getting it” is the first and continuing job of the person on this path. You get “wake up, Neo” messages. You catch a glimpse of the truth of how things work. You have a glimmer of a sense that many people create their own suffering, that disquietude lurks at the corners of most lives, that grief, hope, fear, hunger for security or pleasure or acceptance drive people to do what they do and that satisfaction is elusive. A deeper reality crooks its finger at you and whispers in Laurence Fishburn’s voice: “Wake up. There must be satisfaction somewhere, let’s go look for it. ”
One of the things I find most relaxing about Buddhism is that it doesn’t ask you to take any of this on faith. It asks you to try it out and see if it works for you. Buddhism asks you to start with your experience. Most people’s attention is squandered on the anxiety, all the worry, and the fear in their lives. What will happen to us? Am I doing this right? Will people have a good time at my party? Will I get well again? Will I end up a bag lady? I have one friend who is haunted by the picture of people milling around at his funeral shaking their heads and saying “It’s a shame he never made much of himself.” Moment after moment, for most people, is filled with hope that things will go well and fear that things won’t. That life is a rollercoaster. In the words of the poet John Prine “Some times you’re up, some times you’re down, it’s a half an inch of water and you think you’re going to drown.”
Things happen to you, then you make stories about the things that happen: that they shouldn’t be happening, that they are a punishment for something you did, that your life is unfair, that you are unlucky and unblessed. Buddhism says all of these thoughts about what happens, all of the rollercoaster emotion caused by hoping and fearing makes you suffer. There is a way to end the suffering. In your life, you will have pain, but you don’t have to make yourself extra suffering over the pain. The eightfold path, with its eight elements, is the way to train yourself morally, mentally and emotionally, to be free from suffering from the thoughts you have about what happens. Here are the eight elements: right understanding, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.
Right understanding, the first strand of the Eightfold Path, “getting it, ” involves seeing how things are. You understand that you suffer because you have attachments to how things should go. You crave, you cling, you hope, you fear. You have hopes that an interview will go well. You are anxious about it. You worry afterward about whether they liked you. If you get the job you worry about doing it well. If you don’t get the job you wonder why they didn’t like you. You have ideas about how it should go. You have interpretations of how it went, ideas from your interpretations, and you suffer over those.
Someone you love is drinking or using again. You worry about how bad it’s going to get. You feel the feelings from when it was at its worst. You interpret your friend’s using as his not loving you, because if he loved you he would want things to be good for you, and things aren’t good for you when he is using. It feels as though he is doing it to you.
In your thoughts is a way you wish things would go. You have fears about how things could be. All of these things, hopes and fears, cause you suffering. When you are anxious about these things you miss a lot of your life: seeing your other friends, you can barely hear what people are saying to you, you don’t enjoy your food, sleep, sex, beauty, things seem garbled and dim. You are suffering. How could that stop?
Wake up. “Get it” that if you calm and focus your mind you can see reality more clearly. “Get it” that what happens happens. There are certain things you can do to make the interview go well, and you do them. Or not. Then it happens. You get the job. Or not. You can interpret it any way you want to. They didn’t like you? Maybe. Maybe they had someone else who was a better fit. Maybe this is not your job, maybe yours is coming. If the job wouldn’t have been a good fit for you, you would have been miserable in it. Is that what you wanted? At times I tell people they need to be unattached to outcomes. You need to do what you do and leave what happens then to the Spirit or the Universe. Usually they respond with “So you want me not to care?” What do you say to that? If caring means you suffer and your suffering adds no good to the situation, do you want to keep doing that? Can you care in a way that holds the outcome lightly? Can you care in a way that understands that your loved ones have to find their own way, make their mistakes, feel your support but not your direction.
Buddhist practice is the foundation of this possibility. Meditation, spending time in quiet with your breathing allows you to see more clearly, gives you spaces between your moments in which to understand what part of this is pain that exists and what part is suffering you are bringing on yourself and can stop if you practice. Some spiritual paths attempt to give meaning to suffering – this one says it can be avoided, eventually, with practice and understanding. Wisdom will be cultivated and ignorance will be shed like an outgrown snake skin.
In meditation we have the chance of seeing the story we are telling ourselves about our life. You can notice the thoughts you are having about what is happening in your life. There are a hundred different stories, and seeing your story is part of getting it. Another part of Right Understanding, of waking up, is understanding the law of Karma. Its literal name is “right view of the ownership of action” The Buddhist teachers say: “Beings are the owners of their actions, the heirs of their actions; they spring from their actions, are bound to their actions, and are supported by their actions. Whatever deeds they do, good or bad, of those they shall be heirs.” The Buddhist scriptures, like the Christian scriptures, talk about results of actions as “fruits.” “By their fruits ye shall know them.” If our lives are like a river, it’s as if we are all living downstream from our actions, and the dirty or clean water that runs because of those actions catches us later. Good actions are morally commendable, helpful to the growth of the spirit, and productive of benefits for yourself and others. Unwholesome actions, to use a more Buddhist word than “bad,” ripen into suffering.
Getting it means that you see that suffering occurs from craving, desire and attachment, that the way to end suffering is to end craving and attachment, that the way to end craving is to attend to the eightfold path of right wisdom and right behavior. To own your actions, your part in any situation, to let go of blaming and clean up what you are putting into the water upstream from where you live.
I have a friend who tells the story of her mother-in-law, Carolyn, at the drive-through window at the bank. The teller had sent out a pen for her to use in filling out her deposit slip. She had dropped the pen, which had fallen underneath the seat of the car. Carolyn could reach the pen, she could get her fingers around it, but she couldn’t pull her hand out with the pen in it. Finally they made a present to her of the pen so she would go on. We are caught like that with our grasping, unable to be free. What is the pen under your seat? What is keeping you from moving? Do you need to let it go? Do you need to drive to a safe place in the parking lot of the bank, get out of the car, move the seat, and get the pen? Either way, you get unstuck, and unstuck is where we want to be.
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What does forgiveness entail? Does one have to “forgive and forget?” How do we forgive ourselves? Another sermon having to do with our Covenant of Healthy Relations.
Forgiveness makes you strong. A spiritual practice is something you do over and over whether you feel like it or not, in order to have access to your inner wisdom when you need it, in order to be able to keep a heart of compassion, in order to keep your perspective when the going gets rough, in order to be unshakeable. Well, at least, if not unshakeable, a bit sturdier. Bitterness makes us brittle. Cynicism takes our hope. Ruminating on the wrongs done to us, or on the wrongs we have done, steals away our joy in life. A spiritual practice can help us let go of that kind of ruminating. The meditation we just said together is one such practice, and it can help with forgiveness.
Forgiveness is related to both emotional and physical healing. This week I read a study by Alex H. S. Harris and Carl E. Thoresen called: “Forgiveness, Unforgiveness,Health, and Disease” done in 2005 at the Center for Health Care Evaluation, which is part of the US Dept of Veteran’s Affairs. They concluded that hostile rumination was a chronic stressor with negative effects on health. It led to chronic hyperaroused stress response, which, to put it unscientifically, just wears a person out.
Feeling that you have been wronged is not good for you. You need either to talk about it until you can do something about it or let it go and move on. Holding on to impotent anger makes us cramped and closed. “Impotent anger ” is anger that is not doing anything for you, anger that has no fruitful power. Anger’s purpose is to move you out of hurtful situations, protect you from hurtful people, energize you to do what you can to make things better for yourself. Almost any time you are angry, one question that can move you forward is this one: “How much of this anger is anger at myself?”
Forgiveness is difficult because when we are wronged, we stiffen into righteousness. Righteousness is the root of much wicked behavior. We feel that, because we have been hurt, we have carte blanche to hurt other people. We can speak in destructive ways, we can lay waste about us with the sword of our tongue. We feel that, because we are right, we can be brutal.
Forgiveness is also difficult because, as I’ve said before, being righteously wronged can be a semi enjoyable state. We have a picture in our mind of how the one who wronged us should apologize. We imagine conversations where we articulately explain our P.O.V. and the ones who wronged us slap their heads in enlightenment, in realization. We exercise our arguments toward that imagined conversation. We polish our grudges, we repeat them to ourselves; we can drop into the groove of recrimination and resentment at a moments notice, we can do it in our sleep. We lull ourselves with the recitation. The resentment can become part of who we are. Part of our personality’s clothing, our identity. Forgiveness is especially difficult when it is ourselves we need to forgive. We can get addicted to the guilt and pain of going over and over our transgression or our mistake. We hold ourselves to a higher standard than the one we use for others. Other people can forget things, be hurtful, lie or cheat or make a terrible mistake, but not us. It’s hard to accept that we are human and prone to error. If we’re just regular human beings, then how will we be in control of the world? We might rather think of ourselves as bad and still in control than to acknowledge that we’re just regular folks.
Forgiving requires a willingness to look at the harm being done to you by not beginning to forgive. If you don’t forgive yourself, you may not allow yourself to have a good life, which affects the people who love you. And it makes you insufferable when you’re in the “I’m a terrible person” place, because they have to live their lives and spend time reassuring you that you are all right, which equates to dragging you along like a heavy suitcase with a broken wheel. Being a righteous victim does you harm because you have a stiffening righteousness. It does you harm in that you are stuck. You are also stuck to the person at whom you are angry, or to the bad mistake you made. You cannot go anywhere without dragging them along with you. It does you harm in that you feel that other people might hurt you the same way. You become braced. Ready to be hurt, to be left, to be abandoned, to be betrayed. You don’t have to look at yourself, if you are a victim of mean parents or two timing lovers, or if you are just a tragically bad person. You get to be the right about them, about yourself.. Being right is a big part of not wanting to forgive. You can be right, absolutely, and still be hurt by harboring anger against yourself or the person who hurt you.
Jungian analyst, author and teacher Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes: “Forgiveness seems unrealistic because we think of it as a one-time act that had to be completed in one sitting. Forgiveness has many layers, many seasons. It is not all or nothing, if you can do a 95% forgiveness, you are a saint. 75% is wonderful. 60% is fine. Keep working./playing with it. The important things are to BEGIN and to CONTINUE. There is a healer inside who will help you if you get out of the way. For some, temperamentally, this is easy. For some it is harder. You are not a saint if it’s easy, not a bad person if it’s not. You are who you are and you do it the way you do it. All in due time.” Forgiveness also does NOT mean to overlook something, to pretend the thing didn’t happen. Estes talks about the stages of forgiveness.
1. TO FOREGO: to leave it alone. Take a break from thinking about it for awhile Get your strength back.
2. TO FORBEAR: Containment. Don’t act Keep your self-protective vigilance. Have patience. Practice generosity. Ask what would happen if there were grace in this situation?
3. TO FORGET: Refuse to dwell on it, Consciously release it. Some people are wary of this step, and make definitions of forgetting for themselves that include bearing the wrong in mind. At the Israeli Holocaust Memorial, they say forgive, but never forget, because if you forget it could happen again. Only you can be the judge of whether the wrong that was done to you is something you can afford to forget. If not, ask yourself how you can bear it in mind without it continually poisoning you.
4. TO FORGIVE: Regard the other individual indulgently. Give compassionate aid to that person. You don’t think about the incident any more. You have nothing to say about it.
The metta meditation we use is directly related to this. The first step in forgiving is to direct compassion and love toward yourself. Say: May I be free from danger. May I be physically happy May I be mentally happy May I have ease of well-being. Do that for three weeks, then say it about someone you like, about a neutral person, THEN about the one who wronged you. If you can’t, go back to sending lovingkindness to yourself. You don’t have to forgive all at once. Today, maybe, just think about being ready to begin.
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We will have merry holiday celebrations this year. We had a wonderful pageant last Sunday, and afterwards we had a feast. Tomorrow night we will have our traditional Lessons and Carols service with candlelight and Silent Night. This morning we are going to talk about another reality of this season: the blues. This is a hard time for some among us. Maybe you are one of those. The whole world is celebrating, and you are terrified because you can’t make the house payment, or you have had to let your insurance lapse. People are glowing in green and gold and you have lost someone close to you this year. This is the first Christmas without them. You are feeling the loss keenly.
Maybe you are alone in the world. Your family is gone, or they are toxic to you, and the world is papered in snapshots of families eating together, laughing and watching movies and going over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house. You feel like a motherless child.
You might look around you and see people who look like they have plenty of money, lots of friends, a good love life, radiant health and all their thoughts in order. You are comparing your insides to other people’s outsides, and that is a no-win situation. It’s hard to keep that in mind, though, as you feel tendrils of shame invading your spirit.
We are having a Blue Christmas service this morning to give ourselves a place to recognize this element of the holidays together. The shadow side of all the good cheer can get to us, and it can make confusion and heartbreak more keenly felt. If your marriage is in trouble, or if you or your parents or kids are going through a divorce, the “empty chair syndrome” can make everyone miserable. Everything is different this year. It’s harder, it’s easier, but it’s different. If you are in any of these hard situations, you’re probably having a hard year this year. Your feelings are reasonable and appropriate. You can’t stick the grief and confusion into a little closet for the duration of the season. It’s good to have a time when you can feel its weight and sorrow. Perhaps that will make room for some of the more joyous feelings too. It’s not all or nothing. How do we take care of ourselves and those we love when the season is a hard one?
They say “lower your expectations,” but I don’t like that. It sounds like we’re going to have something that’s not as good. I would say “lighten your expectations.” Having a house that’s decorated to the nines, saddling your family with debt so everyone can have what they think they want, cooking until you are grumpy, snapping at your family members because you are so stressed by giving them the Christmas they want — well, it’s not a “higher” realm in my book.
This is the celebration of the return of the light. Light means love and truth. Those things make room for sorrow.
Look for little things to enjoy. Before the house is decorated, before the presents are bought and wrapped and sent, it’s okay to breathe in the air of a day like today. Just breathe in and breathe out. Wear brown if you want to. Yellow. Watch people do the good cheer rituals as if you were an anthropologist studying the customs of a strange tribe. Look how they totter on ladders to put the icicle lights on their houses. Look how they run from one store to the next buying plastic things. Look how they make mountains of food to eat with people they ordinarily don’t get along with that well. Before you get too smugly above it all, though, remember that you may be doing exactly what they are doing in another year and that it will feel just right.
Instead of carols, listen to the music that speaks to your soul. Hang out with friends. Let yourself be sad that you are going through a hard time this year. Let your friends be happy. It takes a spiritual discipline sometimes, a maturity, to be glad for other people’s good lives. You can smile at them and in the spirit of truth, say “I’m so glad things are going well for you and your family.” Or you could take a sarcastic tone and say “I’m glad things are going well for you and your family,” and then they would have to take care of you for a few minutes, but that’s not quite as mature.
Notice your habits of attention. Are you making yourself worse by focusing on the contrast between your inner state and the one everyone else looks to be in? Are you like someone who has a sore tooth and keeps moving it with their tongue just to make sure it still is hurting? Gently shift your focus to something else. I’m not saying cover up your blues. I’m just reminding you they are not all there is to you.
Sometimes just acknowledging that this is a hard time of year can help. When you make room for the truth of what you are dealing with, the clamps come off of your heart and movement can occur.
More practically, or maybe I should say more biologically, if you are feeling depressed and sad you should lay off alcohol and recreational drugs. They cause depression to get worse. Exercise and eat well. Nutrasweet has been shown to lower your serotonin levels. That is a body chemical that helps with a feeling of well-being. Try to surround yourself with people who are good for you. Don’t force yourself to be around the awful people this year.
Usually your instincts will kick in and your spirit will try to make itself well again.
One friend, the year her husband died, was so mad about Christmas and all the expected good cheer that she painted the front door of her house yellow. Then she went shopping for the worst looking tree she could find. Finally she found one – a scrawny white number flocked with diseased-looking fake snow. She found some khaki colored balls to hang on it and stuck it on a table in the living room. Her intention had been to sneer at it every time she walked past, but she found herself feeling kind of sorry for it. Then affectionate toward it. They bonded, my friend and that ugly tree. It looked like she felt, and they were companions in sorrow.
If you are not the sad one, but if it is someone you love, here are some things to do. Keep in mind that this is a hard time for them. Listen with compassion if they want to talk. YOU DON”T HAVE TO FIX IT. Don’t try to cheer them up, to change their inner weather. You don’t have to be sad just because they are sad. It’s fair to be happy next to someone who is not. It’s not fair to demand that they be happy too. That’s all. Let’s be easy with one another at this time of year. Let’s be grateful that we have hearts that are big enough to feel loss, to feel complicated combinations of happy and sad, cheery and mad. A friend of mine was telling his mentor that he was getting a divorce. The old man is very hard of hearing, so my friend had to shout several times “I’m — getting – a – divorce!” Finally his mentor, a man with ninety years of living behind him, held his hands up in the air, and with a gentle smile and merry eyes, said “Life.”
Thank you for coming here this morning as we all move through life together. Merry Christmas, or —whatever.
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Hanukkah is coming, one of the many celebrations of the return of the light to the northern hemisphere… Whose light could you rekindle? Who rekindles yours?
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In our culture we have to make straight As, be partnered up with an attractive person, raise children who are accomplished and useful, have a good job, and stay healthy and strong. What use is failure?
Reading: Last night as I was sleeping
by Antonio Machado
Last night while I was sleeping,
I dreamt – blessed illusion! –
that a fountain flowed
within my heart.
I said, “By what hidden canal,
water, are you coming to me,
wellspring of new life
where I have not ever drunk?”
Last night while I was sleeping
I dreamt – blessed illusion! –
that I had a beehive
within my heart
and the golden bees
were going about inside it
concocting white wax and sweet honey
out of old failures.
Last night while I was sleeping
I dreamt – blessed illusion!
that a burning sun shone
inside my heart.
It was burning because it
flashed embers of a red hearth,
and it was sun because it gave light
and because it made one cry.
Sermon: Sweet Honey From Old Failures
I remember, in SC, writing a chalice circle lesson on the topic of “Failure.” One of the groups, who normally were game to try whatever topics I came up with, called me on the phone to ask if I had anything else besides that they could do, that it just seemed too depressing. They were welcome to come up with whatever else they wanted to do, I said, but that was all I had this month. They ended up using the lesson, and said it turned out pretty well. We don’t like looking at it, but when we do, it’s not usually as awful as we think. I know people who have hit rock bottom have a special way of looking at life. One of my friends won’t date anyone who hasn’t got his “bottom certificate.” Marianne Williamson is often quoted as saying “Nervous breakdowns can be highly underrated methods of spiritual transformation.”
Once you have lost everything, you can face the next thing with more courage. You have hit bottom and survived. It’s demythologized for you, no longer mysterious and full of dread. A person who has lost everything has good odds of being kinder, more compassionate afterwards. Failure can make you more supple in your approach to life, less rigid. Thinking back to survey my failures, I couldn’t find any that fit into the word, exactly. I learned how to think about failure by reading Thomas Edison : he said “I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.” Also:
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. It was not always that way. I used to send my writing out to publishers, and I would get a letter back that said this: ” Dear Ms. Barnhouse, We have read your pitiful attempt at a story and we have to say that, really, it would be better if you never again attempted to write. You are also ugly. It also would probably be better if you had never been born.” It really hurt. Then I would read it again and what it really said was Ôthank you for sending this. It doesn’t fit what we are trying to do at this time.”
I found some ways that don’t work for me. I failed to stay with the Presbyterian Church. Even in seminary I lost my faith regularly. “Explain it to me again,” I would ask my roommate, or my fiance. Tell me how someone else dying for me could erase my sins, and what are my sins, anyway? I’ve been doing my best my whole life, really trying to be a good person. I don’t identify with the whole “you need to be saved because you’re a miserable sinner. Yes you are. Yes. You. Are. Now, there’s good news! You’re saved by this man being killed by God so God could forgive you.” No. It didn’t make sense. It took me fifteen more years to leave. I don’t see that as a failure, though. It wasn’t a good fit for me. They loved me in spite of who I was, which is not fun.
I failed at my marriage, kind of. I mean, It lasted seventeen years, and a lot of those years were good and happy. Then I found out he had voted for Bob Dole, and that was it. I don’t want to make light of that, but I also don’t believe in preachers over-exposing themselves. The marriage doesn’t feel like a failure. We have two great sons, and that feels like success. It’s complicated, isn’t it?
I’m not sure that all of the things we label failures really are failures. Many “failures” happen when you go against what your inner voice tells you to do, or when you try to make yourself into something the others want from you, rather than what you need to do and be to live authentically. Maybe it happens when you don’t measure up to what the Perfection would be, in your place, but perfection doesn’t really exist.
Another possible translation is “old bitterness.”
the golden bees
were going about inside it
concocting white wax and sweet honey
out of old bitterness.
“Failure” is such a dualistic word. You succeeded or you failed. Life is more organic in shape than that, more complex. There is overlap between bitterness and failure, certainly. When you fail, there is bitterness at the situation, at the others involved, about your inadequacies, your lack of perfect knowledge. Failure sounds like something happened. Bitterness sounds like something you choose.
When you have a picture of how things are supposed to be, and they don’t turn out that way, there can be bitterness. In the 12 step program they call expectations “premeditated resentments.”
When you fail, there is bitterness about the circumstances, the other people involved, yourself, the things no one told you. How can the bees visit those things, draw out the essence, chew on it, distill it, carefully fan it dry and turn it into sweetness?
How can you make honey from those? I re-read “when smart people fail,” and they talked about telling the story differently, redefining failure, learning from mistakes, etc., but none of that felt like what this text was taking me. The man is sleeping. The water breaks through, water from a new life that he has never drunk before. The bees are busy, busy making white wax and sweet honey from old bitterness, old failure. He dreams that there is a sun inside warming like a hearth fire. I realized, late in the week, that these were not to be made into instructions about how I, a strong smart UU can make honey out of my own failures! The poet is sleeping. These things are happening beside his will and control.
Last night while I was sleeping,
I dreamt – blessed illusion! –
that a fountain flowed
within my heart.
I said, “By what hidden canal,
water, are you coming to me,
wellspring of new life
where I have not ever drunk?”
Last night while I was sleeping
I dreamt – blessed illusion! –
that I had a beehive
within my heart
and the golden bees
were going about inside it
concocting white wax and sweet honey
out of old failures.
Last night while I was sleeping
I dreamt – blessed illusion!
that a burning sun shone
inside my heart.
It was burning because it
flashed embers of a red hearth,
and it was sun because it gave light
and because it made one cry.
Last night while I was sleeping
I dreamt – blessed illusion!
that what I had within my heart
was God.
All of those, the spring that breaks through, the bees making honey, the sun, those are pictures of the Mystery. I try so hard to control everything, to use my will. It occurred to me that the poet is talking about things that happen in that part of yourself which has a life that is not always rational, that breaks now and then into your conscious experience. Many of you have experienced a shift in your mind or heart that feels like something new breaking in, bringing you water you haven’t drunk before. Many of you have felt warmed by a sight, some music, a relationship, a connection that flashed embers of home, that made you feel this, yes this, is the center of the universe. When you feel stale or exhausted, when you feel stuck in bitterness or ashamed of your current life, ask for the water of new life to break through, listen to the bees, busy making honey, turn your face to the sun. It is all within your heart, and it is on your side.
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One of the spiritual practices I enjoy is the practice of gratitude. I don’t always remember to do it, but it’s easy and, in my experience, it changes things immediately.
This is what I wrote when I was at the beginning of this practice. “Thank you, I’m Going Downhill” from Waking Up the Karma Fairy
I have told you all that I have found a spiritual practice that works for me — when I remember to do it. It is simple, you don’t need equipment, it’s easy to learn, and I feel its effects right away. If I were really clever, I would string this out, singing the praises of this practice, and make you feel lots of suspense before I told you what it was, but it’s Thanksgiving this week, so you can guess I’m going to talk about gratitude.
To start: why have a spiritual practice? To become a deeper and richer person, to handle life’s twists and spins better, to be better to live with and work with, to have a happier life. Some people want to know “what do you mean by ‘spiritual?'” The answer I’m working with these past few years comes from the Christian scriptures, where the fruits of the Spirit are listed in the Christian Scriptures as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control. If those are increasing, deepening, my spirit is thriving. If I can’t find my peace or my kindness, something is off kilter and I need to pay it some attention. You are, of course, welcome to figure out your own definition, or you are welcome to use mine for a while to see how it works for you.
A practice of gratitude starts with habits of attention. Habits of attention shape your experience of your life. What you pay attention to fills your life. Gratitude begins with a habit of noticing the good things in your life and being grateful for them. You might say “thank you, Spirit of Life, Higher Power, God, or Spirit, or Force, or Universe, Ground of Being or Soul Of All Things. Meister Eckhart says if you only ever said “thank you” as a prayer, it would be a good prayer life.
Cicero, born about a century before Rabbi Jesus, wrote : “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others,” he said. By the 18th century, the free-market thinker Adam Smith, in his “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” supposed that people who did not feel gratitude were only cheating themselves out of happiness in life. And in the 19th century, Immanuel Kant described ingratitude with “the essence of vileness.”
The poet Rumi said “Wear gratitude like a cloak and it will feed every corner of your life.”
I’m still in the stage where I am just grateful for the good things. Just in all of life’s joys? In its blessings? Those who are farther along than I am in this practice say not. They say have a heart of gratitude in the midst of everything. Well, surely not everything. We all know Anne Frank’s diary, but there were others recovered after the Holocaust. I want to introduce to you Etty Hillesum, a Jewish woman who lived in Amsterdam. Etty Hillesum wrote in her diary: “Sometimes when I stand in some corner of the camp, my feet planted on earth, my eyes raised towards heaven, tears run down my face, tears of deep emotion and gratitude.” The camp she speaks of is a Nazi death camp.
Her entry for July 3, 1942, reads:
“I must admit a new insight in my life and find a place for it: what is at stake is our impending destruction and annihilation…. They are out to destroy us completely, we must accept that and go on from there…. Very well then … I accept it…. I work and continue to live with the same conviction and I find life meaningful…. 1 wish I could live for a long time so that one day I may know how to explain it, and if I am not granted that wish, well, then somebody else will perhaps do it, carry on from where my life has been cut short.” In the midst of suffering and injustice, she believed, the effort to preserve in one’s heart a spirit of love and forgiveness was the greatest task that any person could perform.
On September 7, 1943, Hillesum and her family were placed on a transport train to Poland. From a window of the train she tossed out a card that read, “We have left the camp singing.” She died in Auschwitz on November 30. She was twenty-nine.
[From Robert Ellsberg’s book All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses From Our Time.
See Also: An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943 (New York: Pantheon, 1983). ]
I don’t know if I could be like that in a concentration camp. You never know about that kind of situation until you’re there. When I think about her, I have the feeling that it is misguided to try to be grateful and open in the midst of a situation like that. But then I think “how could it make things worse? Why not be present and open? Wouldn’t that stance make any situation better?” When I lived in Israel, the people had a well grounded sense of gratitude, a grounded appreciation for life, which could be taken away at any moment. The bus blows up. The army shells the men, women and children in Gaza mercilessly in retaliation. There is pain all around. Is this the reality of things, and all joys are temporary, or is war and affliction temporary and joy and love are what outlast everything? The religions of the world ask us to trust that this is the case, and that the molten flow of love is at the heart of it all, and that we can feel it if we decide to do so. Maybe this is what Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, in the mid-1800s, meant when he said “The arc of the universe bends toward justice.” Is everything going to come closer to justice? Can we trust the universe? Is everything going to be okay in some way? Are we part of that? I think we can be. Gratitude seems easier if you are willing to believe that love is the most real, the most lasting thing. Believing that just means choosing to act as if it is true. To see what happens.
All will be well
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Wynton Marsalis writes: “To improvise means to find your own way of intelligently using what you have in order to improve your environment; to swing means to maintain equilibrium with elegance, to be resilient; and to play the blues means that no matter how tragic a situation may be you have the capacity to conquer it with style.” UU theology and practice is very much like jazz.
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Using a story from an ancient Hindu text, we’ll talk about how a faithful bitterness toward a person, a place or a religious tradition can keep you as connected as you would be if you loved that person, place or tradition.
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Another part of our Covenant of Healthy Relations says that we promise “to make our church a safe place to express our deepest fears and our greatest joys.” What makes a place safe? How do you know abuse if you see it? What are its patterns and methods? How do you stop it?
Sermon: A Safe Place
The organization that is featured this morning that receives support from First UU is Front Steps. There are a lot of reasons why people end up on the street. For families who are homeless, it’s often the economy. For people who are on the streets by themselves, the reasons often include mental illness and substance abuse. Around two thirds of the adults on the street are there because of mental illness or substance abuse or some combination of those. Other reasons are domestic violence or being a gay teenager. The issues are tangled together. Some mental illness is triggered by substance abuse. Some is triggered by having been abused or neglected as a child. Some substance abuse is itself triggered by childhood abuse or neglect. Not everyone who was abused or neglected as a child struggles with mental illness or substance abuse, and not everyone who struggles with mental illness or substance abuse was abused or neglected as a child. I’m saying that in studies of homelessness, there is a significant overlap.
About 40 percent of the young people on the street are lesbian or gay. Other young people are on the street because they are abused physically or sexually at home. Some of that abuse is because the parents are substance abusers. This month is domestic violence awareness month, and we have just had national coming out day. It feels like a good time to touch on this tangle of issues, so we will not be ignorant of these things. And maybe we can figure out what to do about some of the roots of the problem.
One of the ways we help is by supporting the shelters for homeless people, for abused women and children. Another is to know about abuse so we can recognize it in our own lives and in the lives of our friends and family. I learned a lot about abuse when I helped start the shelter for battered women in Spartanburg. We didn’t do it exactly right. I realized that as I drove fast down the road with a woman in the passenger seat and her angry husband in the family station wagon with a rifle just a few cars behind us. We had asked the police to help, but they had said no. Now, of course, they work hand in hand with the shelter, but not at the beginning. But that is another sermon. We had a lot to learn really fast.
There is nothing simple about abuse. Most of it comes from people you love, people upon whom you depend for your life. Imagine for a moment that at some given moment this afternoon, the person you love most in the world attacks and hurts you. You have to leave. Where do you go? What do you take with you? What do you live on? They apologize and say it will never happen again, that they would rather lose their right arm than do that to you again. You forgive them, and everything is great. What a relief. Then the tension starts to build. You can feel it coming. It happens again.
If you are a kid, or if you were abused as a kid, your first thought is that you did something to deserve it. You ask yourself what you could do to be good enough so that it doesn’t happen again. If you were abused as a young child, it becomes more complicated in that your very wiring is affected so that your adrenaline pumps into your bloodstream at a lower threshold than people with less violent childhood experiences. It becomes even more complicated in that, for some who experience violence, the chaos and danger begin to feel familiar, sometimes more real than when things are peaceful.
Physical violence does not have to be in the picture for emotional or verbal abuse or neglect to be present. Emotional abuse most commonly consists of constant put-downs, belittling, explosions of rage, long days of silence, isolating you from friends and family, preventing you from doing what you want to do, either with intimidation or emotional blackmail. Emotional blackmail goes like this: “if you don’t do as I say, you don’t love me, or I will rage, there will be high drama, or I will hurt myself, or I will hurt things you love.
If you live with that, you might begin to feel that you are not good for anything, that you are just a burden, that you are unwanted wherever you are. It can make you feel ashamed inside, like there is something wrong with you.
Why am I talking about this here at church? Because I’m doing a sermon series on the covenant of healthy relations, which is our agreement on how we want to interact with one another, how we want to disagree, how we want to get things talked about, how we want to conduct ourselves. The section we’re looking at this morning says we want “to make our church a safe place to express our deepest fears and our greatest joys.”
The first sermon was about the word “covenant,” and all it implies. The second one, last Sunday, was about generously supporting the church with our time, treasure and talent.
We do a lot of things as a congregation, but if all we did was create a safe place for people to express their deepest fears and greatest joys, that would almost be enough. It would make one more safe public place in a world where there aren’t very many.
In order to be a safe place, it has to be somewhere a person won’t be attacked physically or verbally. A safe place should be free of outbursts of rage, it should be free of physical fear. Your sexual boundaries should be respected.
It should be a place where you can have your view and speak about it, even when others have a different view, a place where you will be listened to with respect, where when people disagree with one another they disagree with passion and with respect. Safety does not mean everyone agrees and everyone is sweet. During a discussion in another church far from here, a woman raised her hand and said “I’m not feeling heard.” The facilitator said, gently, “The gentleman who just spoke seemed to hear and understand your point very well. Could it be that you simply aren’t being agreed with?” In fact, when you disagree deeply with someone, it takes a lot of respect to engage with them and talk about your disagreement. When there is no respect, you don’t even have the will to engage, because it’s useless, so you are nice. And silent.
In churches that have felt unsafe, members have had very different experiences of the atmosphere and the events. In families where there is abuse, often it is directed at just one kid, not all of them, so the people in the family have very different experiences of life in that family. They tend to blame the person at whom the rage was directed. If those to whom it is not directed see it happening, they feel confused about what to do. If they can’t figure out how to make it stop, they may feel powerless or ashamed that they couldn’t make it stop. They blame themselves.
What is needed in order to live into a feeling of safety? Gentle interactions, acknowledgement of people’s right to their views and their feelings. Dependability, good structure, transparency, fun, allowance for disagreement, especially good strong disagreements where you learn that disagreement is not attack. The assumption of good intentions, where you hold on to the knowledge that people feel they are making the best decisions for the group, even though you feel they are absolutely wrong.
We make a safe place here not only so that we have a place to spread out wings and grow. We spread our wings so that we can help homeless people. We spread our wings so we can figure out how to reach out to gay teens to let them know they’re not going to hell, to let their parents know they don’t have to kick them out of the house. We’ve got a lot of work to do, but we’ve made a good start.
Stewardship Moment
Marisol Caballero
Last time I was in this pulpit I spoke to you all about coming home to UUism and being vocal enough to help others do the same thing. Many of you have heard me speak several times about my joy in joining the staff here as Interim Director of Lifespan Religious Education, especially in light of the fact that I started my ministerial journey here many, many years ago. It was the people within this church who helped me to discover my call to ministry and encouraged me to pursue this path. So, when Meg called me up over the summer and asked if I could come in and help you all with Religious Education for a bit, I was thrilled at the chance to come home and even more thrilled to be asked to stay a bit longer, as I have!
After completing my undergraduate degree at St. Edward’s, I headed to New York to attend Union Theological Seminary, all the while intending to someday return to Austin and do ministry in some form or another. I wasn’t sure of the particulars, only about Austin. I knew that I wanted to live and work in the place and community I had loved and that had nurtured my call. I moved right back here after I graduated seminary and worked with kids in a day care and as a substitute schoolteacher while I took some time to figure out next steps. While doing so, I surprised myself by gaining admission to a prestigious 12-month chaplaincy residency at the Medical Center of the University of California, San Francisco. From there, I was invited to apply and was later accepted to become the shared Ministerial Intern of Throop and Neighborhood UU Churches in Pasadena, CA.
These experiences were invaluable, yet all the while; I pined for Austin, Texas. I wanted to journey with and serve UU’s who understood better that as a Chicana and a Tejana, I have no confusion about whether I’m Mexican or American or Unitarian Universalist or Lesbian. In Texas and in this church, we create room for everyone to be their whole selves and we work together to celebrate those differences! Many UU’s I met in other states often didn’t understand my love for this place and its people and wondered why liberal religious folk would ever stick around such a place. I longed to journey with and to serve those Austin UU’s who look injustice and the face and say, “we will stand on the side oflove (not move aside) and see love prevail!”
I came back as fast as I could. And yes, I am overjoyed to be back home with you all. But, the journey here was a long one wrought with many hardships along the way. Preparation for UU ministry is a very involved and very expensive endeavor, especially when your family is not able to contribute anything. I worked and borrowed my way through both of my degrees only to find my household a fast statistic of the Great Recession, as they are now calling it. When we must operate from a place of scarcity for so long, it becomes so difficult to imagine abundance. So many of us, including this church, are standing in that same place- having operated through a narrative of scarcity, we must re-teach ourselves to recognize our multitude of blessings and begin to embody the wildest imaginings of our highest potential. This year, I am personally digging myself out of a hole; playing “catch-up” with my personal finances and grateful for the privilege to do so. I am not yet able to give to this church as much as I would like to. But, I’ll be as generous as I am able and I urge you all to do the same in your pledges. Let’s imagine, together, and then become the wildest imaginings of our highest potential. It is, after all our mission. Thank you.
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
