Clouds

July 29, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

Prayer:

Mystery of many names, and mystery beyond all naming, this morning we wish to think about and discuss the possibility that we are whole and complete right now, right this moment.

This morning we wish to let go of the burden of self-improvement, realizing that all that self-help minutia is but an attempt for authority to tell us once again, that we’re not right, we’ve never been right, and we’d better get with the program to get right.

Hogwash! There isn’t a thing we need that we don’t have right now. Thinking that we lack something is simply the ability of our own minds to imagine that there’s something out there that will be better than whatever it is inside here. The grass is always greener is in fact propaganda of the advertising moguls. The truth is the grass is always grass. Our lives look different to us because we are into judgment and we see in others the chance that their lives are not tangled skeins, but the truth is if we were able to walk in their shoes and really be them, we would be looking back at ourselves thinking how together we seem now that we’re the other.

The problem is we’re looking to be served when in truth we need to be looking for opportunities to serve. Monty Newton traveled to Nicaragua this past week as a birthday present to himself.

No, he did not travel to a remote resort where he sat in wicker rockers with tall drinks garnished with umbrellas. No, Monty traveled to a small village where with a group of other spiritually minded people they dug a well for a village. And the emails that he sent back to Nell, Lulu and Henry although garbled by the non-familiarity of the Spanish keyboards were, none the less, filled with a renewal of spirit that is taking place in Monty because he knows what Gandhi knew to serve is to rule.

Forgive us, Great Spirit, as we seem to spend the majority of our time worried about who’s going to give us our next jolly. Forgive us for stopping at the traffic light and NOT giving that dollar to that homeless person – “Oh, they’re just going to spend it on alcohol,” we think, but what we’re really saying is that if we were homeless we’d take the opportunity to lose ourselves in booze.

Now lift us up Great Spirit and help us realize that the majority of problems in our lives are self-created and can be self-cured. In truth the self that we hope to improve is non-existent. We are all simply witnesses of this life, and all the trauma and drama of our lives, is nothing more than adult temper tantrums that we’re not being pleased, not being fed what we think we need. Wake up! We’ve got it all and always have.

We pray this in the name of everything that is holy, and that is, precisely, everything.

Amen.

Reading

James Agee, A Death in the Family

On the rough wet grass of the backyard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there. First we were sitting up, then one of us lay down, and then we all lay down, on our stomachs, or on our sides, or on our backs, and they have kept on talking. They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than me, quiet, with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds.

By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of night. May god bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.

After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me to her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.

Sermon:

Introduction:

I have been married a total of three times. I jokingly say that my first marriage was a started marriage, but the truth is there is a part of me that still loves, very dearly, the mother of my only son, Ian.The first marriage lasted 5 years, and the second one lasted 12 – six drunken and six sober. The sober ones were great. I have been married a third, and hopefully final time for twenty years so far.

There is a sense in which I have wanted the women I lived with to tell me who I am – but (they) will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but (they) will not ever tell me who I am.

The notion of romantic love that suffuses this culture and many other cultures, clouds our vision when it comes to what love is, what it can be, and who exactly it is that is playing this love game. We are encouraged to imagine that we will find a partner in this life who is a soul mate, someone who will be the other half of us, someone who will complete us in some mystical manner.

I see this in the faces of the young couples who come to talk to me about getting married. I hear this in the vows they write each other, and again I hear it repeated openly to relatives and friends at the ceremony. Yet, I don’t have the heart to even attempt to tell them something that rightfully they can only learn by living it.

Romantic love is not an aberration, it is merely the species guaranteed way to get us to reproduce and keep the species going. Romantic love is part of growing up, and those who don’t get past it, often fall victim to its seductive lure, it’s ability to make us think that the right man, the right woman is right around the next corner, and that we can’t give up on the chance that we will be fulfilled.

Between my second and third marriages I was actually single for a whole two years – hey it beats the two weeks I was single between the first and second marriages! I had moved from Tallahassee, Florida to Dallas, Texas when my plays started being done at Theatre Three in Dallas. I spent the first year in Dallas taking the Greyhound bus back and forth between Dallas and Tallahassee a total of seven times. During the first summer of our divorce I went back to Tallahassee and spent time with my daughter, Isabelle. I was staying with her mother and her girlfriend sleeping on the couch of a very big homemade home at the Tallahassee Land Coop. The founder of Mad Dog Builders had built the home and it was a wood frame that had three stories and a large screen-in porch on the front. Out in the woods west of town, it was serene and beautiful with the Spanish moss hanging from the Live Oaks and small dirt roads that wound around the beginning of the Hippie Culture as it began to acquire money.

One night sleeping on that couch I dreamed that I met my Anima. I’d been reading a lot of Carl Justav Jung and was intrigued by the idea that we each have the male and female parts of the psyche; it’s just that most of us never realize it. I don’t remember what she looked like, but her name was Amanda.

In the morning I found one of those baby-naming books and looked up Amanda. “Worthy of Love,” it said, so that’s what Amanda meant – “worthy of love.”

I thought it was interesting that in a house dominated by women – my second wife’s girlfriend had three daughters and then there was my own daughter Isabelle. I was the only male there in a house of juveniles and lesbians. I imagined on some level that it had been some sort of defense to actually have identified and met my feminine side in such an unbalanced situation. I thought that she had come to the surface of my consciousness to introduce herself, then simply to slip back below into the waters of oblivion. How very mistaken I was.

An irresistible force is a force that impinges upon us without us even being aware of it. Such was the case with Amanda. She had surfaced and she wasn’t going away.

It wasn’t that I changed immediately, that would have brought my attention to her presence, it was more like she insinuated herself into the place where Jack had stood, and now there were two of us, Amanda and Jack – both comfortable in the same body, both with their own agendas, and only so many hours in the day.

Jung said, “The discussion of the sexual problem is the somewhat crude beginning of a far deeper question, namely, that of the psyche of human relationships between the sexes.” It just might be that the relationship between the sexes is something that happens right inside of us.

In Chinese philosophy and especially the I-Ching we have the possibility of representing this relationship between the sexes with the yin/yang principle. Within the Yin/yang design the large part of the yang is supported by the thinner yin element, and the larger part of the yin is being intruded upon by the thin probing line of the yang. Each blending into the other so that the greatest strength of one is actually the beginning of the next. Go too far in the yang direction and you end up in yin territory, too far yin and you’re right back into the yang.

In Jung’s Foreword to the Richard Wilhelm translation of the I-Ching he reminds us that “The Chinese mind – seems to be exclusively preoccupied with the chance aspects of events. What we call coincidence seems to be the chief concern of this peculiar mind, and what we worship as causality passes almost unnoticed. We must admit that there is something to be said for the immense importance of chance. An incalculable amount of human effort is directed to combating and restricting the nuisance or danger represented by chance.”

In a dream I chanced upon a meeting with a hypothetical part of myself known in Jungian terms as the Anima.To sleep, per chance to dream – aye, there lies the rub.

In Italian “anima” means ‘soul’, in musical notation it appears in the phrase ‘con anima,’ meaning that the music should be played ‘with soul.’

It’s a chance occurrence that I should find the meaning of this Italian word, but it would seem to suggest that a man who lives without acknowledging his “anima” or feminine side would, in fact, be a man who was without a soul and what would a life sans anima be, but a life played without soul.

It’s possible that the whole romantic love thing is really the acting out in public of a drama that should be happening on the inside. Men and women are looking for their other halves out there, in the world the very place where their other half only exists in projections of the inner other halves. In the song, Both Sides Now, Joni Mitchell sings, “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now, from up and down and still somehow its clouds illusions I recall, I really don’t know clouds at all.”

I’m thinking now of the James Agee piece that I read at the beginning of this sermon. I see the family lying on their backs with the summer clouds billowing overhead. Anyone who’s ever done this knows that the next step is seeing the configurations of the clouds as they resemble different animals, objects and shapes. But the shapes are in motion, moving, roiling up there at 30,000 feet and as fast as we can name them they morph into another shape, and yet another.

Believing in romantic love is like having a picture of a cloud that at one point in time assumed a shape that we named “soul mate.” The picture will always resemble the shape we named because within the picture we have stopped the process of the clouds changing, we have frozen time and decided that this is what love always looks like.

In her book, Everyday Zen, Charlotte Joko Beck writes the nonsense of emotion-thought dominates our lives. Particularly in romantic love, emotion-thought gets really out of hand. I expect of my partner that he should fulfill my idealized picture of myself. And when he ceases to do that (as he will before long) then I say, “The honeymoon’s over. What’s wrong with him? He’s doing all the things I can’t stand.”

And I wonder why I am so miserable. My partner no longer suits me, he doesn’t reflect my dream picture of myself, he doesn’t promote my comfort and pleasure. None of that emotional demand has anything to do with love. As the pictures break down – and they always will in a close relationship – such “love” turns into hostility and arguments.

So if we’re in a close relationship, from time to time we’re going to be in pain, because no relationship will ever suit us completely. There’s no one we will ever live with who will please us in all the ways we want to be pleased. So how can we deal with this disappointment? Always we must practice getting close to experiencing our pain, our disappointment, our shattered hopes, our broken pictures. We must observe the thought content until it is neutral enough that we can enter the direct and nonverbal experience of disappointment and suffering. When we experience suffering directly, the melting of the false emotion can begin, and true compassion can emerge.

The way to true love and compassion is through endurance and suffering. We can long for that soul mate, or grieve their passing, but staying stuck in that loop in which we’re sure if we keep looking then we can have all those hyped up feelings that love is supposed to be all about just keeps us in a neurotic cycle. Jung again, Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

“I’ve looked at love from both sides now, from up and down and still somehow its love illusions I recall, I really don’t know love at all.”

LOVE IS PATIENT, LOVE IS KIND. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Loves does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

If that doesn’t sound like the love we’ve been dealing with, then maybe we’ve taken a picture of what we thought love should be, maybe we’re involved in idol worship, maybe, just maybe, we don’t know what the hell love is.

When I was a child, I talked like a child; I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man/ woman I put childish ways behind me.

Perhaps now is the time to begin wooing your real soul mate that half of you that you’ve refused to cultivate.

Shadow selves are called shadow selves not because they are evil or bad and lurk in the dark, but because we have kept them in the shadows and refused to acknowledge them.

“Tear and fears and feeling proud to say I love you right out loud.”

Perhaps the “I love yous” need to be said to the other half of our psyches.”

Sigmund Freud stood on the shoulders of the Hasidic Jews when he suggested that to become whole we must rescue from the darkness that spark of divinity, which lies buried within us.

Sometimes to become whole we must dig a hole and unearth what we find, resurrect that part of us that we have been projecting into the world. Amanda, my dear, I want to say right out loud that I love you and that together Jack and Amanda are truly worthy of love.

Thank you, Amanda, for helping me to stop projecting onto those females about me the mantles of Madonna and whore. Thank you for helping me see that to become whole I must not only be strong, but also supportive and nurturing, that I must not always be aggressive, but that there is time for retreat and regrouping. But mostly thank you for helping me see that the true birth of anything takes a period of gestation – a period in which that which is incumbent and unformed must grow inside me till the moment of its birth and once birthed I must let go and let grow the seeds and plans that I have left behind.

And now I will sit down from this pulpit a last time. From the bottom of both of our hearts which happens to be the same heart Amanda and I thank you for a journey well spent, we give thanks for your gifts of compassion and love and pray that in the years to come this congregation will continue to grow as it has in the past into a loving and nurturing body wherein those so covenanted find solace and grace. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be “congregation without end.”

Amen.