Coming of Age – Constantly! – First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin

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Sally Miculek

20 March 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

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AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Sally Miculek

Ten days from now, I’m going to turn 27. Most people would say that 26 isn’t really a major year, as far as growing up goes. It’s not 18, and “adulthood,” or 21. It’s not a decade change. It’s just 26. But, for me, 26 has been a big year. I’ve gone through three important life events, coming-of-age kinds of events, if you will. And their varied nature just reinforces the notion that you never know when or where some new growing up experience is going to come from.

The first event was the most recent – Sunday, January 16, of this year. With two new friends, I signed up to run a 12 mile leg on a relay team for a 50 mile ultrarun through Big Bend National Park. I’m sure many of you have completed marathons or ultramarathons, or had equivalent achievements in other sports, but I hope you will not scoff at me too much. My first 5k, or 3.1 mile race was in April of last year. By November, I was able to run six miles at a go, and that’s when I decided to sign up for the Big Bend run. I put myself on a training regimen more grueling than any exercise plan I’d ever tried before, and within eight weeks of deciding to make the run, I was ready and able to conquer this task I’d set for myself, and I had a great time doing so.

The second event was my wedding. On June 5 of last year, I met my fiance in my parents’ garden, and there we said our vows in the company of many of our friends and our families. The day was the perfect culmination of months of plans, preparations, negotiations, and stress, and I feel lucky to enter the married phase of my life with such an amazing fellow.

The first event was of a more sobering nature. As it happened, the day I was sending my wedding invitations, my OB-GYN called me. He had confirmed that, after follow-up tests, some unwanted cells had returned to my cervix after a procedure 18 months before that had been intended to eradicate the problem. Though he told me many times that this was not cancer, he did refer me to an oncologist, and that fact, coupled with the word “carcinoma,” which was used to describe the wayward, was enough for me. I am happy to report that, after a day surgery a few weeks later, and after many follow up visits throughout this year, the cells have not yet returned. Still, cancer remains a specter for me, and I cannot hear a woman say she is overdue for a routine exam without feeling obliged to tell her some part of my story and then urging her to see her doctor.

So here I am, at the end of my 26th year, embarking on a still new phase in my life. I have a new husband and a new fitness hobby that I hope to keep for a long time, and an ongoing medical concern that will forever color my attitude towards women’s health, and that I hope will never become more than a mere concern for me. As I prepare for my next birthday, I feel confident that whatever growing up experiences 27 brings, I’ll be able to handle them. I’ve got some stuff at the core of my being that I can hold onto when I need it, and that offers comfort, solace, and jubilation through all of my triumphs and challenges. First, I have a family that loves me, and that I love in return. I know I can always go to this group of people to share all of my growing up experiences, for the good or the bad. Also, I have always held the belief that I am a lucky person. To this, I owe my good fortune in having a family I love, finding a mate I love, having a good job, and being able to relish the highs in life, and recover my happiness and joy after things go wrong. No matter what challenges I face, what good or bad decisions I make, I know that I’m lucky enough to be able to come through these growing up experiences stronger. Now I ask you two questions: what have your growing up experiences been this year? I think, if you examine it, you’ll find that maybe you’ve had a more important year than you might have expected. Second, what is at your core that will help you overcome the challenges and embrace the triumphs? I think I did pretty well with the stuff at my core, and I hope that the stuff at your core is just as strong.

PRAYER:

Let us remember who we love and who loves us. for those invisible threads are the ties that bind us together, that help to weave the web of our larger and better selves.

Let us remember and honor those high ideals we have served, and which have served us. They are a part of the image of our greater selves, the image of God.

And let us remember, and draw into our hearts, those most tender mercies that help make us blessings to ourselves and others.

As we make our way through life and life makes its way through us, it is these invisible, slender threads of connection that make up our greatest strength and our most heartfelt hope.

We are not alone. We are never alone, if we can remember those few invisible and precious things that live within us.

And so let us remember who we love and who loves us. Let us remember and honor the high ideals that give us our most noble profiles. And let us remember and pass on to others those most tender mercies that help make us most fully human, and most fully divine.

If we can remember and honor just these few invisible things, these things that form the bedrock of our character, we will be all right. We will be all right.

Amen.

SERMON:

Coming of Age – Constantly!

This morning’s service is really about how to deal with change, and the role played for us by those “still, small voices” I was talking with you about last week. When we speak of change, we are usually talking about disposing of something: changing clothes, jobs, cities, partners. Change is usually a kind of “out with the old and in with the new” sort of thing. So it usually means to drop one thing and get a new thing. We speak of it as though we stay unchanged, but just change some of our accessories.

But even with that simple kind of change, we have in mind some image of ourselves, of what doesn’t change. So we change clothes because we are going to a party or a wedding, and want to be dressed right to honor the people and the occasion, because that’s the kind of person we want to be. We change what’s visible to serve what’s invisible.

In the Christian scriptures, there is this famous sentence that says, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1) “The evidence of things not seen.” Invisible stuff. Important stuff. And Roman Catholics have defined a sacrament as an outward manifestation of the Holy Spirit’s presence. That invisible holy presence is one of the most important things about us, especially when we have to go through hard changes.

With every physical change we make, there is an invisible thing that usually directs or guides the change.

Konrad Lorenz, the great Austrian who created the discipline of comparative animal behavior – humans and other animals, that is – once said that there is one time in our lives when we are so receptive to our environment that it could almost be compared with “imprinting” in young geese. That is that time in our late teens and twenties when we’re struggling to find an adult identity to replace the one assigned to us by our parents. We are so oversensitive to stimuli at that time, he said, that the music that is most powerful for us at that time usually remains the most powerful music for the rest of our lives.

And we may change a whole slew of things in this search, depending on the fads of the day. We want to mark ourselves as individuals, but we want to look like the right kind of individuals – like all those others in the group we run with.

When I was a teen-ager, boys who wanted to look a little wild combed their hair with a duck tail in back. Boy, does that ever not sound wild any more! And I’ve never understood just why we wanted the back of our head to look like a duck’s behind, anyway.

Today, young people get more dramatic changes done: piercings, tattoos, theatrical things done with their hair. Those are the visible changes. but they are driven by the invisible desire to look the part of someone trying to declare independence from an old role, looking for a new one.

Or think of people getting married, and putting wedding rings on. That’s an outward and visible sign of something inward and spiritual. Though most people who get tattoos will tell you they are also an outward and visible sign of an inward movement.

Almost all of our actions are outward signs of inward dispositions, beliefs or concerns. This is true of social movements as well as individual ones. Something like the civil rights movement or the women’s movement created a lot of outward signs: parades, protests, banners, petitions and the rest. But what gave these movements their power were the invisible and inward changes in attitude that they symbolized.

What’s the point of all this? It is to draw your attention to an irony. And that is the fact that in life, most of our visible actions are really acting out invisible inner or spiritual states that are more important.

This may sound kind of obvious, but it’s one of the most important things in religion and life. I’ve thought for a long time that the biggest reason that religious literalists seem so frightened of change, or those who are different, is because they’re stuck in the visible world, and can’t find that deeper faith that the holy spirit is present everywhere, in everyone.

I’ve had a brief, if strange, e-mail correspondence with a professor from Bob Jones University recently. At one point, I tried to engage him by raising some good scholarly questions that anyone teaching religion should know about. But his response was simply to say that we probably couldn’t communicate, because he was convinced of the absolute depravity of humankind. You know, you can’t say something like that about other people: you don’t know them. But he and many other literalists say that these are confessional statements, they know they are true by looking within. And I don’t think you can argue with that.

But my god, what a sad, miserable kind of faith! Of course we have some original sins – taking our beliefs too seriously is one of them. But we also have many original blessings that are with us still. And we tilt toward the good, not the evil. How dreary to go through life with fear driving you to such horrid beliefs that you miss the gift of so much that makes life rich and good. I think one of the ironies of people stuck in literal religions is that their only answer would be to find a better kind of religion: one with a healthier and more whole picture of our human condition.

This is the kind of thing Sally was talking about with that “stuff” at her core: that invisible center that has sustained her through some of her recent big changes. Things like knowing that your family is stuck with you and you can count on them, or counting on the fact that you’ve always been lucky enough to be able to frame changes in hopeful ways rather than frightening ways.

The supremacy of these invisible things – these still, small voices – has been seen by the greatest thinkers in all times and places. I want to introduce you, or reacquaint you, with a few of them, a few people saying the same thing in different ways.

1. Aristotle wrote, “There is a life which is higher than the measure of humanity: [we] will live it not by virtue of [our] humanity, but by virtue of something in [us] that is divine. [and] small though it be, in power and worth it is far above the rest.” All this talk of invisible powers and voices sounds kind of spooky or supernatural. But it isn’t supernatural. It’s natural, and super.

2. In the Bible, when the ancient Hebrews left Egypt and wandered through the wilderness for forty years, all the outward and visible signs were just awful. Those with the shallowest faith even wanted to return to Egyptian slavery because at least it was familiar. But they carried something with them on their wanderings, that gave them a kind of center, a center that moved with them. They called it the Ark of the Covenant. It was a box about three feet long by two feet square, and the Hebrews carried it with them everywhere. It was thought to have great power – you may remember the movie “Raiders of the Lost Ark”? That was the outward and visible thing.

But its real power came from the fact that it was a sign to them that their God was with them, that everything holy that gave them significance and purpose was with them, always, even as they wandered through the wilderness. Now don’t just think of this as an old story about people who have been dead for over thirty centuries; it is, as all good myths are, also about us, about a dimension of ourselves we usually haven’t learned to see.

3. There is a stronger version of this business of carrying your god with you, in ancient Greek mythology. It’s one I find both more profound and more useful. It comes from a little-known myth of a little-known god named Proteus. If you read Greek mythology, you won’t find many lines devoted to this god. His chief claim to fame was his ability to change shape.

Sometimes he was a tree, sometimes sea foam, or anything at all. A lot of Western thinkers have attacked this as a sign of people with no soul, no core: “protean” people. But they have missed the point. The god Proteus should be seen as the patron saint of change. Because, while he changed form quite often, he was always a god. Think about this. What was most important, most sacred, about him, had nothing to do with the form he happened to be in at the moment. He was always holy, always a god. You understand that in the language of mythology, this is a story about us, don’t you? It is a story telling us that for us too, when we change form, place, change almost everything, there is still that invisible something about us that is sacred. If there is one single truth I wish more people really believed, it is this. It’s both natural, and super.

4. And a beautiful expression of this same insight comes from the Qu’ran from the religion of Islam, where one of its most famous sayings is that Allah is closer to you than your own jugular vein. Now what can be closer to you than your own jugular vein? Only something that is an inherent part of you. God inside of you: the holy spirit as an invisible but essential part of you that goes with you wherever you go.

5. One last image comes from an old story the Greeks used to tell about Socrates. He was this wonderful and very irritating old philosopher who taught Plato, who in turn taught Aristotle. He was a stonemason by trade, and all the stories about him indicate that he was, that his face was – well, ugly. And this was in a Greek culture that idolized beauty.

Sometimes in the plays the Greeks would put on, an actor would portray Socrates – usually to make fun of him – by wearing a big mask he held up in front of his face, a mask made to look like the face of Socrates. Now the face was so ugly that people laughed, sometimes because they didn’t believe anybody could actually look like that. And when Socrates was in the audience and this happened, he used to stand up and turn around so everyone could see that yes, by golly, someone really can look like that! His heart, his soul, weren’t owned by the visible world, but by something inside of him no one but Socrates could really see.

That may have been the source of the story that compared Socrates to some common little wooden statues Greeks would make that were plain on the outside, but when you opened them they were filled with gods. How else could Socrates be so unconcerned with his looks, unless there was something inside, invisible, that was more powerful than his misshapen face? Plain on the outside, with gods inside. You see, that too is a story about us, if we’ll hear it.

Sally called it the stuff at her core. When I hear a story like Sally’s, I don’t much care what you call this invisible and holy part of you, as long as you can call it forth. Aristotle called it forth by one name, the old Greek mythmakers called it forth by another, the ancient Hebrews called it forth by still another. And for Socrates, like Proteus, it was closer to him than his own jugular vein. But can you see they were all talking about the same thing, the fact that there is something about us that is incorruptible, that is always there, always with us, and that it is the strongest ally we have as we go through the changes that life brings to us.

This invisible, natural, super thing at our core: what is it? I think it’s an ability to frame life as trustworthy, because you know you are supported by a core, anchored in a soil, deep and fertile enough to ground you as you grow through the changes life brings.

This invisible thing, this faith that believes the evidence of things not seen, that believes there is a holy spirit within us, within our core – this is what determines whether in our lives time will bless us, or will just pass; whether we’ll grow up, come of age again and again, or just get older.

You know there’s a story about this, too: about someone who never got it, who was never transformed by life, who never came of age, and whom time simply passed by. It is the story of Rip van Winkle, who fell asleep under a tree for twenty years, and woke up with nothing to show for it but a long beard. We can miss it. Life really can pass us by.

St. Paul once wrote that when he was a child he thought like a child, but when he became a man he put away childish things. That’s what we need to do when things change and we become afraid. We need to put away childish things – like believing that we’re alone, or that our meaning and purpose were tied to a certain form, job, or identity, or that there is nothing we can count on to carry us through. Those things are childish, and are not true. They are profoundly faithless.

For we are not alone. We may look plain on the outside, but we are filled with gods, filled with the holy spirit. The evidence is closer to us than our own jugular vein. You just have to have the eyes to see it, and the faith to believe it. It is not supernatural. It’s natural, and it’s super. It is the truth that can set us free. Try it, for a lifetime, and see.