Davidson Loehr
August 27, 2000
Readings: Three Stories From Restaurants
1. A family settled down for dinner at a restaurant. The waitress first took the order of the adults, then turned to the seven-year-old boy.
“What will you have?” she asked.
The boy looked around the table timidly and said, “I would like to have a hot dog.”
Before the waitress could write down the order, the mother interrupted. “No hot dogs,” she said. “Get him a steak with mashed potatoes and carrots.”
The waitress ignored her. “Do you want ketchup or mustard on your hot dog?” she asked the boy.
“Ketchup.”
“Coming up in a minute,” said the waitress as she started for the kitchen.
There was a stunned silence when she left. Finally the boy looked at everyone present and said, “Know what? She thinks I’m real.” (Anthony de Mello, The Heart of the Enlightened [Doubleday, 1989], p. 45)
2. A man was a regular customer at a restaurant, and the management did its best to please him. So when he complained one day that only one piece of bread was being given him with his meal, the waiter promptly brought him four slices.
“That’s good,” he said, “but not good enough I like bread- plenty of it.”
So the next night he was given a dozen slices. “Good,” he said. “But you’re still being frugal, aren’t you?”
Even a basketful of slices on the table next day did not stop his complaints.
So the manager decided to fix him. He had a colossal loaf of bread baked specially for him. It was six feet long and three feet wide. The manager himself, with the help of two waiters, brought it in and laid it on an adjoining table, then waited for his reaction.
The man glared at the gigantic loaf, then looked at the manager, and said, “So: we’re back to one piece again!” (Ibid., p. 107)
3. An American preacher in Beijing asked the waiter in a restaurant what religion was for the Chinese.
The waiter took him out to the balcony and asked, “What do you see, sir?”
“I see a street and houses and people walking and buses and taxis driving by.”
“What else?”
“Trees.”
“What else?”
“The wind is blowing.”
The Chinese extended his arms and exclaimed “That, sir, is religion.”
(Ibid., p. 38)
Sermon: “In a Restaurant, Choose a Table Near a Waiter”
This is a sermon framed in stories, so I will begin with yet another one. A man is walking down the sidewalk at night when he sees a friend of his on all fours under a streetlight, crawling around and looking for something.
“What did you lose?” he asked. “A key,” came the answer: “a very important key, and I simply must find it.”
The first man offered to help him look, and for the next fifteen minutes the two of them crawled over every square inch of ground under the streetlight, but found no key. Finally he asked his friend “do you remember where you lost the key?”
“Yes,” came the answer, “I lost it at home.”
The first man stood up. “Then why are you looking for it out here?”
“Because it’s brighter here.”
There is a man with his table a long way away from a waiter. His key was lost back home in a darker place, and that is where he will have to look for it.
The story would be funnier if we hadn’t all done the same thing so many times. Where are your hungers and needs; what are the questions your heart or soul is pressing on you? Never mind the roles, the pretenses: who are you, who do you need to be, where are the gaps?
Or: who are you, what do you need to offer, to give to others, how do you want or need to be a part of a larger community- a family, a church, a world? These are the questions that can lead you to your most important hungers.
And it all begins when you own those questions and needs, whether they are the questions of anyone else or not, and whether they fit the answers that other people are offering you or not. For these deep questions and needs are the “still small voice” within you that theologians and poets speak of; that spark of the divine fire that you were born with.
These questions- what do you want, what do you need, what do you need to give- these are the questions that sketch the outline of who you really are and need to be. These are the hungers that need to be filled.
That’s the point of the “lost key” story: look for what you’ve lost where you lost it, not where someone else has put up a light. All the creeds and professions of faith ever written, all the religious answers ever proposed, can not help you one bit if they don’t answer your questions. And learning to have the courage to ask our own questions is one of the most important steps any of us ever takes.
This morning’s first reading about the little story of the boy and the hot dog is a parable. What was most real for him was just what the world would not see. If the point were only nutritional in a purely physical sense, then the more balanced meal his mother had tried to order would have been what he really needed.
But he didn’t need a steak: he needed to be heard, to be acknowledged as a real person with tastes that differentiated him from his mother and father. He didn’t need to eat as much as he needed to be.
The other side to this is that you must own your own needs and questions. So many people come here and ask where our answers are: “what do you people believe? Where is the neat list of creeds or worked-out beliefs that I can memorize and feel safe?” And the only answer to such questions is to ask what they need.
After you have been here awhile, you find that it wasn’t answers you needed. What you often need instead is, for once in your life, to listen to your own questions. What an awakening that can be! The first time you feel bold enough to look at old creeds or Sunday School teachings you have been reciting forever and finally to say “good lord, I haven’t really believed those things for years!” Then and only then is there room for the more troubling but more fruitful questions about what you really do believe, and what you hunger for.
But how often we can catch ourselves crawling around under a streetlight looking for a key we have lost somewhere else! I’ll tell you a story of my own about this. It is a story I have told to several people here at one time or another, about one of my former careers as a professional photographer.
I began as a combat photographer in Vietnam, where I discovered quite by accident that I had a natural gift for photography. I had a good eye for subjects and composition, and a good sense of timing. While many of my war pictures were picked up by AP, UPI, and several major newspapers and published in this country, it was clear early on that my real gifts were for photographing people.
When I returned, I worked as a wedding photographer during the summers while finishing my degree in music theory at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Then in 1972 I went around the country to study with the eight or ten best people-photographers I could find, and opened a studio that fall.
Artistically, the studio was a success, and by 1975 I was averaging $1,100 per wedding and $450 per portrait, so it was a pretty ritzy operation selling some very expensive pictures. Also in 1975, I won first place in the professional division of the Detroit Photo Show in Cobo Hall, in a field of more than 900 entries. I would not say that I was happy, and I don’t think I would ever have been a great photographer- but I was a very good one.
Then one Saturday morning in 1976 a good friend of mine called. Fred was a commercial photographer whose studio was a block from mine. I had a gift for photographing people, and Fred’s gift was for photographing things. Since neither of us was much good at what the other did well, there was no competition between us, and we had developed a pretty good friendship.
Anyway, Fred called one Saturday morning and asked me to take a camera and macro lens and meet him at the arboretum. He wanted to take some nature pictures, at which he was very good, and wanted some company. Since he called me, he apparently wanted the company of someone who was not very good at nature photography, but I figured that Fred needed his ego boosted, so I played the part.
We walked for over two hours that morning, during which time Fred took some very nice pictures of mushrooms and things, and I took some very mediocre pictures that I threw out shortly after we had developed the slides.
But the moment that makes this story significant came near the end of the walk. It was one of those watershed moments for me, though I doubt that Fred would even remember it.
We were walking down a path in the woods when Fred suddenly stopped and turned toward me, with a look of puzzled surprise on his face. “You know,” he said, “I’ve known you for six years. And in six years, this is the first time I have ever seen you pick up a camera when you weren’t being paid to. Don’t you like photography?”
I had never thought of that. I was so good at it that it had never occurred to me to wonder whether I liked it. Once he asked the question, the answer came like a lightning bolt. “No,” I said, “I never have.”
I had spent three or four full years serving a gift which gave to others, but which gave me almost nothing at all. I had never liked photography, and hadn’t even known it! Within months, I sold the studio, sold all of my camera equipment, and never missed it. A few years later I was offered a short job that paid for a whole new set of cameras and lenses, but I hardly ever use them, even on trips.
I had looked under the streetlight and found all sorts of things, but I never found a meaningful job there because I never thought to ask myself what I liked to do. And I can tell you from some experience that a gift that gives nothing to you, no matter how much it may give to others, is no gift at all. It is a trap.
Now you don’t have to love everything about your job in order to stay in it, but you do have to love something about it, and what you love about it needs to be very important to you, or your table is a long way from the nearest waiter.
So you have to know yourself a little bit: you need to know what you love, what can help fulfill you, and have to try putting your energies into an orbit around things that you cherish.
And this business of keeping your head in touch with your heart is an ongoing process. Your needs, and your spiritual needs, may change. As the poet James Russell Lowell put it, “New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth.”
The boy won’t always want hot dogs. His needs and his diet will change, and the only way to keep him growing is to keep listening to his questions and his yearnings, and to keep knowing that he is real- even when he begins to question your beliefs. That is the task of religion and of churches, as well.
There are so many people going spiritually hungry today, in a world that has all the riches they need if only they would look in the right places. I learned this week that Bill Moyers said that the six-part series he did with Joseph Campbell, the series that we offered here last year, has been seen by more than fifty million people so far, and that there are over two thousand study groups meeting to discuss the programs.
That is a lot of hungry people: hungry people trying to move their table closer to where there might be some nourishment for them, closer to a waiter. But it all begins there, with giving voice to your own questions and needs, and then in trying to change tables so you can get closer to the food.
And then comes the second step in this process. When you begin, it is often hard to know just what your own questions and needs are, as I had gone on for several years without ever finding my own.
But at the next step is the equally hard task of being able to recognize true gifts when you find them. That is part of what the second reading was about, about the man who thought he could never get enough bread. Here was a man who was being offered a gift and he didn’t even recognize it.
The gift was not the bread, but the kindness which offered the bread. And too often when we reject someone because they haven’t done anything for us lately, we forget what a gift it is that they ever wanted to do anything for us at all.
There is a story about this too, of course, as there is a story about everything really important. It is the tale of the old Zen monk who found a raw diamond nearly a foot in diameter. It was a good size for a footrest, so he took it back to his cave.
The word spread through the town that the world’s largest diamond, a jewel of inestimable worth, rested unguarded in the old monk’s cave. Then a man thought “If I could get that diamond from the old monk, I would have treasure beyond my wildest hopes!”
So he went to the cave, to try and find a way to trick the old man out of the diamond. But the old monk saw him staring at the diamond. “Do you like this rock?” asked the monk. “Oh yes, oh yes, I like it very much!” the young man replied.
“Then please take it, as a gift,” said the monk, and handed the priceless diamond over to the young man. “I can always find another footrest.”
Overjoyed, the man ran down the mountain with the diamond, and stayed awake that night guarding the jewel and thinking of all the things he could do with his newfound wealth. But the next morning something began troubling him. And after spending a second sleepless night, this time because of the troubling feeling within him, he arose early on the third morning and carried the huge diamond back up the mountain to the old monk’s cave.
“I have taken the wrong gift,” he said, setting the diamond back in its place. “I would have you teach me instead how you could let go of this so easily.”
Or the story of a young man who was blind from birth and fell in love with a woman. All went well until a friend told him the girl wasn’t too good-looking. At that minute he lost all interest in her. Too bad! He had been “seeing” her very well. It was his friend who was blind because he was unable to see her through the eyes of love.
Sometimes the hardest thing in life is to recognize the look and feel of real nourishment, and to tell it apart from spiritual junk food.
And that brings me to the third reading. And the point of that is much like the point of the first reading, which is that what we seek was really there all the time, right under our nose, because the primary search is inside of us, not outside of us.
How many stories there are that make this point! “The Wizard of Oz” says it: it was all in Kansas, it just took looking at it in a new way. The story of the blind man who learned to see through the eyes of love and then forgot how and became really blind is like a negative version of “Beauty and the Beast.”
Or the old Hasidic tale of the Rabbi from Cracow, who travelled to a distant city in search of a great treasure he had dreamed about, only to learn that the treasure was really buried beneath the hearth in his own home. You travel out to learn of the treasures you have always had but had never learned to see before.
It is the same story that Joseph Campbell tells of the Hero’s journey. The hero goes out into the world and goes through many adventures in which he grows and developes a deeper and surer self, and then returns back home again and is for the first time able to fully live in the riches that were always there, awaiting his return.
Or as the poet T.S. Eliot put it:
“We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started- and know the place for the first time.”
And to know the place for the first time is to know that always, at all times on your journey, you are sitting in a restaurant where there is nourishment if only you will seek it. For this restaurant is nestled in a world that is filled with so many simple miracles and treasures: like streets and houses and people walking and buses and taxis and trees, and the wind is blowing. And when you can find your life in this world, and your peace, when your soul has found itself and found its world, and you have reached out with your mind, heart, and actions to connect the two, that is religion, and you are home at last.
Well, this has been a lot of poems and stories, so I will try to end it very factually by condensing it into a list of advice, sort of a traveler’s guide on how to choose a table near a waiter:
1. First, find your hungers. What is most real about you? Where do your deepest and most noble yearnings live? What gifts do you need to offer? Who, in other words, are you? Everything begins there.
2. Second, feed those hungers, not lesser ones. Or, as Joseph Campbell has put it, “follow your bliss.” Go where you and your world are richer for your having been there.
3. Third, don’t be afraid to change tables or even restaurants. Don’t linger where nourishment isn’t. Stop eating spiritual junk food, and know that all the creeds and rituals in the world can’t make you whole if they don’t help to connect your mind, body, and spirit with the riches of life abundant.
4. Fourth, know that in order to find treasure, you must look for it. The real and enduring treasures in life will energize you and bring you more life, not just more money. At the level where these hungers lie, all the diamonds in the world aren’t worth a good night’s sleep.
5. Fifth, know that you too are a waiter, and that without the nourishment that you can offer, this world would be a much, much poorer place.
6. And finally, don’t forget to leave a tip. When someone brings you joy or nourishment, for goodness’ sake, let them know it! Leave them something extra, something they can take home with them: a kind word, a kiss or a touch, even a silent look, if it is a look of thanks. For you know: this gift of life that we have been given is really quite a scrumptious feast!
Bon appetit!
