The Corruption of Grace & The Grace of Corruption

August 27, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

Mystery of many names and Mystery beyond all naming, we’re here today in our herky-jerky manner. We’ve raced here to find peace, and tranquility. We’re caught up in our contradictory thoughts that scold us worse than any parent ever could have – we are, in truth, our own worst taskmasters. What can we do about it?

It’s time to realize that we are not alone in this business of having a life that seems ordered on the outside, but on the inside is a web of tangled skeins. Trying to separate the threads of the skein internally only pulls the knots tighter and we long for release from this mind that will not let us be.

It’s time to start to show the cracks in our lives, time to let others in on our big secret, which, once we do it, we find out it’s their big secret, too. We’re lost and lonely, and there isn’t a prayer in the world that can change that. But we do have each other.

Help us to realize that what separates us from our neighbor is our inability to simply open up and let out our secrets. We are individuals, that’s true, but defining ourselves takes community, and the only way to define yourself inside community is to share with others what’s on your mind. You might be surprised.

It may very well be that collectively we hold things that we are not proud of, and yet, we are not alone in this shame. There’s an old tradition in Jewish synagogues, one person stands up and tells a bad story about themselves, and then another stands and tries to top that bad story by a worse story. The winner is the congregant who can tell a horrible story about themselves that no one else can top! What a turning of the tables that would be for us all – to admit our foibles and be rewarded.

May we have the strength today to admit that we are human, not perfect, a marble cake of contradictory feelings, and may this admission be greeted with the loosening of others as they decide to leave the conspiracy of silence and let it all hang out. In a popular song we are reminded that there is a crack in everything, and that’s how the light gets in. Let’s open up and let in the light of love and friendship. Let’s embody our humanity and be proud of it. We pray this in the name of everything that is holy and that is, precisely, everything.

Amen.

Song of the Open Road

Blaise Pascal, Pensees 434

“What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the pride and refuse of the universe? These foundations solidly established – make us know that there are two truths of faith equally certain: the one, that man, in the state of creation, or in that of grace is raised above all nature, made like unto God and sharing in His divinity; the other, that in the state of corruption and sin, he is fallen from this state and made like unto the beasts.”

Here’s the same thought expressed by Kris Kristofferson in his song from the early 70’s, entitled, The Pilgrim, Chapter 33.

The Pilgrim; Chapter 33,

Kris Kristofferson

“He’s a poet, he’s a picker?

He’s a prophet, he’s a pusher?

He’s a pilgrim, and a preacher, and a problem when he’s stoned?

He’s a walkin’ contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction,

Takin’ ev’ry wrong direction on his lonely way back home.”

SERMON

There was a professor at the University of Florida in the Psychology Department by the name of Sydney Jourard when I was attending that university from 1965-1969. The first book I read that Dr. Jourard wrote was Disclosing Man to Himself. It is a study in self-disclosure and how telling others about ourselves not only informs them who we are, but also keeps authentic the notion that there is something about us that is real and perhaps the best way to discover what is real is in dialogue with another human being.

Also, at the University of Florida in 1965 was Dr. Thomas Louis Hanna, Head of the Philosophy Department, a graduate of Texas Christian University, where he played football and was also a collegiate middle-weight boxing champ in the late forties. He graduated from TCU with a BA in Philosophy, and a minor in Music. Dr. Hanna went on to the University of Chicago where he earned a Bachelors of Divinity degree, and then his PhD in Philosophy.

I first met Dr. Hanna in Hume Hall, the dormitory I lived in during my freshman year at Florida. I saw a poster on the bulletin board of Hume Hall and it advertised that a Dr. Hanna, Head of the Philosophy Department, would be speaking on the Playboy philosophy in the Recreation Room that night.

I wandered down there expecting to see a few people, but the Rec Room was packed. It was standing room only, and I was one of the ones that were standing. Dr. Hanna went on to explain to his audience, who were, if not subscribers to Playboy Magazine, certainly borrowers of that same magazine, what he saw to be the implications of the Playboy philosophy. We were all anxious to hear about this because we all wanted to be the BMOC. Does anyone remember what the BMOC was? The Big Man on Campus. And although we knew that the BMOC was popular, wore the right clothes, drove a cool car, we also suspected that an explanation of the Playboy philosophy might give all us geeky freshmen a leg up on how to woo the girls and get them where we all wanted them – nudge, nudge, wink, wink!

Dr. Hanna was smooth. He explained the Playboy philosophy from Hugh Hefner’s viewpoint, and really I can’t remember what that entailed, but then he went on to do a critique of this same Playboy philosophy as being mainly masturbatory and definitely non-personal.

This, I shall never forget. He, in fact, wasn’t saying anything bad about masturbation, but he was saying that a magazine whose literary merits were sublimated by the pictures of naked co-eds, or at least young women old enough to be co-eds whether they were or not, a magazine of that type lent itself chiefly to the masturbatory process.

And the final question he asked all these very young men was, What kind of relationship and philosophy can you expect to have with and toward women, when the majority of the time spent with the magazine is practicing sex with an air-brushed symbol totally removed from any personal interaction, and hermetically sealed from the sights, sounds and smells of a real woman?

We may have been freshmen but we understood the answer to this merely rhetorical question, and further more, we understood the implications of a philosophy so implemented. More interesting to me than the Playboy philosophy is how Dr. Hanna had played a sort of bait and switch with us, we had expected to learn how to be the BMOC, but what we had really learned was that such a person would be a hollow man, a straw man whose attitude toward women was based upon only one of the attributes of femininity and lacking all basis in the real world.

But what does this have to do with the corruption of grace and the grace of corruption? Perhaps you can see parallels already, perhaps not? There is a connection, and as we go along, it will become clearer, I promise.

I remember very clearly one afternoon in spring as I was leaving another dormitory, Murphy Hall, I saw Dr. Jourard and Dr. Hanna playing handball on one of the outside courts that lined University Avenue. I stopped and watched as these two youthful full-grown men played a difficult game at top speed. I didn’t stay to see who won, but I can tell you that they could have played against much younger men and held their own.

This image of these two men playing handball is especially poignant for me, because both of these men are now dead. Dr. Sidney Jourard was working on his sports car when the jack he was using collapsed and the car landed on his head. Dr. Thomas L. Hanna, at the age of 62, and with the physical reflexes of a man in his 30’s swerved to miss, it is conjectured – since no one saw the one-car accident – swerved to miss a dog, cat, squirrel or other sentient being and left the roadway and collided with a telephone pole.

Two years before Dr. Hanna died (when he was 60) he realized that he had to tell everything he knew about our bodies and their inherent dignity, divinity and grace, he had to tell all this to the world at large.

He and Sidney Jourard were buddies, and Tom Hanna knew that not to disclose fully everything that he had learned about himself and his body would be in essence hiding from his fellow human beings and ultimately hiding from himself.

The point is most people are taught to hide their true feelings. In polite society it is not considered kosher to be frank, it is not considered a part of everyone getting along to disclose that you do not agree with the dominant cultural position, no matter what the issue is.

It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to see that this same sort of suppression, this same kind of domination is at work today when it comes to the war in Iraq, the proper treatment of prisoners of war, the growing gap between the rich and the poor, and the erosion of our democratic processes, global warming – the list goes on and on. In some circles it is still considered unpatriotic to voice an opinion counter to the dominant culture.

Shifting back in time.

In 1799 Frederick Schleiermacher, who is sometimes called the “father of liberalism? published his first work. Schleiermacher maintained that religion was not a form of knowledge (as the rationalists and orthodox believed) nor was it a system of morality, as Immanuel Kant put forth.

For Schleiermacher religion was not grounded in pure or practical reason, but in Gefuhl – the German word for “feeling.” This is not sentimentalism, nor sudden conversion experiences, but a profound experience of our “dependence? upon the ONE on which all existence depends.

In other words an absolute dependence upon God, or the ground of Being. The purpose of the church for Schleiermacher is to relate these absolute feelings of dependency within the church and to future generations. The emphasis is on sharing these feelings with one another – disclosure.

These feelings of dependency occur on three levels; the self, the self’s relation to the world and the self’s relation to the ground of being. For Schleiermacher anything that doesn’t deal with these three levels of feeling is not theology, period.

For theology to deal with the feelings of the self, and its relationship to the world and the ground of our being is as close to existentialism as one can get without calling it that. And the kind of philosophy that Dr. Hanna was doing back in the sixties and seventies, and the kind of psychology that Dr. Jourard was practicing – both of these were existential in nature. Existentialism is concerned with the feelings that one has within one’s body – feelings of grandeur, feelings of passion, anxiety, despair – all heavy internal emotional states.

Within the world of theology I come down with the existentialists and with Schleiermacher. Religion is about my relationships with myself, my relationship with my world and my relationship with that which I am totally dependent upon for my well being.

Most of us come from religious traditions that claim that we were born into sin. That is, we were raised within an environment that saw human life as basically tainted from the word go! Obviously, this is a way of thinking about life that is basically pessimistic.

Buddhists do not believe in the notion of original sin, and their quests through meditation and sutra readings are bent in the direction of rediscovering our original face before we were born, or in other words, finding out what the world and we looked like before we were told by the world what they’re supposed to look like.

In his work Sidney Jourard was stressing that if we successfully hide from others, we will end up hiding from ourselves and there will come a time in which we do not know who we are simply because we have not shared who we are. We are individuals, true, but we define ourselves through community.

In the vein of liberal religion, via Schleiermacher, our first responsibility is our responsibility to our selves. If we are to have adequate relationships with the world and with eventually the ground of our being, then we had better be in communication with ourselves. Who are we?

Quite simply, we are this body. We live our lives within the framework of this physical entity and we receive impressions of what the world is like both from outside our skins and from within. To not honor the communications that we receive from within our bodies is to short-circuit our understanding of who we are and what our place is in the world.

Thich Nhat Han said world peace begins within the human heart. For the world to be at peace we must first be at peace inside ourselves.

In like manner, if we are to be autonomous and free individuals, who can make responsible decisions about who we are and how we ought to operate in the world, then we must honor the first relationship – the relationship we have with ourselves. Jesus said, and he was merely quoting older Jewish scriptures, You must love your neighbor as yourself. Yet, if there is no love of the self, there can be no neighborly love.

We can no longer speak of a mind body split. Dr. Hanna retooled a Greek word to stand for both the body and the mind, because he saw no separation between them. He called human beings somas. The Greek word “Soma” is used in science and medicine to refer to a cell body, but Dr. Hanna’s contemporary definition sees somas – sees us – as much more than simply bodies acted upon by outside forces. We are at one and the same time, somatic beings that have internal perceptions about the world and ourselves and we are capable of controlling how we function.

But how do we regain control in a world, which seems to be spinning out of control. The first thing we do is to take charge of our bodies.

In Dr. Hanna’s terms about 85% of the Industrial populations of the world suffer from SMA – “sensory-motor amnesia.” That is, we have lost contact with our bodies and forgotten how certain muscle groups are supposed to feel when relaxed. SMA describes the effects that a lifetime of daily stresses has upon our bodies.

There are basically two disorders that demonstrate this sensory-motor amnesia.

The first is the “red light? reflex and is best demonstrated when someone fires a gun behind you and you didn’t even know they had a gun. And it looks like this. (Demonstrate)

There’s nothing wrong with this reflect, it has saved many a soldier’s life. What’s wrong is when these responses are continually involved in our daily stressful lives. Worry brings the shoulders up because it’s part of this same withdrawal response. In fact, it’s impossible to say, “Oi Veh!” without lifting the shoulders.

The second is the green-light reflex. This is very prevalent in industrialized societies. It’s that get-up and go quality that typifies the North American consciousness.

This is what the Green Light response looks like. (Demonstrate)

If we are to typify these two responses – the red and green light responses – we have to say that while the red light reflex is negative distress, the green light reflex is a positive response.

This response is awakened in us when we are just babies. The ability of a baby to finally hold its head up, to flex its legs out at the age of six months, and finally with its head lifted and straightening out its knees, the child begins to crawl and that is the culmination and full discovery of the Green Lights reflex.

But what happens in an industrialized world when we are perpetually put into a Green Light reflex? What happens if the stimulus for the Green Light reflex is constant in such a society? Continual repetition guarantees that the reflex will be constant, habitual, and eventually unnoticed. When this happens we are in sensory motor amnesia (SMA) and what we feel after a day of this Go! Go! Go! is tired, sore, and worn out. After a lifetime of such stress we feel sick and tired, and ready to die!

In older people we often see combinations of these two – the red light reflex and the green light response. (Demonstrate.)

Again, what does this have to do with the corruption of grace or the grace of corruption? How does this talk of bodies and green /red light responses inform any discussion about whether we are like unto the Gods, or bestial?

It’s very simple, really. Life is a marble cake. You ever notice that? It’s never all chocolate, or all vanilla. It’s a swirl of this and a blending of that. Those who wish to see life as black or white, right or wrong are disappointed when confronted with this swirling inconsistency.

In order to maintain a philosophy of life that does not admit the marblecakeness of life children are taught not to touch themselves, that they do not feel what they feel, women are told that they are not equal to men, men are taught that boys don’t cry and older people are taught that they are misshapen because that’s what old age looks like. Lies! Lies! All lies!

It’s time to stop trying to get our bodies to fit inside philosophies and theologies that are anti-life. It’s time for the body to assert itself and say what it feels and how what it feels translates into relationship and community. It’s time for embodied spirituality.

Let’s face it; we are many things that do not go together “

“We’re poets, we’re pickers?

We’re prophets, we’re pushers?

We’re pilgrims, and preachers, and problems when we’re stoned?

We’re walkin’ contradictions, partly truth and partly fiction,

Takin? ev’ry wrong direction on our lonely way back home.”

I feel, like my mentor, Dr. Hanna, that I, too, will die before long. Let’s face it, if I live 30 more years I’ll be 90 and what are the chances of that? I do not wish to leave this world, or this congregation before I have given to you everything I know about how to be a non-anxious presence in your bodies and in this world. In an effort to do just that this sermon has been, and is, a preamble to a course that I will be offering in Adult Religious Education this fall. This sermon is the spiel of a snake-oil salesman.

This course will begin on Saturday the 2nd of September from 9-11AM and continue every Saturday after that for six weeks – ending on Saturday October the 7th.

Those who wish to explore the idea that they may be suffering from Sensory-motor amnesia are more than welcomed to attend. What I can promise you is – even if you do the movements poorly and don’t practice them everyday, you will still see a noted difference in how you feel, and how you get about in this world.

Every good sermon has a prescription for the congregation; this is my prescription for you. Come to the classes, buy the book (it will cost you exactly $16.52 if you buy the book from me), do the movements suggested, and learn to live free inside your own skin. Freedom, independence and autonomy – these qualities – are what human life is all about. And who among us could not use a means of becoming more self-responsible?

At the end of this service the ushers will have clipboards in the foyer. Please stop, sign up and together we can learn to be free and self-regulating human beings. Caution: there is a limit of 20 people in this beginning class.

Conclusion: Dr. Hanna saw over 3000 patients. He taught them the necessary information so they did not have to keep coming back to see him. He taught them that the sensory-motor system is a closed loop in the cerebral cortex and that by daily movements that take no more than 10 minutes one can retrain the brain to recognize what the relaxed state of our bodies feels like.

What is the relationship between corruption and grace, grace and corruption? Redemption comes not through ascending to the Gods, but descending into our bodies. Being totally present and taking back control on the physical level is my definition of grace. God, enlightenment, health do not reside outside our bodies, but within – come join in the journey to the center of our selves.

The true relationship between our corruption and our grace is like a Texan standing in his pasture. His feet may be in the cow manure, but his hat is in the stars. We are that consciousness that spans this great divide. The fallen state of human kind – the bestial, and the raised state made like unto God are but the warp and woof of life’s material, but as it passes through our hands and bodies surely we feel the difference, yet know it to be of one skein.

Remember the ending I give to everyone of my prayers, In the name of everything that is holy, and that is, precisely, everything.

Amen.