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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
March 31, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
How do we nurture our whole selves, especially those parts of ourselves that we may have been taught were no acceptable? How do we create communities and a society that are more whole?
Call to Worship
ALL OF YOU IS HOLY
Anonymous
Forget about enlightenment,
Sit down wherever you are,
and listen to the wind that is singing in your veins.
Feel the longing, the fear, the love in your bones.
Open your heart to who you are, right now,
not who you’d like to be,
not the saint you’re striving to become,
but the being right here before you, inside you… All of you is holy.
You’re already more and less
Than whatever you can know.
Breathe out, Look in, Let go.
Reading
WHOLENESS
Parker Palmer
If I am to let my life speak things I want to hear, …
I must also let it speak things I do not want to hear and would never tell anyone else!
My life is not only about my strengths and virtues;
it is also about my liabilities and my limits, my trespasses and my shadow.
An inevitable, though often ignored, dimension of the quest for ‘wholeness’ is that we must embrace what we dislike or find shameful about ourselves as well as what we are confident and proud of.
Sermon
“Making the World Whole Again” Video
During the upcoming month, our Lifespan Faith Development ministries and religious education classes will be exploring the topic of “wholeness”.
How do we become our whole selves?
What are some ways we can bring wholeness to our relationships with those whom we love?
How do we create wholeness and holiness within this, our beloved religious community?
In our larger community?
Our society?
Our world?
One of the things I loved about the video with which we started just now is how, among other things, it points toward one of the paradoxes we encounter when we start examining this idea of wholeness.
In order to help make our communities and our world more whole, we must move toward wholeness ourselves as individuals.
And yet, it can be so difficult to do that when our society and our world can seem so fragmented and tom apart sometimes.
So our journey toward wholeness, by necessity, is both an individual trek and yet a passage that must also be done in relationship and community with others and our world.
Now, it might help to take a moment to examine what we mean by wholeness or to become our whole selves.
There were several quotes that I found reading the materials for this topic that might be helpful.
“Happiness is just one part of our existence, wholeness is to embrace all that is within us. It’s to embrace our shadow qualities, to embrace our self-doubt, fear, anxiety, as well as the brightness, joy, and curiosity. It is all welcome”.
That’s from Dan Putt, a consultant and entrepreneur who works with folks on developing the ability to take risks and embrace change.
That quote, and the reading from Parker Palmer that Carol read for us earlier I think both remind us about an aspect of finding wholeness that can be difficult – embracing and accepting the parts of ourselves that we do not like as much; the things we are not as good at; the sides of ourselves that might make us feel vulnerable about being judged by others.
Part of learning to be whole is loving even the parts of ourselves that we may not like or that cause us challenges sometimes.
My parents divorced when I was twelve, and my mom ended up having to work more than full-time to make ends meet. As the oldest child in the family, that meant I often ended up caring for and to a degree parenting my younger sister and brother.
Later, as I moved into adulthood, I started to recognize this pattern I could easily fall into of taking on the needs of others – parenting people who were themselves adults and could therefore take care of themselves.
Family Systems Theory calls this “overfunctioning”, and it is something I have to monitor about myself even today.
The thing is, that experience of helping to raise my brother and sister and all of the tendencies it created within me are a part of who I am now – the whole human being I have become up until now.
And those tendencies are not necessarily entirely unhealthy or bad. For instance, I suspect that they are a part of why I have spent most of my adult life within the caring professions, which has been amazingly rewarding.
Perhaps paradoxically again, embracing the wholeness of ourselves, including the areas on which we may want to do some work means first, we have to accept those areas in order to be able do that work, and second some aspects of our whole selves may be both sometimes problematic and sometimes beneficial. In some instances, wholeness is not either/or.
Unless you’re a narcissistic psychopath, in which case you don’t get to go “oh, that’s just part of who I am.”
Anyway, author and editor for the spiritual series “On Being”, Kristin Lynn says “Wholeness is never lost, it is only forgotten.”
What a wonderful way to think about wholeness, and one that I think leads us to some other ways in which our sense of wholeness can be challenged.
Inevitably in life, we face loss and sorrow. Inevitably, we will encounter the judgements and prejudices of others.Inevitably, we will run up against constraints that cultural and societal norms place upon the expression of our full and whole selves.
When we lose a person or even a creature that we love, a job, a physical or mental ability, it can feel like our wholeness has also been lost.
I remember after my stepfather, Ty, died, my mom saying that it felt like a part of her was missing. It felt that way to me too, and I remembered feeling that same way after other times of loss.
The thing is, we so often would not give up one moment of our relationships with those we loved and have lost. We carry them with us. They and our loss of them become part of the whole person we now are.
Parker Palmer says it like this
“We all know people who’ve suffered the loss of an important person in their lives.
At first, they disappear into grief, certain that life will never again be worth living.
But, through some sort of spiritual alchemy, they eventually emerge to find that their hearts have grown larger and more compassionate.
They have developed a greater capacity to take in others’ sorrows and joys, not in spite of their loss but because of it.
Suffering breaks our hearts – but there are two quite different ways for the heart to break.
There’s the brittle heart that breaks apart into a thousand shards, a heart that takes us down as it explodes and is sometimes thrown like a grenade at the source of its pain.
Then there’s the supple heart, the one that breaks open, not apart, growing into greater capacity for the many forms of love.
Only the supple heart can hold suffering in a way that opens to new life.”
The supple heart allows us to find wholeness.
Similarly, when we experience the loss of physical or mental abilities we once had, it can feel like we are less than whole.
I went through this when I was temporarily disabled by an impacted nerve in my neck a while back. It did feel like a loss. I’m fortunate that it eventually got resolved, so I never had to reach acceptance and find a new sense of wholeness for myself.
I have a friend who was born with a condition that left her physically disabled in a number of ways. She says that her journey toward wholeness has involved unlearning the many ways in which other people and societal systems labeled her as and made her feel incomplete.
And far too many of us have felt limits imposed upon us, barriers to becoming our whole selves because of gender role stereotypes and restrictive gender binaries, because of our race or ethnicity or religious beliefs (or lack there of) or our sexuality or our gender identity (or lack there of) and on and on and on.
I’ll talk a little more about this in a moment, but for now I want to note that even the scars we bear from our losses, as well as those we may bear from fighting to become our full, whole selves even up against oppression and restrictive mores – they too, these scars are a part of who we are now – the whole person we have become.
Many of you are probably aware of Kintsugi (Kin Sugi), the Japanese art that provides a beautiful metaphor for what I am trying to express, but here is a short video that explains it better than I likely could.
Kintsugi video
Here is another quote related to all of this that I loved, from a UU named Paula Goldade
“As a Unitarian Universalist, I have come to see that universal salvation is not just for all of us but for all of me. There is no crevice inside of me that love cannot touch.”
Now, so far, I have been concentrating mainly on how we become whole as individuals, but I want to return to this idea that we also must be in relationship to find wholeness. We must work to create wholeness in our communities and our worlds to know wholeness for ourselves.
Here is one more quote that I loved, from our own Unitarian Universalist minister, Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael
“We don’t really know our own wholeness until we see the wholeness of another or work to serve wholeness in our world. Wholeness, a sense of our own fullness, a spiritual realization of our own strength and beauty, is given when we give of ourselves… We heal our own aches by healing the aches in others. We put back the pieces of our own souls by helping others redeem their own wholeness.”
I think she is so spot on there, and I also think that this has implications for the work we are called to do in our world to build the beloved community.
My friends, I believe that we, none of us nor our communities or our society – we can never be whole while black lives are still so far too frequently being extinguished and destroyed.
We cannot ever be whole when people are still being forced to proclaim that their lives do matter.
Black Lives Matter.
They do matter.
And we can never be whole when brown and queer bodies are treated as if they are of little significance; when indigenous peoples are treated as expendable; when female and nonbinary gender identities are treated as “less than:”; when entire cultures and religious expressions are demeaned.
We need all of humanity’s beautiful variations to be fully realized and embraced for all of humanity to become whole.
It seems like you can hardly ever attend one of my sermons these days without also hearing from author and researcher Brene Brown, my personal guru and diva.
I want to share with you a short video from Brown, because I think she has identified a root cause of what lies at our lack of feeling whole sometimes and then bringing and perpetuating that unwholesomeness and unholiness in our world.
She says it has to do with how we are constantly receiving messages that make us feel we can never be enough. And this, in turn, undermines our feelings of belonging and worthiness.
She says that to counter this, we have to be willing to be vulnerable and to live in a way that she calls “wholeheartedly”.
But maybe I should shut up and let her speak for herself.
Brown video
Unitarian Universalist have seven principals that we affirm and promote and the first of those says that we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.
I wonder sometimes though if whether we affirm that for and about our self.
My beloveds, you are worthy.
You have inherent dignity.
You are capable of knowing and becoming the whole person you were born and are called to be.
And by doing that – each of us individually and yet also together – by doing that, we may yet bring more wholeness and holiness into our world.
And hallelujah to wholeness and holiness!
Most sermons during the past 19 years are available online through this website. Click on the index link below to find tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on a topic to go to that sermon.
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