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May 2002 Sermons
May 5, 2002 SermonRev. Nancy D. DeanMay 5, 2002We Are a Welcoming CongregationAs sometimes happens, we have to make a shift in the Sunday mornings, so that this morning that was to be the annual Youth Service, had to be changed and will now be on June 16th; so, I bring my message to you early that would have fallen well after our Annual Congregational Meeting on the third Sunday in May. For those new or visiting this morning, and for all who need a reminder of what I am talking about when I mention the vote to become “A Welcoming Congregation,” I will share a bit of relatively recent Unitarian Universalist history.
To implement the vote of our national organization of affiliated congregations that we call the Unitarian Universalist Association or UUA, a curriculum was developed and called “The Welcoming Congregation.” In my opinion, the intent, the heart and soul of this curriculum is undermined by the title “The Welcoming Congregation.” I believe we would have had fewer problems in implementing the really important core and focus of this curriculum that seeks to inform our congregations about the GLBT (our shorthand for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) membership we have had for years, if we had named it something else. For example, “The GLBT Acceptance Program.” Instead, a name was chosen that seems to trample on the very understanding most of us UUs have of ourselves, or at least the path we have chosen to follow of being open and accepting of all people. Yet, again, a situation where the spirit of an idea or program loses focus because of a single sticking point. So, instead of paying attention to educating ourselves about the real issues of homosexuality, we keep saying instead: “We are already welcoming.” “We know that we are welcoming, so why do we need to make a public statement, a vote, to affirm what we think we already are?” I hope to answer those questions, but to affirm at the same time that it is true, we are a welcoming congregation. But, that is the beginning, and not the end of our work as faithful, spiritually intentional people. You need to know my biases right up front this morning. I have been a long time supporter of gay civil rights, but I was not always. I was in college before I knew anything about homosexuals except that I loved one; I just did not know that was the label he was supposed to wear. I grew up out in the country near a small town in Idaho. That is about as rural as it gets in this country. I also grew up about as naïve as you can grow up, not only from being from this small farming community, but also as a result of being born into a family of Christian evangelical fundamentalists. I do not think it is even possible for a child to grow up as naïve as I did nowadays, unless they take no newspapers or popular magazines, don’t have a radio or TV, and limit the socialization to the family and religious community. Very few people could accomplish that today. So the fact that I grew up with a gay cousin and did not know he was gay may seem a contradiction these days, but it happened. I did know he was not like the other boys and men that I knew of in my family and community. In fact, I knew that he was made fun of by that group of males in particular. He was variously called a sissy, or fancy pants, or girlie, or some other term meant to state that he was not a “real boy.” He was my closest friend, so I always had a hard time figuring out what was wrong. The rare time or two that I asked an adult, I got some avoidance technique common to paternalistic households, like “You don’t need to know.” Or “You’ll figure it out someday.” It would not surprise me a bit to learn that two-thirds of the women in may extended family did not have a clue about most things relating to gender difference or sexuality for that matter. They knew enough to do what “the Lord required,” might have been a response if they were queried. I cannot help but recall the story about this deeply religious and moral woman, who back in the post-WWI days, decided after having spent her life in a town, to retire from her job in a kindergarten and move out to the country. She decided to raise chickens to supplement her income, so she set about getting some modern chicken coops built. When they were done she went into he country general store to place her order for the poultry. “I want sixty hens,” she said to the salesclerk, and then on reflection added, “and sixty roosters.” Monogamy gone awry. Clearly, she needed educating about the real nature of hens and roosters, and in the economics that are involved, too. That is the state of many people in our country, and, yes, right here in our congregation. The only thing that I saw different in my cousin Mike, was that he was a lot nicer than most boys of my acquaintance. He also liked to do a lot of things that I did: read, gather wild flowers, go for walks, make brownies, watch old movies. He was much more interesting to me than my little brothers or other male cousins and neighbors. He did not play with the boys, who like most farm boys, were on the whole a pretty rough lot, and on the rare times he did, they were even rougher on him. I heard different comments about him all our growing up years. First and foremost, was that his mother coddled him. Or, what he needed was a day bailing hay or some other farm labor. Mike’s parents own and operated a dairy farm. This is hard, unrelenting work, and he was a part of that workforce all farm kids are. If his parents, mother or father, had time to coddle him, it was not evident. If anything, I always thought his mother was not any more attentive than my own, who was not by any modern measure attentive. In just about every way, but front and center honesty, people in the family let it be known from the time Mike and I were about five or six years old, that in some very serious way, he was not acceptable. Can you imagine being a small boy, not even knowing what is different about you, but being made to feel all those important growing up years that you are a different, unacceptable, even a pariah? The thought that today any child must grow up with this behavior is sickening to me. Yet, I can tell you from my experience as a Board member of PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) that it is happening all over the country as we gather this morning. That is the first reason why I am biased. The second, and most important reason, is that two and a half years ago, my son, Adam, told me he is gay. I had never seen anything about Adam that did not look like many other boys I knew of his age and acquaintance. He was bright, funny and witty, sang beautifully, liked soccer and ice-hockey, loved spending hours at the computer. He was just a great kid as far as his father, older sister, and I were concerned. But, after spending a summer in counseling for what I thought was mostly just teenage angst over the problems that many young people deal with at that age (he was almost seventeen then), he told me he was gay. I was as shocked, surprised, and fearful as any other parent would be. What I was not, was filled with hate for homosexuals. Yet, even with his knowledge that I was an advocate for gay community, he still found it fearful to tell me something he knew no parents would want to hear about their child. At least, that was his view of things then. I remember being shocked, in part because I remembered a rather homophobic phase he seemed to go through in 9th Grade. I could recall chastising him for saying things against a gay boy from his school. I said at the time something to the effect: “Where did you get that thinking? I never raised you to behave that way.” His explanation those few years after that was that he did not yet realize he was gay; that it was what boys “did.” How often now have I heard from many others in the gay community that they, too, thought they were just in a “phase” that they would out grow. They heard that in their sex-ed programs, so it was just a matter of time; like blemishes, and the phase would pass. After all, it is the age of raging hormones, and frequent thoughts of a sexual nature. Further, sexuality is one of the two basic human drives. To be human is to be sexual, although that drive certainly varies considerably from to person to person; still, at least while most of us are in our late teens and early twenties, sex is high on the our thought list. The notion that we should forever suppress our sexuality is first and foremost foolish; secondly, the belief that sexuality is only one way and not as varied as hair and eye color in the human populations, is equally foolish.
It is like the young man in seminary studying for the ministry in his evangelical religion was troubled by excessive thoughts of sex. He felt this was sinful, so he went to the dean of the student center, and explained his problem and concerns. “Pastor,” he asked earnestly, “ at what age do you get over this trouble?” The older man replied: “About three days after you’re dead.”
I know that we here at Mill Creek are welcoming. I hear it from newcomers all the time. Further, I have seen it in the way people were so accepting of Adam as he tried on this new identity of Adam the gay young man. It was almost as if he had to go through a second adolescent sexual awakening. He could, as it were, practice being gay here in this group of mostly straight people who he felt would not reject him. What a gift you gave him! A gift that not even I could give, for what is there that we long for more than acceptance of our community? It is a thirst we nearly all have. Yes, we are welcoming to all people who walk through the doors to celebrate in our liberal religious tradition. But, being welcoming is not exactly the same as being accepting. Perhaps a better name for this gay awareness program might be just simply, “The Accepting Congregation.” Whatever the name, it is the intent I hope we can focus upon; we who are the voting members of this congregation, and those who come to these services as friends and visitors. You do not have to believe as I do that being gay is not something you chose; it is something you are. My son did not chose to have gray eyes, be right-handed, be white, or male, and he did not chose to be gay. No more than those of us who identify as heterosexual decided to be as we are. Further, there is no such thing as absolute birth conditions of heterosexuality as some anti-gay hate-mongers propound. The fact is, that many babies, more than are born with the cystic fibrosis, are born with indeterminate sexuality. And, this happens in the animal world, too. Humans are not born with exact physical anything. We all have variability, our individual unique qualities, from our fingerprints to hair color to variations on all the characteristics. Some are relatively easy to live with, some are most definitely not easy to live with. In my days as a teacher of college English, I had a boy who was an albino African-American, write about the difficulties of being artificially, as he put it, a white man in a black world. Yes, we are welcoming, but that really means, if we really are, that we are willing to learn about the differences people face in life; even the differences that we would rather not talk about. The GLBT community is roughly five to seven percent of the population. That is a lot of people if we realize our own population is close to three-hundred million in this country. A lot of people to be told, just pretend you are like us, the heterosexuals, or, don’t show us that you might love someone the way I love my husband or wife, or, don’t ask us to acknowledge your presence. That would mean more than saying we are welcoming to all. It would mean believing we care about understanding all we would welcome. That is a spiritual challenge I place before you today. So be it.
Hear in your hearts the words of the African poet, Mzwakhe Mbuli:
May 12, 2002 SermonRev. Nancy D. DeanMay 12, 2002Buddhism: The Birth of a New Religion
For a few weeks now I have had a virus. A virus: an infectious agent in the body; a virulent contagion in the corpus. A royal pain in the backside! I spent the better part of Thursday afternoon and evening hoping this virus would just magically go away. And, finally it was cured, primarily by the noble efforts of my darling husband who is always concerned for my well-being. This virus was one I had never had before: a silent insidious bug, slowly but surely invading my system, making me miserable. Still, I would not have even known I had this virus, that is until it was far too late and the disease had spread far and wide, without Steve Medoff. Yet, another reason I am grateful he is our nominee for Board President at the Annual Meeting. Of course, I am talking about the dreaded Computer Virus. While this virus was a huge headache to me, my spouse, and all the people I have sent warnings to, I found a message in this experience that relates to this week’s sermon on Buddhism. Part of what was so surprising for me, in discovering that I had a computer virus, was that I thought I was safe from such infiltration because I had the Norton Anti-Virus protection on my computer. But, it turns out that one of the things this virus did was destroy that very protection. While this virus in my computer was a problem, it was minor compared to some I have read about. Still, I expected to never have a virus problem; I was inoculated, protected, or so I thought. Accidents, though, those unintended consequences, do happen. Speaking of inoculations and religion, the great comic writer Sam Levinson once wrote: “Getting inoculated with small doses of religion prevents people from catching the real thing.” Which relates somewhat to the subject at hand for this sermon, that is, how one thing leads to another, but not always what might be expected. Who ever would have thought that from Hinduism, from the wealthy and elite in what is modern Nepal, a new spiritual following would be created that is important to nearly a billion people in the world? First of all, we need to understand that the word/term Buddha is actually a description or title which means to be “awakened, or an awakened one, or the Awakened One.” The word comes from the ancient language Sanskrit, the root budh, meaning “to perceive, to know, to come to one’s sense, to wake.” While the term buddha, can be applied to any such awakened person, the title Buddha with a capital B, has come to mean one specific person. As the stories tell, consistently, the Buddha’s real name was Siddhartha, of the family Gautama, who lived in northern India, in the 6th Century, BCE, or before the Common Era. His father was ruler of the kingdom of the Sakyas, in present day Nepal; his mother was queen Maya. Siddhartha as married as a boy of sixteen, according to the custom of the time, to a beautiful princess name Yasodhara. He lived in a palace since his birth, never leaving the protected walls of the great palace grounds. He was surrounded by great wealth, his every comfort attended. Until, that is, he left the palace to walk among the people. This one act, leaving his luxurious, safe haven of the palace, opened his eyes to something from which he had been sheltered and protected all his life to that point, namely the “reality of life and the suffering of mankind.” This shock of seeing the real world had a profound affect on this young, privileged Siddartha Gautama, and he determined to find some solution to the universal suffering of humanity. A very ambitious goal; yet, he was so protected in his upbringing so as to not see his limitations. A very rare gift, indeed. At the age of twenty-nine, following the birth of his only child, Rahula, he left his kingdom and became an ascetic, or monk, “in search of his solution.” As legend has it, Gautama wandered about the valley of the holy Ganges River, meeting with “religious teachers, studying and following their systems and methods, and submitting himself to rigorous ascetic practices” in the way of the Hindu holy men. None seemed to be what he was looking for, so he abandoned all the traditional religions he knew or had learned, and went on his way seeking that mystery which would bring an end to human suffering; or salvation, to use a Christian term. After many years of his questing, enduring self-imposed hardship and austerity, he at last arrived one day at a place where there was a large bodhi tree, or the Bodhi-tree, and he sat down to rest. It was while sitting beneath the bodhi tree, the tree of enlightenment as it came to be known, that Siddhartha came to his enlightenment. This is how the legend is told: There, at that tree, the god who name is Desire and Death, by whose power the world is kept turning, approached the Blessed One to unseat him; and assuming his fair character as the inciter of desire, beautiful to look upon, he displayed before the Blessed One his three exceedingly beautiful daughters, Yearning, Fulfillment, and Heartache; so that if the one seated there [the Buddha] immovable had thought, “I,” he would certainly also have thought, “They,” and been stirred. However, since he had lost all sense of the ji hokkai, of thing separate from each other, he remained unmoved, and that first temptation failed.
And, so the temptations continued through his confrontations with the King of Death, the Lord of Dharma, duty, and so on (not unlike the story of the temptations of Christ prior to his crucifixion), until it was clear that Siddhartha was no longer himself, a human unconnected, but “one with everything.” (I cannot help but remember Robin Williams’ joke: What did the Buddhist monk say to the New York street vendor? “Make me one with everything.”) So it was that this man, Siddhartha, broke “past the net of separate things within which feeling and thought are entrapped,” as Joseph Campbell put it. The Buddha was so completely struck by his enlightenment, that he remained seated there unmoving for seven days, then he arose and standing seven pace from where he had been sitting remained standing for yet another seven days staring at the place of his enlightenment. And through four more of these seven day wonderment episodes, until he became wholly understanding and knew: “This cannot be taught.” Meaning, that enlightenment cannot be truly communicated, only known. Perhaps the enlightenment cannot be taught, but we know that for 2500 years people have been teaching the character of the Buddha’s enlightenment which he described as the Four Noble Truths, which are: All life is sorrowful. There is release from sorrow. The release from sorrow is Nirvana (or death into nothingness). The fourth noble truth is the Way to be released from sorrow, which is known as the Eightfold Path of his doctrine: right views, right aspirations, right speech, right conduct, livelihood and effort, right meditation, right rapture. As the Buddhist monk and scholar, Dr. Walpola Rahula, details in his book, What the Buddha Taught: After his Enlightenment, Gotama the Buddha delivered his first sermon to a group of five ascetics, his old colleagues, in the Deer Park . . .near Benares. From that day, for 45 years, he taught all classes of men and women—kings and peasants, Brahmins and outcasts, bankers and beggars, holy men and robbers—without making the slightest distinction between them. He recognized no differences of caste or social groupings, and the Way he preached was open to all men and women who were ready to understand and to follow it. So, we are given to understand, from the Buddha’s enlightenment, and his first sermon to five, and his teaching for the rest of his life, this marvelous religion was born. As with all religions we undertake to study and seek to understand, we know that from the earliest scraps of manuscript of the period that there are certainly some truths in the legend of Buddhism’s beginnings. If you noted, there are some similarities with other religions we know about like Judaism, Christianity and Islam (and in fact many others). The pattern is characteristic. A move from a well-established tradition is first, then a period of seeking, a climax in an episode of enlightenment, followed by spreading the word (evangelism). Looking at the parallels to the stories and legends around Jesus, Siddhartha looks around and becomes disenchanted. Putting aside the story of great wealth and privilege, which may have come along later to heighten the sense of sacrifice, it is easy to understand the rejection of his status and wealth as a rejection of his society. The area we now call India and Nepal, was a number of kingdoms, small and large, in which a strict system of hierarchy, beliefs and practices had come into being. We lump all these beliefs and practices into the religion Hinduism, but like all religions, Hinduism is multifaceted, no one thing, no one set of practices. Still, this most ancient of the large religions of the world, like all before and since, was becoming entrenched in ways that some believed was not good for the people, especially the poor, weak, all those who would have been among the disenfranchised. Further, as the Buddha saw it, even the wealth and privilege were also disenfranchised by believing that a high caste, wealth, privilege could make one happy, for all people will experience sorrow, all must die, this especially. For as he could see clearly, all must face the their own inescapable destiny which is to die and live no more. Jesus was rebelling against an entrenched Judaism of his day, that also seemed to place position, superficial piety, wealth above the essence of living, which is love. Now, this is one major difference between Buddhist and Christian teachings, for in Buddhism, everything must eventually come to an end; indeed that is the most desirable goal: Nirvana or nothingness. Christianity, on the other hand, is focused on the life after death for those who achieve salvation, and then spend eternity in the presence of perfect love which is God. In both cases, and in Judaism and Islam, too, if we delve into those religions, the root cause for the new developments that eventually become new religions that take on a life of their own, is noteworthy. These root causes relate to whether the larger population, or at least a significant number within the group, becomes discontented with their religious beliefs and practices. As we see clearly demonstrated in the family, one generation is often unwilling to accept all the teachings handed down to it, and over successive generations, someone or something will become the focal point for change. Hence Jesus within Judaism, Mohammed in Syrian religion, and the Buddha in Hinduism. Ultimately, to state all this very simply, people must have their spiritual needs met or they will begin to look elsewhere. Filling that need has been the role of the holy man/woman down through time: to help a people, usually a small group to begin with, but to help a group of people find greater meaning for their lives than they may be finding in the religious teachings of their elders. This is also true for our own combined faith of Unitarian Universalism. Perhaps the virtue of our UU faith is its malleability, its ability to change and reflect a given group’s most deeply held beliefs. What characteristically gets old belief systems in trouble is their unwillingness to change, their very dedication to unbending tradition. Of course, this rigidity is a sure sign that the religion is on the forefront of major change, indeed revolution. Hence, the Reformation within Christianity in16th Century Europe, and Buddhism within Hinduism. In both cases, new religions were formed. The great lesson to learn, is if you do not give people what they want and need for their spiritual well-being, they will find it somewhere else. This brings to mind Mother’s Day, which is today, and all over this country, women are getting perfume and cologne for special gifts; it is what my children usually have given me. Rita Rudner, a wonderful comedienne commented: “Why are women wearing perfumes that smell like flowers? Men don't like flowers. After all, who are we wearing it for? I've been wearing a great scent. It's called New Car Interior.” Religions do change, sometimes slowly, subtly, sometimes the set of circumstances come together so that the change appears more dramatic, as in Christianity, but my belief is that even as we create the next generation, we are setting ourselves up for change in and of the things we most dearly cherish. Jerry Seinfeld had some insight into this when he said: Once you survive growing up, the next step is to have your own kid. . . . It's a major point. I think you are at a certain level when everyone you know pretty much has caught on to you. You need to create a new person, someone who doesn't know anything about you. . . . You have a kid, the relationship is off to a great start. You give the kid food and toys, and immediately, they are very impressed with you. Judaism gave birth not to one religion as is in the Genesis story of the Hebrew scriptures, but to many others who are the nieces and nephews of the original, sometimes greatly removed. Hinduism, too, gave birth to many different sects, among them Buddhism, and in its turn, many different sects or varieties of Buddhism have derived from the first. This factor might well have been included in the Noble Truths: All things change, as Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, said in the generation before the Buddha was born. We gathered here to celebrate our joys and sorrows, to delve into the deepest recesses of our human spirits, we are not without our own rigidity of beliefs about what will bring us absolute happiness and freedom from pain, even as we know there is no such freedom, no such happiness. Our challenge as people of faith, seekers after whatever truth we can know, is to be open to the experience of the Buddha, to sit beneath a tree, and wait for truth to descend upon us or arise from within us. So be it.
May 19, 2002 SermonRev. Nancy D. DeanMay 19, 2002Finding One’s Heart’s Desire: Truth in the Spirit
George Bernard Shaw wrote in Man and Superman: “There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.” In this past year I have spent a good deal of time considering my own heart’s desires. There have been so many things happen that have caused me to keep my mind on what is truly important to me, that I find at times I am weary with its contemplation. This time last year I was planning for the first part of my sabbatical, expecting the birth of my twin grand-daughters, as the months progressed, I was facing, as we all were, the tragedy of September 11th, then having to accept my son’s decision to leave college and join the Air Force; plus engaging in the totally useless emotion of Worrying. Worrying about all these things, including the fate of our long process toward finding and building a home of our own. As so often happens for readers, during this time I read yet again this famous quote from Shaw: “There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.” In each of the events just mentioned, I can see the truth of Shaw’s observation. In the birth of my own daughter in the late 60s, I had my heart’s desire, a healthy beautiful baby girl. How was I to know that thirty some years later I would be so afraid for her in her somewhat difficult pregnancy? How, when in the years shortly after they were built, in the 1970s, I would gaze upon the marvel of the Twin Towers on a solo trip to New York--yet another of my heart’s desires— how could I know that one day they would be the object of terrorists, and come down in an odd sort of perfect implosion? How could I know that when my son, so clever and talented—of course, my heart’s desire, would be moved to act on higher emotions and take a different path, he would behave all too much like his mother? You see where all this led me. And, now I ask you: What is your heart’s desire today? Where have your hearts’ desires led you? Where are they leading you still? The one thing I do know, is that to find one’s heart’s desire, one must be willing to engage truthfully with oneself, one’s own spirit, one’s own soul. The writer P.L Travers tells about one morning as she was walking down a busy street in London, suddenly she saw before her the Brompton cemetery. It was just one of those days. She was off to do some of those mundane chores you and I so often find ourselves doing, when in the midst of her mental listing of what she needed, and what needed to be done, other thoughts intruded. She stopped there by the Brompton graveyard, and suddenly realized that she was “saying No” to her life. She paused and said in a private prayer: “Set me free of things, the merciless brute matter of objects that bears us down with its tyranny till living is hardly living. ” Travers goes on in this her story about a moment of enlightenment to remember the playtime of her childhood in Australia, when the children were sent out of the church before the sermon began, to the children’s delight, for they loved to play in the adjacent graveyard. There in the resting places of Miss Jebb, Mr. Perse, and the “Teeth” family—Isaac Tooth, Sarah Tooth, Simon, Lucinda and Athene Tooth, Luncina Fry, aged three months, among others. She writes: From the graves that still had friends to tend them, we took cut flowers from the pannikins and doled them out, just rather than merciful, to those that had been forgotten. And if the sermon were long enough we would visit Amos Tupper, whose grave with its simple marble curb was a convenient spot for lying down in, arms folded, feet together. ‘Here lies X ,” we informed each other, ‘beloved child of Y and Z, gone and deeply regretted.’ We took turns at being deeply regretted, tasting for a moment our death-in-life, seriously and with confidence. For Amos we knew, would never haunt us. With his gravemould sprinkled on our back, we still had no fear of Amos. He was so far away and so long ago that we felt him as a beneficent presence, near and neighborly. But the new graves with their fading flowers . . . we passed with eyes averted. There is something about a graveyard that gives both things we as spiritually undernourished souls tend to need, even hunger for: an appreciation for life, and recognition of the fact that we will die. During the years I lived in Massachusetts, those stress-filled years at Harvard, the one constant was my 6AM four mile walk, a habit I had for twenty years, until recently this past year when back problems forced me to alternative, yet far less meditative forms of exercise. The town I lived in for most of that time, did not have what I consider ideal conditions for walking on the street. However, there was a lovely old cemetery close to my home, so I could walk about a mile, then spend a good two miles walking around this peaceful, and very beautiful, garden that was still in use, as it had been since 1715. Rather like P.L. Travers, I found myself drawn more to the oldest part of the graveyard, where the names and dates of the dead were barely visible, indeed, sometimes not readable at all after the centuries of wear. While all the graves were marked by the gravestone artistry of their periods, the most interesting to me were those of the oldest graves. Those stones of the 18th Century were usually marked at the top by a skull and a phrase such as Memento mori, Latin for remember death or remember you must die. Graveyard in days gone by were a more common component of the daily lives of the villager, for the church and the next-door graveyard were usually the center of the town, and dying was not the occupation of a Funeral Home, but of the families themselves. Now, we often do not set foot in a graveyard more than a few times, if ever, until we go there for our final rest. During my early morning walks among the graves, I would look from one to another, wondering, imagining what their lives might have been. In those days people did not disperse so far and wide as today, so generations could be seen in one section of the graveyard. A whole host of Holmes, Fords, even a Dean or two, which always gave me pause. My calling, of course, brings me face to face with death more frequently than most folk, so it is often that I wonder about, and sometimes know, whether people did find their heart’s desire or not. But, I can share with you that there is nothing like facing the inevitability of one’s own demise to put a person squarely in the frame of truth of the spirit. The problem is that we often do not want to be in the frame of mind, or frame of the spirit, that will mean facing the truth. For, the fact is, often we do have to give up our lives to gain our souls, as Jesus taught. We can be so skillful it looking at the front of our desires, that we do not see the heart behind them. In this society where what we have seems often to be the measure of who we are, it can be even harder to find that inner truth. I am reminded of Adam Christling who wrote: “Whenever I go to those motivational success seminars, I am amazed at all the people who drive up in new Mercedes and BMWs. How much more success does a person need?” That is an interesting question for those of us who are driven by our need to succeed above all else. How much success does a person need? Which prompts the response: What is your definition of success? Those questions can be downright terrifying for some people, for implicit is the notion that there is more to being successful than driving an expensive car, or living in the “right” neighborhood, or knowing the “best” people. Implicit is idea that we might have to give up our lives to gain our souls. The idea of giving up something we value to gain something greater is perhaps the greatest of life’s challenges. Yet, it can be misleading, this idea of giving up something. We often think of the hermit, or the nun, who give up a comfortable life or even a fortune to live apart, but again, the focus may be incorrectly on the material. I think of the UniBomber, Theodore Kozinsky. He was a brilliant young man, graduated from Harvard at nineteen, a mathematic associate professor, living certainly many academics’ idea of his heart’s desire, but in fact his heart’s desire becomes something set apart in such an unhealthy, awful expression that even today his name is instantly recognizable by the American public. For Ted Kozinsky, his heart’s desire was not just for him to turn away from technology, but for all of us. In this case, might have to give up his life to gain his soul, require acknowledge the right of each person to find her or his own heart’s desire, the truth of each person’s own soul. What the Unibomber could not let go of was his misplaced notion of success or truth. One of the best stories I know about truth goes like this: An older couple regularly sat near the front in church. The pastor was quite impressed by how harmonious and how in love they seemed. One day after the service, walking past their pew, the pastor couldn’t resist going up to them to express his admiration. He said: “I find it so inspirational to see how deeply in love you are. Even after all these years, holding hands like that.” The wife looked surprised and replied: “It’s not love, Pastor, I’m just keeping him from cracking his knuckles.” Not surprisingly, many of us set out to find our heart’s desire, or to know the truth of our own hearts, with all kinds of presuppositions, or as if we are in a kind of race to win, or a treasure hunt in which we will find the treasure that everyone else has not found, or some other version of a success story of mystical (or mythical) proportions. It is not enough to just be willing to let the truth of the spirit come to us, or find us, or be there in some simple, unexpected place--even in the playing of children in the graveyard. Here is a bit of advice that may be in effect for some of us. In came from the “Consumer’s Guide” to the catalog published in the 1897, by Sears, Roebuck and Co: If you don't find it in the index, look very carefully through the entire catalogue. For us too, there are times when we will not find what we are looking for in the index of life, and it may be that we must go through the entire catalog of life to find what we are seeking. Your heart’s desire can only be known by you as you are willing to look truthfully at yourself, your family, the communities you are part of, the world as you see it. Further, we each have a different calling. For some, their hearts’ desire will be the kind of success that the world measure favorably, for others it will be in the realm of religion (which no more spiritual than any other way), for others still it will be in ways that are foreign to those around them, and indeed maybe even to themselves in the initial contemplation. “Ask and ye shall find”; “knock and the door will be opened.” These scriptural truths are everlasting. The burden and the bliss come from each of us being willing to ask, each of us having the courage to knock on the door of the unknown. Let me share with you the end of Travers’s story, when she returns to the graveyard with her own child who runs among the tombstones, searching “with the eye of a connoisseur, saying: “’I’m choosing my grave . . .. ‘And this is the one I want. Promise me that when I’m dead you’ll give me one just like it.’ I promised. Why burden him with time and statistics? Or the fact that when he was ready for his Celtic cross I would be weaving rain with the Pleiades or hunting with Orion?” Finally, from Travers as she learns in this experience: But now, myself on the way to Amos, I know that the word contradiction is not really exact; that between all pairs of opposites there is a point—could we but find it—of reconciliation. [and] Occasionally, for a waking moment, such as I found in the Brompton graveyard, we ourselves happen to it, as the reconciling factor . . .to know oneself pregnant with one’s death . . . is to experience a surge of energy, life so much at its apogee [it’s peak] . . .. Our spiritual path as Unitarian Universalists is to be always seekers after the truth, wherever, however, and whenever we may find it. So be it. |
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