June 2005 Sermons

• 6/5 Sermon -- Don’t Let the Perfect Become the Enemy of the Good
• 6/12 Sermon -- Children Should be Seen and Heard
• 6/19 Sermon -- On Being a Man in These Days
• 6/26 Sermon -- 

June 5, 2005 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

June 5, 3005

Don’t Let the Perfect Become the Enemy of the Good

In the first chapter of Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew scriptures or Old Testament, we are told that God created the heavens and the earth from out of a formless void, and he created light and it was good. So, even the Bible supports the contention of my sermon today that we human beings are often over-reaching or under-reaching in our attempts to live our lives. That we are continually worrying about, or complaining about, or confused about all kinds of things because we assume there is a perfect order to be had in the world. At different times in our human evolution we have been driven more or less to achieve this perceived perfection, but usually driven more by outside forces than those inside. Perfection, though, is the realm of the divine; only God or the gods and goddesses, are perfect. If God being perfect created the world and said that it was good, even God who could have created the world perfect can be seen as settling for something short of perfection; for what reasons we can only guess.

Yet, as most of the great holy teachers of our history have taught us, we are the reflection of the divine; Jesus said “the kingdom of heaven is within you”; so perfection is what we already are. What we do is another matter altogether. And, if Genesis is to be taken as a guide, God did not set out to make the world perfect, only good.

Here is a story to illustrate how worrying overmuch about perfection sets us up for failure.

When her daughters were very young, one Mrs. Dwight Morrow gave a tea party at which one of the guests was to be the senior J. P. Morgan, the famous financier. The girls were to be brought in, introduced and ushered out. They were dressed immaculately, instructed as they had been from birth in proper social etiquette they were nonetheless reminded of the social position of their family, and the importance of the guest to whom they were to be introduced. Mrs. Morrow, was not without fear, though. Her great fear was the possibility that the youngest, Anne, the most outspoken of them all at the tender age six, might comment audibly upon Mr. Morgan's most unfortunate physical characteristic, his celebrated and conspicuous nose. She therefore took pains beforehand to explain to Anne that personal observations were impolite and cautioned her especially against making any comment upon Mr. Morgan's large nose, no matter what she might think of it.

When the moment came and the children were brought in, Mrs. Morrow held her breath as she saw Anne's gaze fix upon the banker's most prominent facial feature and remain there. She held her breathe awaiting the worst, but, the introduction was made without incident. The little girls curtsied politely and were sent on their way.

J.P. Morgan complimented Mrs. Morrow on her family. With a sigh of relief, Mrs. Morrow turned back to her duties as hostess and inquired of her guest as she poured his cup of tea, "And now, Mr. Morgan, will you have milk or lemon in your nose?"

Such are the trials of parenthood. Such are the trials of humanhood. We spend so much time trying to avert one perceived disaster, that we fall victim to another.

Last spring, I was stressing myself over a problem, and in talking with Judy Pappenhagen about it, Judy said this wonderful, pithy phrase, which I immediately held on to. By the way, you should be reminded that Judy, Fran Loeffelholz, Debbie Dehghan, and Wes Bowman are the Ministry Liaison Committee, a group that you can go to with concerns about the ministry and to whom I go to with concerns about the congregation. They are all wise people. So not surprisingly, I learn a lot from them, as indeed I learn a lot from all of you; this is a mutually beneficial relationship.

So in the midst of my relating my problem, Judy said that there is a great adage for the situation I was presenting, which is: Don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good.

The wisdom of this is so obvious, yet I like many of you fall victim to the call of the perfect all too often, while letting the good go undone that would be of far greater benefit.

Here is the central problem in this frequent human failing. When we worry ourselves too much about doing a thing perfectly, we usually wind up doing nothing.

This is the real problem with perfectionism, that so little actually gets done; because, if the thing cannot be done to some extremely high, perhaps even unattainable standard, then the perfectionist will procrastinate and procrastinate often achieving little or nothing.

Perfectionism is a curse on our culture. We have had it preached to us from the Christian pulpits since the Reformation. But perfectionism is debilitating, since as fallible human beings we are set up to fail repeatedly. A good number of psychological problems are related to this issue. We want perfect lives, perfect children, perfect houses, perfect churches, perfect leaders, perfect teacher, perfect everything. No wonder so many people are so unhappy.

I often hear about a young woman a family member works with who is very bright, in her mid-thirties, and wants desperately to get married and have children. Now, I am only hearing all this second hand, but as I hear it, she dates a lot of different men, has gone to a dating service, and so forth and so on, but every man has a flaw; and, of course, her own flaws are evident to some of the men who report back to this dating service. Apparently, she and they are all very picky; meaning they have a preconceived notion of the perfect mate, and, so far, she had not found the man who has all the requisite good looks and education, impeccable manners, right height and weight, and of course right religion, etc. I suspect that she will not find a mate until she becomes more like the Zen Buddhists, and lets go of her notions of perfection.

Over-reaching then is one part of the perfectionism problem. Part two, is under-reaching that stems from fear of failure. This is equally debilitating, for the only way we learn is by failing.

I used to tell my students who agonized over getting straight A’s; that they should not be afraid of an occasional B, or of, god-forbid, a C, for no one learns without some failure. If you know it all to begin with, you have learned nothing. If this testing that education has been reduced to does nothing else, it sets our children up to fear failure; and that is both sad and unfortunate. Success comes to those who dare to fail.

As a counterpart to the first young woman, is a man of my acquaintance-an in law of an in law--who has never had but one or two dates, and no one expects him to ever marry. He simply cannot get the courage up to take anyone out. In our more liberated times--which does not necessarily liberate our thinking--it has often been assumed that he might be gay, but I don’t think so. I think he simply cannot face all the fearful things he imagines will happen if he so much as asks a woman for a date. The “what ifs” loom large in his thinking. He would rather live lonely that risk that some woman might refuse to go out with him, or laugh at him, or criticize him as a potential partner. He is simply paralyzed with fear. So he thinks up all the reasons why he should not even try: women are too demanding; too picky, too self-centered, too unreliable, too cranky, not thrifty, not hardy, etc. Now, if he is asked if specific women, like his mother, sister, sister-in-law, are this way, he says of course not, but they are exceptional. I assure him that all these women are good, but they are not exceptional. It does not matter. He prefers to stay in the safety of his cave. I am sad for him, but this is a pit that he has dug for himself with the shovel of fear.

We all do some of both of these things, often without realizing it. We can be so sure of great heights to which we cannot aspire that we hum and haw around about the problems and wind up not making any progress. Or, we can be so critical that we give ourselves permission not to try, or blame our lack of success on others or the institutions around us.

Religious institutions exist because we are seeking something greater than ourselves, often without seeing the fact that the greater really exists with in us, too. The reason there are hundreds of different religions, though, has a lot to do with the power and control of institutions have over large numbers of people. But, it also has a lot to do with perfectionism. Some churches promise perfect spiritual experiences, while others, such as our free faith, do not. Yet, people find imperfection equally in both. So they start new religions hoping for the perfection for which they are looking.

I belong to an interfaith group of ministers, and I am continually reminded that while we have radically different theologies, we all have congregations of similar people. People complain that there is not enough of this or too much of that: for UUs, it is usually about God. People anguish over the imperfect nature of love: love means joy, but it equally means suffering. People cry out against injustice, but expect others to be the agents of justice. So it has been, so it will be.

The question I pose to you is: What do you want from your life? What do you think will give your life meaning? What makes for a life well-lived?

The natural follow up question is: What are you doing about it?

This is the heart and soul of spirituality, the spiritual life. How do I give my life meaning? What am I willing to risk in the pursuit of meaning? How much do I expect others to give me, and how much am I willing to do for myself?

Jesus said: “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” Whatever heaven you and I are looking for, the only access we have comes from within us. Achievement of any kind, be it spiritual or material, rarely happens if we are looking for all the reasons why we cannot or should not do any given thing, or even put the energy forward for an effort. Too often out of fear of failure, excessive caution, risk aversion, etc., we wind up stuck in one spot making no discernable changes or progress. Or, we wind up blaming others for our inability to get what we want.

Politics is a good case in point. We are the government. We the citizens of this nation are the ones who elect our representatives and senators for state and national government. We are the ones who have to go to the election site and make our mark or pull the lever to vote for the people who sit in Washington. But, to hear most people talk, you would think government was some hydra of nonentities who make everything happen. Ask some of the politicians who did not get re-elected who is responsible for their losses and for government.

Sure, it is true that there are two lobbyists for each elected official in Washington, but they each have one vote. Sure, money is a factor in how well the parties can get out their messages, but rich people have one vote each.

There has never been an election that could not have turned in another direction if all the non-voters had gotten off their duffs and voted.

We have the right to organize, to gather, to be part of the process of each election, and between each election. We have money we can donate. We have a lot we can do. So, either we do something, or we do nothing. That is what makes the difference between one outcome and another.

The same principle holds true in any organization, any church or congregation. Here, you the members literally own this place. It is what you make of it. UUSMC is You! Certainly, I have a role, but I am one person. You each have a role to play, a part of the responsibility for the whole. One reason we have discussion after many of the sermons is so you can offer your voice to the discussion. If you disagree with me or with another point of view, you are more than welcome, indeed I fervently hope, you will express that opinion. That is the real beauty of the free church. No one person can lay claim to all truth.

The older members of the congregation remember our beloved member Jim Owens, now deceased, who once told me following a sermon: “Nancy, you’re way off base.” I cherish that as one of my fondest memories of ministry to date, that in our UU faith, you can do that. In the religion in which I was reared, I would have been assured of my future in hell for such heresy. So, feel free to tell me what you think, even if you believe I won’t like it. It is good for us to hear what we don’t like; we learn from that more than from just hearing what we do like.

But here is the challenge: If you complain about what you think should be different or be changed, be prepared to say how you will help make the change happen. Don’t just complain that other people should fix things for you. If I don’t like the way the government is working, I should be prepared to join in the work of making it better. Same goes for schools, churches, neighborhoods, and everything else. We cannot do everything, but there is something each of us can do. Follow your heart to decide where to put your energies.

Just don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good.

Most of us have very good lives. We have good jobs, good homes, good families, etc, but there are many of us who keep looking at what is not perfect, and keening after that, while failing to appreciate the goodness that surrounds us, the goodness that is in us. We all do this occasionally, but if we do not develop some perspective, we can wind up missing out on more than the thing we might be looking for in the meantime.

We UUs are a people who seek after all kinds of things. We do want success, good government, wonderful congregations, joyful experiences. The seeking is not the problem, so don’t misunderstand my message. To look beyond ourselves, our situations, and consider if there is something more we might achieve is good. It is good to strive. It is good to work for better quality of life. It is good to want success for our children. It is good to seek after liberty, to pursue happiness. All these require real effort toward a real goal. This is not the crux of problem perfectionistic or fearful thinking.

By way of example, exercise is good, leads to better health, is life enhancing, but fewer than 20% of Americans get regular exercise. The reasons are that it is too hard, or the perfect machine has not been invented, or they fear that it might hurt (and if it does hurt a bit, that is reason to stop). Then some people become foolish or fanatical about exercise, and do not consider their real abilities or their real commitment, as Jack Leonard, a comic, said: Thanks to jogging, more people are collapsing in perfect health then ever before. So there are two sides to every issue.

You do not have to run five miles a day to get enough exercise to be healthy. Walking a half-mile every day, is better than running five occasionally, for the commitment is greater, and the benefits will be long lasting as a result. Spirituality is like that, too.

Spirituality is something that we are born with, that we grow from within, and we become as spiritually enlightened as we want to be. If we are continual seekers, we will be continually learning, continually open to the greater depths of spiritual experience that are possible. We do not know how or when or with what effort those experiences may come to us, but no one ever was spiritually touched, or grew enlightened by running away from the problems inherent in the search.

Not one of us is perfect, only in recognizing the profound freedom in that fact can we finally realize the joy to be had in trying and in failing. Someone once said: The closest to perfection a person ever comes is when s/he fills out a job application. Not a bad way to consider our lives. The job application teaches us to value ourselves for our experiences to date, what makes us worthy for the job, not for the having already done the job perfectly.

June 5, 2005 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

June 12, 2005

Children Should be Seen and Heard

Marian Wright Edelman, longtime head of the Children’s Defense League and active Unitarian gives us this interesting prayer for children:

[God] help me not to do for my children
what they can do for themselves

Help me not to give them
what they can earn for themselves

Help me not to tell them
what they can look up for themselves.

Help me to help my children stand on
their own two feet and to grow into
responsible, disciplined adults.

These are words of empowerment for children and adults alike, that we demonstrate to our children and for our children the supreme act of trust. That we show them the vital aspects of human engagement and interaction in trusting them enough to learn without our constant sheltering from the world, or so tempering the world that it comes to them as unusually or unnaturally secure. It is a reminder that children should be seen and heard and active individuals in our families.

We all have heard dominant in this week’s news one of the horrors of human life, one of the horrors for any parent, about 18-year-old Natalee Holloway, the young woman who was on a trip with other members of her graduating high school class to Aruba, and who disappeared. By all accounts, she disappeared while celebrating by getting very drunk and taking off with three boys, and has not been seen since.

We have been told she was a straight A-student. What happened between the twelve years of being an A-student, graduating with lots of hopes and expectations, and the events as they have been reported thus far?

Being a good parent is the hardest work anyone will ever do-bar none. Part of what makes the work so hard is that you can believe you are doing everything the best you possibly can, but even so, we know that our children will not or do not always have the safe, easy, distinguished life that every parent hopes for them.

The Hebrew Scriptures admonishes us to rear the children up in the way they should go. To teach them how to experience life in the way that they will need it, not in the way we might misguidedly wish it. That is why it is so tough being a good parent. We cannot just do what is fun. We cannot do just what makes us feel comfortable, for what might make us parents comfortable might deprive them of the essential learning that must take them through life.

Most of us have heard the old saying that it is better to teach a hungry person how to fish than to just give a person a fish. Giving a person a fish will feed him/her for the moment, and is rewarding in the immediate gratification is gives to both the giver and the receiver; but to teach a person how to fish insures the gratification and independence of both parties for the long run. Of course, we can do both, but the teaching part is by far the longer lasting gift of greater value.

This is a good metaphor for us as parents. It is far easier to just take care of our children’s every need than to help them become responsible people, but we give them a much greater start in life by teaching them to be responsible from an early age.

My mother was obsessive about cleaning our house. I do not say that lightly. She was constantly cleaning. I knew something was different at a party for my 12th birthday, when the girls walked into the living room, and one of them looked around and said: “Your house really does sparkle.” Noting the advertising lingo of the day. I never had to do anything, and did little. My mother did the washing and ironing, she did all the cooking and cleaning, I did dry the dishes sometimes, but for the most part, she said it was easier to do it herself, then it would be done right. When I left home and had to take care of my own laundry, I ruined nearly everything I put in the first load of laundry I did on my own. I had seen my mother put bleach in the white clothes, but she also put a tablespoon of bleach in the loads of colored clothes, and mimicking what I had seen, so did I-without waiting for the tub to fill with water. So my three favorite dresses all had blotches of white where the bleach had hit them. Now, how could I have been so foolish? Simple, we often do what we see our parents do, but what we see is not always straight-forwardedly clear or obvious. I learned the hard way what I might have learned by some hands-on instruction.

For us, as this community of faith, the aim of our religious education program is to teach our young ones the values of our UU faith, to respect themselves and others, and to see that spiritual growth is a lifelong journey. We hope that the children of our congregation will be the adults of UU congregations in the future; but, what we do now makes all the difference. What you and I do now is what helps them develop the skills of personal responsibility that give them life-long competence both in the spiritual and material realms of life. From this competence, from this ability, they come to see that they are best able to grow their minds/spirits in the atmosphere of questioning and seeking. That is what we want to nurture in our Unitarian congregations.

Life is never completely safe, nor easy. That is a truth each of us must learn at some point. But the greater truth we want to learn, and to teach, is that to love one another in all the ways that love can be understood is the highest goal and virtue of human existence. What we as the faith community can do to model this is to love each other, and especially to love the children. To be willing to give some of our time to teach them this love, which we can do by teaching in the religious education program, and by supporting this important community for them and those that will come after them. What we do is always more important than what we talk about should be done.

In the New Testament, Jesus rebuked the disciples who tried to keep the children away from the great teacher, saying: "Let the children come to me, do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of God.” We too want to do nothing to hinder the children coming to us to learn, to grow, and to know the caring community of faith.

I paraphrase one of our great UU ministers, Alice Blair Wesley, who teaches that religion is far more than what we each believe; that religion is primarily about what matters to us the most, what we love, what we trust, what we are thankful for, to what we give loyalty, how we understand personal integrity, how we respond to mystery, and what we see as important to spiritual health. All this is what we want to be about in this congregation.

Our children are the future. We do not want to hinder their own strong impulse to seek and to learn. We can help them and we can love them. That is the call of this Sunday when we honor those who have given their time to the children of this community, for in so doing we are honoring the children of today and the children of tomorrow as well.

Let love abide in our relationship with the children. Let love abide in all that we do.

So be it.

June 19, 2005 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D.Dean

June 19, 2005

On Being a Man in These Days

I asked Wes Bowman to share the pulpit with me this morning because if one is going to talk about gender issues, it seems a good idea to have a representative of that gender.

This may be in part a reaction to a colleague at the university where I used to teach. A group of us were having a discussion about men, and I quoted something from Dr. Joyce Brothers, when a man who is a professor of child development piped up: “I wouldn’t take advice from a female on male issues.” To which I responded (in one of my rare moments of thinking of the right response at the time it needs saying, rather than three hours later): “So does that mean Benjamin Spock and Barry Brazelton don’t have anything meaningful to say about child rearing to women?” So we both had something to learn.

Yet, I do believe that men and women cannot help but have gender specific understanding of what it means to be a woman or a man, even in these times of greater blurring of the lines between what it has traditionally mean to be a man or woman. So, what I have to offer this morning is undeniably colored by my own understanding or lack of it of the male sex, as well as colored by my age and experiences of the men in my life.

Like many of you, I have seen the great changes in the roles men play in our society. My own father and the men in my world growing up in rural Idaho were working class men of the soil. Even the few who made quite a lot of money never quit being working men, for agriculture was until very recently a very hard, dirty, job, inevitably more like the blue collar workers of industry. When my maternal grandfather died in 60s, I remember walking up to his coffin in the church, and the first thing that grabbed my attention was that his hands looked like banker’s hands rather than the rough, calloused, hands of the farmer that he was. Hands that always had some lines of soil embedded in the creases that no soap and water scrubbing could ever erase. His hands had always looked like a farmer’s hands, even when dressed in his Sunday best, as he was lying there in that coffin, but with somebody else’s hands. At least that was how it seemed to me.

Many of the men of my father’s and his father’s generation, those men of the soil, had only just enough formal education to do what was required in the way of the three R’s; their education was primarily an apprenticeship of the land and at the side of other weather-beaten farmers who taught them as they worked. They had little patience for ‘book learning’; and viewed education divorced from manual labor and experience as worth little. They valued honesty, hard work, bravery far higher.

When I came home from college railing about the injustices of the world, my father just shook his head. “Is that what you’re learning in that university, that life is supposed to be fair?” I understood when he said: “What does fairness have to do with anything? If a blight comes down on this orchard, it don’t have nothin’ to do with fairness. If my foreman falls off a ladder and breaks his neck, fairness hasn’t got anything to do with it.” He saw all these things as matters of nature, and/or the stupidity of men. Life was supposed to be hard, a trial, something to be gotten through by the skin of your teeth. Yet, this same man had a devout faith in God’s fairness. Maybe not in this life, but in the next. So, while to me he lived a life of contradictions, they worked for him and generations of men like him. They expected a lot of hardship and little happiness. They pretty much got what they expected. They were rooted in this work ethic, and a hope that one day by-and-by they would be rewarded for being faithful servants of the Lord.

My son, born some sixty years after my father, has none of these ways of understanding the world. Yet, I see him and others of his generation, especially those who are well educated, as far more uncertain. They don’t have that feeling of being rooted in the land and the ways of many generations. At the same time, they have a greater sense of freedom and options. Being a man in these days strikes me as better, though; in part because of a greater sense of freedom. They have more freedom to be themselves, and certainly more freedom to enjoy their children.

Men of my father’s generation had a generally distant relationship with their children, at least until they were adults. That is perhaps the greatest freedom men nowadays have, in that they can and are encouraged to be active in their children’s lives. Here in our RE program, many men teach classes. There were no men teaching children in the Sunday schools of thirty to sixty years ago.

I am so impressed by men today who take such an active roll in the rearing of children. It reminds me of what the well-known physicist Richard Feynman said about science adding to life. He said:

I have a friend who's an artist. . . He'll hold up a flower and say, 'Look how beautiful it is,' and I'll agree. And he says, 'You see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist [just] take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.' And I think that he's kind of nutty. . . I can appreciate the aesthetic beauty of a flower. At the same time I see much more about the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside that also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension of one centimeter, there is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure. . . All kinds of interesting observations showing that science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds; I don't understand how [he thinks] it subtracts.

That is how I think men of today have it better, if not easier; that they have more of all of life, that the added range of possibilities adds to their lives. Maybe they miss out on the simplicity of such a ruled existence as the men of our rural, agrarian, or our industrial working class. Yet, they are probably better loved and understood. Or, so it seems to me. For I see sharing happening a levels my father and uncles would never have experienced. I see closeness that they would have feared.

I think there are real differences for men today, and they are not all better. One of the chief differences is that the age old rites of passage that men had to experience have been all but erased in this age. Those rites of passage were trials that helped men know themselves, to leave boyhood behind. To learn the responsibility that goes with manhood.

Nowadays, the rites of passage have been gradually blurred by an increasingly educated population; yet, the need to learn the boundaries of what defines manhood have not left us. So, much that we view now as careless behavior in our young men, is often really our young men trying to find out where they belong, what is expected, how to live responsibly. I believe my son leaving college after 9/11/01 and going off to the Air Force was just such an action.

Ultimately, being a man in any age is a challenge. Nowadays, a man might not worry about a blight destroying his orchard, but he worries about credit card fraud that can destroy his credit rating, and identity theft that creates untold difficulties.

Still, overall, I believe men are better off now than at any time before because they have the options of greater sharing and experience that, as Feynman pointed out, only add to the totality of life. That is where the blessing lies; that men may grow in mind and spirit, and not be ashamed to say that they want their lives to be full and to be fair, here and now. Not feel that life is just a time of suffering that may or may not be rewarded in the unknown and unknowable beyond.

Ultimately, I know that I am overjoyed that my son-in-law is such an active partner with my daughter in the rearing of their two girls. That the girls cry when he leaves as often as they cry when their mother leaves. That he feels he is as important at home as he is at the office. For whatever men in these days may have lost, they have gained more in love. And that adds to the world, for love never subtracts.

So be it.