by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given April 29, 2001

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

One spring a river was rising after an especially quick thaw. A man lives close to the river and starts to hear the warnings that people may have to evacuate their homes. A neighbor comes by to check on him and tells him to get his things together. "I don’t need to do that," he says, "God will take care of me."

Things get more serious and the police come by saying that people have to leave their homes now. They come to the man’s door and tell him to get out. "I don’t need your help," the man says, "God will take care of me."

The river continues to rise and at this point all of his neighbors have left the area. Water starts to come into his home. Some people come by in a boat and tell him that he can ride to safety with them. "No thanks," he says, "God will take care of me."

The river continues to rise and finally the man finds himself up on his roof. A helicopter comes by and sends him down a rope. "I don’t need it," he says, "God is going to take care of me."

Finally it gets to the top of the house and he is swept away by the flooding water and drowns.

He gets to heaven and he meets God. The man is a pretty angry. He says to God, "I waited and waited for you to come and save me and you never did. And now look at me, I’m dead. Why didn’t you do something?"

"Why didn’t I do something?" asks God. "I sent the neighbor, I sent the police officer, I sent the people in the boat, I sent the people in the helicopter. How many people do I need to send before you get it? I don’t think you’re paying attention."

Show up. Pay attention. Tell the truth. Let go.

A friend told me this. It is how she tries to live her life. For her it is a reminder that all of life is a path and that the main thing we have to do is to simply be present.

Sounds good. But not always so easy. Too often life becomes a destination and not a path. We have our goals: the dream house, a first million, the perfect job, a child who goes to an Ivy League school, the retirement trip we saved up for years to take. And then there are the daily goals: getting to all the appointments, getting dinner on the table, returning the day’s e-mails.

On our way to the goal, we sometimes run out of steam. In fact, we feel in the end like we’ve lost something. Even if we achieve the goal, it may not feel very rewarding when we are finished. It may be we get to the end and we don’t even remember what it is we were trying to accomplish. If we have our eye so set on the prize, we might miss what the prize really is, because it may not come in the form we expected.

Before we can do much of anything, we need to show up.

In these days of cell phones and pagers and 24-hour round-the-world news, we can find ourselves so busy keeping up that we never really show up for what it is we are doing. We’re not really there as much as we’re getting ready to get to the next thing. Even if we don’t have all of those things distracting us, there’s a way they all keep us from talking to each other. We get into our own worlds and we shut others out.

Once I called a salesman and got his voicemail. The message said that he was on vacation, but invited me, a customer, to page him if I needed anything. He wanted to make sure that I didn’t have to wait. That’s nice, but I wondered to myself if he was clear about what a vacation is. I have this image of a person lying in the sunshine on the beach only to be interrupted over and over again by the beep of a pager. He gets back to the office and feels like he has never been away. I decided my call could wait a day or two.

It may not be pagers at the beach, but this is something that can happen all the time. It might be the television on during dinner, it might be the need to check e-mail 20 times a day, or the need to use our cell phone to make sure there are no new messages. We live in a culture that tells us we need to go faster faster faster, and the more we try to keep up, the less we find that we are really there.

It is easy to put things on my calendar, but I’ve come to realize that I first need to try to show up. If I start the day focused on all that I have to do, chances are that is how I’m going to be that day. I’ll have the meetings but I may not really be at the meetings. And at the end of the day chances are it may not feel all that satisfying. If the events of our lives become things to get through, chances are we are not really living.

It could be we have some things to learn from children in this regard. They are good at being in the present moment. When they are fascinated with something that has caught their eye, it is the center of the universe, and when they are not happy about something the whole world knows about it. But they can teach adults a great deal. This past week a father told me about walking out of the house with his daughter and how she saw the azalea full of blooms and exclaimed, "Where did that come from?"

When I’m lucky, life has a way of pulling me in and engages me. It almost makes me show up. This time of year it might just be the azaleas or the dogwood trees. It takes me from my preoccupation about what has happened in the past or what is about to happen in the future.

The idea is that if we are able to pay attention to what is around us then we will see all it is that we need to see. We get into ruts and we start to take for granted the things that happen to us. We get focused on what has been or what is going to happen and in the process we completely lose sight of the present, when that might contain exactly what it is we need. We go through life and we just don’t see.

I heard a story last week from New York City. A few years ago a man named Bruce Renfroe got a job operating an elevator at the Washington Heights Subway Station. People got off the train, got into the elevator and rode up to street level. After a few months in the job, Renfroe started to notice that the same people were riding in the elevator everyday and how they looked grumpy, how nobody in the elevator said anything to anyone. Renfroe decided he was going to dedicate himself to changing this.

So he brought in some plants to hang, he put up pictures in the elevator, and most of all started to play jazz music. It was not long before people took notice. They started to smile when they came into the elevator and they even started to talk to him and to each other. They said they looked forward to stepping in for the short morning ride every day.

It wasn’t long, of course, before the Transit Authority got wind of this and decided it was against the rules. Renfroe said, "There’s nothing wrong with this," but the officials said, "Yes there is" and it is now up for appeal. But what might be the most remarkable thing is that 90 people turned out for a meeting to support his cause. They love their elevator ride and the fact that they are now talking to their fellow passengers.

A little action can make a lot of difference.

We get caught up in our routines. We have our way to the usual places where we go. Our lives get scheduled and we can lose any sense of spontaneity with life. We get into ruts. We do things simply because we’ve always done them that way before.

And in the process we don’t see things with fresh eyes, but tired eyes. We get sick of this or that and we find that we are looking down rather than looking in front of us. Ever notice when you go away somewhere how you seem to notice things you didn’t notice at home? It is because we get out of the routine and see things with new eyes.

When we get caught up in routines, we not only miss out on much of the beauty and spontaneity of life, but also on the fullness of life and all that fullness has to teach us. When we experience suffering and injustice in the world, it is easy to want to walk past that and to pretend that it is not there. We can move right past the problems because we’re going forward to the next thing.

But when we cut ourselves off from the suffering of the world we also cut ourselves off from that part of our self that is suffering. We cut ourselves off from that part of our self that seeks justice and truth telling.

Writer Kaaren Anderson tells the story of a husband and wife who are out for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. They order their plate of lo mein and are sitting there enjoying it, engrossed in conversation, when a hand reaches down and takes the platter of noodles. They hear a voice quickly mumble "Sorry!" and look up to see a thin, poorly dressed woman leaving the restaurant with the plate of lo mein.

They watch her walk down the street holding the plate in her hand and stuffing noodles into her mouth as quickly as she can. About this time, the owner of the restaurant realizes what has happened and takes off out the front door chasing the noodle thief. He catches up with her and stands firmly in front of her, blocking her way, grabbing the side of the plate. A struggle ensues, the noodles sliding from one side of the plate to the other. The owner finally gets the upper hand and pulls the plate away and the noodles go flying.

The woman is left there, empty-handed, with soggy, contaminated noodles at her feet. She stands with her arms hung dejectedly at her side. The owner walks back to the restaurant with the soiled plate in hand, feeling victorious.

The couple gets a new heaping plate of lo mein even though they had eaten half of the other plate before it was taken. Unable to eat any more, they ask if the rest could be boxed up. They head off to their movie.

A block later, they happen upon the lo mein thief. The woman is hypercharged. She simultaneously cries, convulses, and shouts at a man, who quickly runs away from her. The husband wants to get away as quickly as possible, but his partner doesn’t want to do that. She walks over to the thief and says, "Ah, we haven’t formally met, but about 10 minutes ago you were interested in our noodles. They gave us some new ones. Are you still hungry?"

The woman nods and extends her arms and takes the styrofoam container in her hands, bows ever so slightly and says "Thank you, you’re very kind."

Most of the time when we feel uncomfortable, we want to walk away and not stay with the discomfort. But most of the time it is in that very discomfort that we find what it is we need to learn or know. Living in the present and being mindful does not detach us from the pain of the world but brings us closer to it—and the same is true for joy in the world. Living in the present brings us closer to life. It brings us closer to what we strive for.

If we want to be more compassionate in our lives, the time to start with that compassion is in the present. We can talk all we want about what we are going to do tomorrow, but there is a strange way that things don’t always happen tomorrow, or ever.

If we want to be able to speak the truth about what we see in the world, it may be we need to put ourselves forward to speak the truth about what is in front of us. It is from this place that we are able bring ourselves into the world. If we can stay with the discomfort we feel, it is the discomfort that can move us to action.

The woman whose noodles were stolen could stay with the discomfort long enough to reach out and offer compassion. If we are able to see life fully in front of us we find that we, too, move past our blocks and toward a different way of being in the world. And in this we find our way to telling the truth about what we see.

Life is a path. We can chart the destination all we want but that is not always what happens. Most of the time, in fact, it doesn’t go quite like we expect.

There is a Zen story about a man riding a horse at a pretty fast pace. He comes by a man standing by the side of the road, and the man asks, "Where are you going?" The man yells back, "I don’t know, ask the horse."

We are called, again and again, to put ourselves forward and to show up. We are called to get on the horse and trust it will take us where we need to go, and let go of the outcomes we expect. We simply put ourselves out there and see what happens.

A few years ago when I lived in Berkeley, I had an opportunity to see the Dalai Lama. It was a beautiful sunny day and it was great to just sit in the sun waiting for him to arrive. After some delay he arrived with his entourage. There was a long series of speeches and finally the Dalai Lama spoke. He was a little hard to understand but it was wonderful to see him.

And at the end of his talk he said, "If what I have said is of any help, then please use it. And if it is not, then just forget about it." That is what, to this day, I remember about hearing the Dalai Lama. And it is a lesson that has served me well. That in whatever I do, I need to offer what I have and then let go of expectations.

Show up. Pay attention. Tell the truth. Let go.

It is precisely at those times when I’m rushing through the events of my life, when I’m being the least present, that something will catch me up short. And in that moment I realize that instead of rushing along into the next moment, all I really need to do is to pay attention and see.

Everything in life is sacred. All the moments we live are sacred—those times when we are full of joy, those times when we are suffering. Even the time when it comes to die. It is all a part of some great cycle.

The last time I visited with one of our members who died a few days ago, she was in and out of sleep and not saying much of anything. Her husband and I sat by her bedside and held her hands. The two of us quietly talked, wanting to let her sleep. In the middle of our conversation, in a clear voice, she said, "I’m here." And yes, indeed, she was there. And yes, that was all we needed in that moment.

Words of Mary Oliver:

Every year, everything I have learned

in my lifetime leads back to this:

The fires and the black river of loss,

Whose other side is salvation,

Whose meaning none of us will ever know.

To live in this world

You must be able to do these things:

To love what is mortal;

To hold it against your bones

Knowing your own life depends on it;

And when the time comes to let it go,

To let it go.

To see the azaleas blooming, to hear a child’s exclamation at a new discovery. To look into another person’s face and see their beauty. To stand in the middle of a springtime hail storm and to be started awake by the shower of cold. To stand in sunshine and feel the warmth through our body. To witness to the suffering in the world and to be connected to that suffering, and but also to be connected to the healing that happens everyday in the world. To be present with all that is and to know that it is enough. To be present with all that is and to know that this is life. To know that it is life in its fullest.

May this be so this day. Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, hold us this day, hold us this hour, hold us in this moment. May we be present to this world and its tremendous beauty, its tremendous sorrow, its tremendous calling. In our seeking, may we find all it is we need to find. May we live our lives fully. Amen.

BENEDICTION

Be ever attentive, good people.

Bring your light and your presence into the world this day.

Amen.

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Copyright 2001, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.