by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given January 6, 2002

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Good morning!  Welcome to this sanctuary, all you who seek to be made whole.  Bring your questions, your fears, your needs, your longings.  We are all pilgrims seeking our way.  Come, let us worship together.

Businessman Jim Collins tells of a course he took at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, a course called “Personal Creativity in Business,” taught by one Michael Ray.  Ray has taught this course for 24 years, and it is one of the most popular courses in the school.  But Collins says the last thing he expected in the Stanford B. School was to be sitting on the floor in the dark, listening to a tape of an Indian spiritual leader and chanting “om.”  He almost dropped the course.  It was just too weird.

Ray, the teacher, had just gone through a divorce and was searching for meaning in his own life, when he began teaching the course in 1979.  Now he is a relaxed, white-haired 61-year-old, and as he sits at his desk sipping carrot juice, he says to a journalist:  “What I saw in business school was the scientific paradigm taking over everything else.  People were coming here and getting technologically trained, but nowhere did they stop and ask, ‘Who am I, in essence, and why am I here?  What is the purpose in all of this?”  On a sabbatical trip to India, he saw workers beginning their work day with prayer—they seemed to be motivated by a higher purpose.  He began to want his students to look inside, to trust intuition.  “Often that trust is covered over by fear of judgment and the chattering mind,” says Ray.

Ray’s course is built around nine strategies, to help students develop creativity.  For example: (1) “destroy judgment, create curiosity,” (2) “do what is easy, effortless, and enjoyable,” and (3) “ask dumb questions.”  “People take the risk of being vulnerable and when they do, they’re not only accepted, but applauded,” he says.

Collins is glad he didn’t drop out; this was the course that propelled him to become an entrepreneur and an author.  He taught at Stanford for a while, then left to form his own research laboratory and went on to write a best selling book about management.  He’s now chanting all the way to the bank.  Collins quotes Ray, “It’s very hard to pursue a creative life following someone else’s script.”

Creativity—what is it, and where does it come from?  The concept has been around for a very long time—in 500 BC the ancient Greeks believed that the universe was saturated with god-ness—that inspiration and originality came from the Gods.  The Greeks invented heavenly creatures called Muses as guardians of human creativity.  (Of course, the muses generally were female, nurturing male artists, for some reason.  Women on the whole don’t have muses.)

Socrates believed that inspired thoughts originate with the gods, coming not from the rational mind, but coming when a person is “beside himself,” or “bereft of her senses.”   The word inspiration is based on a Greek word meaning “the God within.”  It is kin to the word spirit, which comes from spiritus, meaning life or breath, kin to respiration.

In the Victorian period, artists seemed to feel that they needed to break out of strict social constraints.  You remember the Romantic poets Lord Byron and Coleridge, who were known for their women and their drugs.  Becoming a bohemian doesn’t make you creative.  But if you pursue your creativity—whether it’s in business or science or in art—you have to be able to challenge the status quo, to take risks, to be willing to fail.  Thomas Edison was once asked, “How does it feel to have failed nearly 7,000 times trying to create the incandescent light bulb?” and he answered, “Those were not failures, those were solutions to problems I haven’t started working on yet.”

A few years back, I did some aptitude testing at the Johnson O’Connor lab in Seattle.  It was a fascinating experience.  I learned that some people have more aptitudes than others, and if you don’t use your aptitudes—all of them--you become unhappy—or even worse, if you try to do something you’re not good at or that you dislike, you will be miserable, and you will make all those around you miserable.  Those who have many aptitudes are more challenged, because they need to find ways to use all their aptitudes.  I discovered that I have few aptitudes.  And I have several areas that I’m quite poor at.  Putting little pins in little boxes, for example.  I thought I was doing great, but apparently I was very slow.    My worst test, though, was that of spatial sense.  The tester gave me 8 or 10 “wiggly blocks” to fit together.  I did 3 and sat there with the tester for another 20 minutes, trying in vain to get at least one more.  “I’m not doing very well, am I?” I asked.  He just looked at me and said, “Don’t ever, ever go anywhere without a map.”  Turns out that I’m high in inductive and deductive thinking and very high in “ideaphoria.”  Generating ideas.  True.  I remember that in one church where I was serving as interim, a member of my ministerial relations committee said, “Would you please quit thinking of new ideas?  We’re tired!”  I was told at the lab that I was not a manager, but more of a visionary. Tom Disrud, our Associate Minister, tested as good at managing, so we work together well as a pair.  He’s also good at spatial stuff, so I follow him around in this building so I won’t get lost.  Literally.  I’m really fortunate to be able to do what I most enjoy—envision, create, communicate.

Not that I don’t have problems letting myself be as creative as I could be.  Preparing this sermon made me realize that many of the barriers to true creativity exist in my own life.  What are some of these barriers?  Incidentally, I should say that many of these ideas come from Julia Cameron, in her book The Artist’s Way.

Cameron points out that we need support to develop artistic sensibilities, but parents and friends often offer cautionary advice.  She tells the story of Edwin, a miserable Wall Street trader who is very wealthy, but whose joy in life comes from his art collection.  As a child he was strongly gifted in visual arts, but was urged by his father to go into finance—his father, in fact, bought him a seat on the NY stock exchange when he was only 21.  He’s in his mid-thirties now, very rich and very poor.  Surrounding himself with artists and their work, he can aspire to none of it himself.  He is a generous man who recently gifted an artist with a year’s living expenses so she could pursue her dreams, but he could not make the same gift to himself.  He was raised to believe that the term artist could not apply to him.  This is sad.

When we are creating, we are having fun—and in this culture we often have some level of guilt when we are too happy—our Calvinist heritage.  Scratch a Unitarian and you find a Calvinist.   Not that there is not work and discipline involved in any form of creativity—but unless our work is just somewhat unpleasant, we think it’s not really work. If it’s pleasurable, it must be frivolous, and if it’s frivolous, it must not be work, and if it’s not work, we’re lazy.  Now think—what kind of logic is that?  If your work doesn’t give you joy, something is wrong—you are not giving out of the deepest center of yourself.  You may be ignoring your true aptitudes and talents, perhaps you are not being true to the divine leading from within.

Maybe at this point I should share with you the assumption, the context, in which my words take meaning.  I believe that each one of us does have that divine spark within, that presence of the holy, and we listen or we don’t listen to that inner voice, but that is where truth will be found.  Some call it intuition, some call it the Holy Spirit, others simply say, “Listen to your gut.”  It’s the golden thread that Robert Johnson writes about, that synchronicity which leads us on the right path, if we will only pay attention.  When I trust it in my own life, it is always, always, always right.  When I don’t, I get in trouble.  And God tries hard to get my attention.  I remember the time when I desperately needed a job, and I was offered one that I did not at all want—and I lied.  I looked right into the eyes of the director of this program and said, “I would really like to have this job.”  And at that exact moment a light bulb fell out of the ceiling onto my head and broke into a thousand pieces.  Did I see this as a warning?  No, I took the job anyway, and that was a big mistake.

Still, even with such heavy handed signs, I tend to distrust God’s leading.  Along with some of the rest of you, I may be operating out of an early concept of God that says, “God wants me to do something that’s hard and nasty, God wants me to suffer, and I don’t want to, so I’ll ignore my inner leanings, because there’s no telling where they will lead.”  This attitude, I believe, is firmly rooted in the Christian blood sacrifice story.  I mean, think about the life of Jesus—he was perfectly obedient to God and he ended up poor and most likely celibate and on a cross, betrayed by one of his own disciples.  But it’s not just Christians--think about Gandhi: he ended up poor, with no earthly possessions, just a loin cloth and a spinning wheel, and celibate (finally in his 50s and against his will) and then was killed by one of his own people.  These stories go deep. 

I was talking with someone just the other day, and I said to this person, sort of out of the blue, “I struggle with giving my life over completely to God.”  I think the fear is that I’ll be, if not dead, at least poor and celibate.  And that doesn’t sound appealing.  The fact is that I don’t know what would happen if I gave myself completely to the purposes of the Spirit—maybe my deepest longings would come true.  And maybe I’d find out what those deepest longings really are.

In this culture money is seen as the real source of security.  The lilies of the field?  That’s a quaint image, but not very practical for this life, we think.  We have to provide for ourselves, for our children’s education, for our retirement.  No time for dreaming, no time to pursue our heart’s desire.  “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and all things will be added unto you”—can we believe this promise?

Maybe, you know, God wants us to be joyous and free and expansive, not frightened and cowed by life.  Maybe so.  I think so.  We somehow think there’s not enough, not enough money to share, not enough vital interesting work, not enough love.  But the nature of the universe is abundance.  How many stars are there in the heavens on a cloudless night?  How many spring flowers on a mountain hillside?  All around us is the abundance of creation, just overflowing, just profligate, and we somehow think there’s not enough.  This fear keeps us from opening to the plenty that is there, keeps us “safe” from the urgings of the Spirit to take risks, to try something new.

“But I might fail!”  That is the fear that keeps us from stepping out and trying.  We think if we want to write, we should arrive full-blown with the first essay that comes out of the printer.  The first painting should be a masterpiece.

Not so, says Lisa Colt.  This is her short poem “Risk”:

My teacher says,

You’ve got to stink first.

I tell her, I don’t have time to stink—

at 64 years old

I go directly to perfection

or I go nowhere,

she says, So stink

Sink like a beginner,

stink like decaying flesh,

old blood,

cold sweat,

she says

I know a woman who’s eighty-six,

last year she learned to dive.

We don’t want to look foolish, undignified.  Therefore, we often just stick to those things that we can do well.  I personally hate to look incompetent, undignified.  Like last summer, when I was trying to learn to ride a bike—again.  You know, one thing that frustrates me about the Northwest is that everybody you meet says, “Do you hike, do you cycle, do you ski?” like you’re some kind of inferior being if you’re not training for the winter Olympics.  There is no snow in Louisiana, where I grew up, so of course I don’t ski.  Mountains are in fact scary to me, if you want to know the truth.  And big trees are, too.  But biking—I could learn to do that, I thought.  I did ride a bike when I was a girl, but stopped about the time puberty set in.  Bikes have changed a lot since then.  The tires are thinner, for one thing.  So here I am trying to impress the guy I’m with, with my athletic ability, and I’m doing pretty well, but then I come to a stop sign, and I stop, and I forget to get off the seat, and so the bike just falls over, with me under it.  I’m lying there in the gravel, my hand scraped raw, blood dripping from my knee,  totally humiliated, and just at that point this kid—he must have been all of 8 or 9 years old—points at me and says to his father, “Look, Daddy, grown-ups crash, too.”  His remark did not endear him to me.

But to learn, we have to make mistakes, look stupid, ask foolish questions.  Once a seeker traveled many miles to ask a wise man one question:  “How did you, Great Master, become so wise?   How did you learn to make such wise decisions?”  And the wise man answered, “By making so many foolish decisions.”  And that’s the way it goes.

Another one of our ways of escaping our heart’s desire is to say, “I’m too old.”  After a certain age, some people—you’ve seen them--just settle down and wait to die.  Other people become ministers, artists, playwrights—in their 60’s, 70’s, 80’s.  Don’t let anyone—in particular, don’t let yourself—tell you you’re too old.  With the exception of certain physical limitations, you’re never too old to do anything you really want to do.  “I’m too old” is really just another excuse, another escape.

So maybe you’re stuck—you can’t start, or you can’t continue.  You’re blocked.  So what are your energies given to?  Confusion?  It takes a lot of energy to endlessly consider alternatives.  Where else does your energy go?  Perhaps to self-doubt, depression, anxiety, jealousy?  Perhaps all these words are names for the big word that underlies them all—fear.  Fear of success and the responsibilities that might bring.  You might have to become a grown-up.  Fear of failure and possible humiliation.  Perhaps most often it is fear of abandonment, fear of losing love.

I have had and to some extent still have all of these fears.  During my sabbatical I was writing a book, and my writing just didn’t go well.  I wasn’t sure why.  I gave the manuscript to my younger son Madison, and he said to me, “Mom, this is not the book you should be writing.  You should tell your story.”  And in truth, my editor at Beacon had told me that, too.  So then I went into this thing about how I couldn’t do that right now, because I’m a parish minister and I don’t have time, and anyway, I can’t tell my story because my congregants would read the book, and they would know more about me than they really want to know.  “It’s not that I’m a serial killer or anything, but trust me,” I said to Madison, “they do not want to know the details of my life.  You do not want to know the details of my life.”  He said, “Well, that would be good for your congregants, Mom—they would know you’re a real person.  And as for me, I’m not going to read your book.”  I’ll write the book.  I’m not sure when.  I had to ask myself, “What is my real reason for not writing it?”  I’m afraid that I can’t do it, that it might not be good enough.  Or I might not be good enough.  Or when it’s read, that I won’t be loved.

For most of my life, I have felt that I would be never be loved just for being me, but only for what I could give, and so what I give always has to be perfect.  Or as nearly perfect as I can make it.  After about 25 years of therapy, I now know that I can love and be loved—but that lingering doubt is there:  I have to be the best, I have to give only the best, or I won’t be loved.   That’s the fear that lingers and still keeps me from giving all the gifts I might have to give. 

I’m not the only person who operates too often from fear and self-doubt—and the only antidote for that is to be grounded more firmly in the Spirit.  When one enters a true alliance with God, the ego drops down, and faith moves in.  “Leap and the net will appear,” says Julie Cameron.  This dependence on something beyond ourselves will lead us where we need to go.  Watch for the life force in you and what it reaches for.  For what do you feel real enthusiasm?  Enthusiasm is from a Greek word meaning “filled with God.”  When we say yes to our heart’s delight, we become partners with the life force itself.  We become a vessel for that force, and in all humility forget our fears in our love of the creation that engages us so fully.  “I paint not by sight, but by faith.  Faith gives you sight,” says painter Amos Ferguson.  “I shut my eyes in order to see,” wrote Gauguin.

Creativity is a spiritual endeavor, for in giving ourselves to what we love, we connect our divine center with the divinity, the sacredness, of the universe.  We become freer of other dependencies.  We become truer to ourselves.  We become less judgmental of ourselves and of others.  Grace seems to be a river flowing through our lives, freeing us from our fears, holding us afloat, showing what it is we are to do, what it is we are to become, and we give thanks, and we live in the midst of Love, and we are glad in it.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

This day we come, O Spirit of Life, O Creator God, confessing that we fritter away our days with doubts and fears, and we ask forgiveness for squandering the precious gift of life this way.  We ask then for courage to walk where we have not walked before, in faith, and to become a conduit for your beauty, truth, and love in this world.  Hold us close, and set us free.  Amen.

BENEDICTION 

My people, on this day, in this New Year, resolve to walk through your fears and take your destiny by the hand.  Go in love and go in peace.