by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given June 30, 2002

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning! A warm welcome to all

who enter this place of worship.

We are here to offer confession,

To give thanks,

And to be strengthened of spirit.

Come, let us worship together.

The last time I spoke to you from the pulpit, my subject was "American Myths About Happiness." I concluded by saying that I’ve come to understand that the core question is not "How can I be happy?" but rather, "How can I love more deeply?" That is, the purpose of life, it seems to me, is spiritual growth. That statement sounds simple, but to live by it is deeply counter-cultural.

If you do accept my premise, though, that we are put here on this earth in order to grow our spirits, it follows that whatever teaches us, whatever wakes us up, is of tremendous value. Unfortunately, it seems that we often learn the deepest spiritual lessons through suffering and loss.

I don’t like this system that the Great Mystery has laid on us, and I promise that if I am elected Lord of the Universe—or as it were, Lady of the Universe—I will try to offer an impetus to spiritual growth that is more, shall we say, user friendly. Why do we have to lose someone before we know that person’s real value? Why do we have to get a life-threatening disease in order to appreciate the simple joys of living? Why do we so often have to be thrown into despair in order to be transformed?

And think about who the Creator sends as our teachers. Not the ones I would choose! If I were to have a conversation with God about this issue, it would probably go something like this. God, I like to be around people who understand me, people I’m comfortable with—people like myself, actually. God, I don’t want to learn from people of color—why, some of them carry a lot of anger around because of the way they are treated. I don’t want to hear their anger. I mean, I’m not racist. At least, I try not to be. And, God, how about gays and lesbians? Oh, I can be cool with that—but now, God, we have transgendered individuals—why, I know a man who is now a woman, and he still has a beard! That’s really—confusing for me. I’d rather not learn from people who’ve had a sex change, thank you very much, God—that is just too weird. And what about the homeless people I see every day? They are just in my face, and I feel uneasy every time I see one. I pass by, hoping they don’t speak, hoping they don’t force my attention. I want to help, but their problems are so enormous that I hardly know where to begin. They’re not like me, not like the people I know who bathe every day and go to work and pay the mortgage on time every month.

But, O God, I long to grow spiritually, I want to become more compassionate. If that is my real purpose on this earth, then who can teach me best? Perhaps those who have been despised and rejected. Those who live with despair as a constant companion—those who pull me outside of myself, to a place where I have not yet dared to go. What if I were black? What would it mean to have everyone who meets me for the first time see only my color? What would it mean to be trapped in a man’s body, when I know I’m a woman? What would it mean to walk the streets all day long, with no place to rest, and when I sit down at last on a bench in the Park Blocks, to have a policeman tell me to move?

And then, God, let me speak to you for a moment about the evil ones—we could do with fewer of those, don’t you think. To answer, you give me a poem from Rumi, which I reluctantly read:

"I run into them, they beat me, and leave me nearly dead

in the road, and I understand, again, that what they want

is not what I want. They keep me on the spiritual path.

That’s why I honor them and pray for them.

"Those that make you return, for whatever reason,

to God’s solitude, be grateful to them.

Worry about the others, who give you

delicious comforts that keep you from prayer.

Friends are enemies sometimes,

and enemies friends."

Why, oh why, do we have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into consciousness? Oh, I try in my own little ways to experience a little pain and suffering—just to put my toe in, you know. Like the time when some of us here in the church decided to skip lunch once a week, and give the money we saved to a food program run by our neighbors, the Baptists. That was the first year I was your minister, as I remember. It was a kind of two birds with one stone thing, or really three birds—solidarity with hungry people, money raised for food, and making friends with the Baptists. That was a good thing for us to do—but we knew that we had plenty of food in the fridge, and we could have a big dinner that night, if we wanted. We weren’t really hungry, in the sense of not having enough food to eat. Most of us have never had to choose between paying the rent and buying groceries.

I think many of us are like Jonah in the Hebrew Bible, when it comes to spiritual transformation. His story is classic. (Now please don’t get hung up on whether or not this story is literally true. It isn’t. If Keiko the whale swallowed you, you would be—dead. The tale of Jonah and the whale is a myth, or a story that gives us spiritual truth.)

The scripture tells us that God told Jonah to go down and prophesy in Nineveh, to tell the people of that city that they were wicked, that God’s patience was running low, and that they had better change their ways. Now prophets are not the most popular of people, and so Jonah decided that he would flee from God and from the task at hand. He decided to take a ship to Tarshish.

But Jonah got caught up short. The Lord sent a great wind, and the ship was about to break apart. The sailors began praying, the various ones to their various gods, as we do when we’re in a tight spot, and they decided at last to cast lots, to see who had caused this evil to fall upon them. You know the story—the lot fell on Jonah, who confessed that he was running from his God, and he told them, "Cast me into the sea, and the sea will become calm once again." They were reluctant, but finally they did throw Jonah overboard, and the sea stopped raging.

Jonah was then swallowed by a great fish, and he stayed in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights. Jonah cried "out of the belly of hell," the scripture says, and he promised to "pay that which I have vowed." And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited up Jonah upon dry land. Sometimes we just have to learn the hard way.

Now we usually don’t hear the end of the story—but I love the end. Jonah is just so human. He heads to Nineveh and when he’s still a day’s journey away, he starts crying out, "In 40 days Nineveh will be overthrown!" Well, it turns out that the people of Nineveh believe Jonah, and they repent—they start fasting and from the greatest to the least of them, including the king, they sit down in sackcloth and ashes. And so God decides not to destroy the city. Jonah hadn’t counted on that, and the scripture reports that Jonah was "very angry." You see, he had gone just outside the city and made himself a little booth, from which he planned to watch the violence and destruction. And when that didn’t happen, he just sat there and pouted. He was all ready to gloat, to say, "I told you so," and to see God smash that city to bits—but his little party didn’t happen. Never mind that God had forgiven him. How soon we forget.

The story of Jonah and the whale is typical of a certain class of transformation stories. The hero/protagonist must take a perilous journey into darkness, where he is purified. He is humbled and fixes his energy on his spiritual calling. In these stories, the traveler typically is cut to pieces or devoured or dismembered, symbolizing the destruction of the attachment to ego. Where there is no ego, no self, there is only spirit. The Jesus story is, in fact, a kind of transformation story—Jesus’ body is ravaged, and he goes into the darkness of the tomb, only to be resurrected as spirit. "No creature," writes the philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy, "no creature can attain a higher grade of nature without ceasing to exist."

But let me tell you the real life story of a real live person. You may have such a story, a story of despair and redemption, in your own life. This story is about a gay man, a man who grew up not knowing that he was gay, but realizing that in some fundamental way, he was different. That deep sense of difference haunted him even as early as his elementary school days and on through junior high and high school. He didn’t know other gay men because in those days, most everyone was closeted—he thought that he alone was different, and he still wasn’t sure exactly how. He felt as though he were in a glass enclosure that shut him off from others, and he lost all will and energy. He became suicidal. He remembers not wanting to be around anyone, not even caring about the people he loved, or worrying about how they might experience his choosing death by his own hand. He just wanted out, out of the pain of his separation, which is the deepest pain that exists.

Then out of the blue he had what he would now call a mystical experience—a hand seemed to reach out to him, and in that moment he knew that he was going to live, and that he wanted to live. Life suddenly had purpose. He truly felt "born again." He understood that life was bigger than himself, and that life has meaning and that there existed something that included him and enveloped him. He knew with no doubt whatsoever that life is a gift, to be cherished and to be shared.

But isn’t there a way that we can be transformed without becoming desperate, without having such deep pain? I think the answer is, to some extent, "yes." Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron says we are all addicted to hope, and we have to understand that there is no hope, there is no place to hide. She suggests putting the stricture "Abandon Hope" on the door of your fridge, as opposed to "Every day in every way I’m getting better and better." Get real. To abandon hope is the relinquishment—the letting go, the surrender—that is necessary for the spiritual journey. Relinquish? Surrender? These are not easy words for Unitarian Universalists—we are so smart, so capable, so resourceful. Too often we have to get smacked in the face by something we can’t fix, in order to be ready for spiritual development. We are forced to our knees, so to speak. But do we really have to wait for the big fish to swallow us?

Chodron says, and I agree with her, that all our hope and therefore all our anxiety are rooted in the fear of death. As one Zen master said, "Life is like getting into a boat that’s just about to sail out to sea and sink." I hate how realistic these Buddhist folks are. Can’t they leave me a little comfort, a little denial? It appears not.

Somehow we never think we are going to die. Well, we know this intellectually, but to really internalize that truth, to grasp that existential reality, is beyond most of us. Death will come to others, but not to me. Death will come, but not now—always later. It’s like the woman who said to her spouse, "Dear, if one of us should die first, I think I’ll go and live in Paris."

I get invitations from time to time to speak to various community groups, and I remember being asked to speak to a group of elderly men and women. The program coordinator asked me what I would like to speak about. I thought a moment and I said, "You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about death recently. Maybe I could speak about death." He looked thoughtful and paused and said, "Well, I don’t know about that topic. Many of these folks are getting sort of close to that time." "My point," I thought—but I just suggested a more cheerful topic.

What I am proposing here today is an entirely different way of perceiving the world and ourselves in the world. We are told that we can have perfect lawns, a wrinkle-free face, a life with no anxiety or loneliness, kids who sit still and listen like polite little automatons. All these promises, all these ways of fixing things! Thinking in this manner only breeds dissatisfaction and unhappiness. What is real is that we are human; we have all kinds of feelings, some pleasant and others decidedly unpleasant; our bodies are tremendously vulnerable; we will get old, if we’re lucky; and we will die. All this has to be okay with us. Welcome to the Titanic. You can rearrange the chairs if you want to, but it’s still going down.

Let me end with a story. There was a woman who was dying. She was alone and embittered—she had never been a happy woman, and she was in great pain. At the point of her greatest agony, when she felt she could no longer bear the suffering and resentment, all of a sudden she began to envision the agony of others. She saw in her mind’s eye a mother, starving, in Ethiopia; a teenager dying of an overdose in a dirty, littered apartment; a man crushed by a landslide and dying alone by a riverbank. She came to see that her pain wasn’t just her pain—it was the pain of all who live, all who must die. It wasn’t just her life, it was life itself.

This tenderness for life itself, called by the Buddhists bodhichitta, this largeness of being, comes only when we stop trying to fix things, stop trying to hide from our fundamental fragility. When we let the pain of the world in, when we let our hearts break, we soften and we grow compassionate. Our feeling of isolation, of separation, leaves, and we find we are not alone, but simply a part of the human family, a part of all that is. It is then, and only then, that the healing can begin.

So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

Great Mystery, you have given us a hard and confusing way to go in this world, and yet we acknowledge that this is the world we have been given, with all its joys and all its woes. Help us to understand that we are not alone in our suffering and loss, that we are all part of what is, and we can trust what is. May we learn to be present with the moments we have been given, and out of this presence, grow in love and in compassion. Amen.

BENEDICTION

May your hearts be tender, and may you go forth unafraid, that you may live in the fullness of each moment. Go in love and go in peace. Amen.

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Copyright 2002, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.