By Bruce Davis, Intern Minister

A sermon given December 28, 2003

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Responsive Reading: #639        from 1 John 4

Let us love one another, because love is from God.

Whoever does not love God does now know God, for God is love.

No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us.

God is love, and those who abide in love, abide in God, and God abides in them.

There is no fear in love, for perfect love casts out fear.

Those who say “I love God” and hate their brothers and sisters are liars, for those who do not love a brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.

No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us. 

Reading: “The Best Cigarette,” by Billy Collins

There are many that I miss,

Having sent my last one out a car window

Sparking along the road one night, years ago.

The heralded ones, of course:

After sex, the two glowing tips

Now the lights of a single ship;

At the end of a long dinner

With more wine to come

And a smoke ring coasting into the chandelier;

Or the white beach,

Holding one with fingers still wet from a swim.

How bittersweet these punctuations

Of flame and gesture;

But the best were on those mornings

When I would have a little something going

In the typewriter,

The sun bright in the windows,

Maybe some Berlioz on in the background.

I would go into the kitchen for coffee

And on the way back to the page,

Curled in its roller,

I would light one up and feel

Its dry rush mix with the dark taste of coffee. 

Then I would be my own locomotive,

Trailing behind me as I returned to work

Little puffs of smoke,

Indicators of progress,

Signs of industry and thought,

The signal that told the nineteenth century

It was moving forward.

That was the best cigarette,

When I would steam into the study

Full of vaporous hope

And stand there,

The big headlamp of my face

Pointed down at all the words in parallel lines.

Making Promises: To Ourselves and With Each Other

When my children were growing up, we made a yearly ritual of New Year’s resolutions. Before Christmas we’d build a gingerbread house, and for breakfast on New Year’s we’d eat it, dipping the harder chunks into mugs of cocoa. While we munched we chatted about things. Finally we told each other some of what we planned to do in the New Year. The success of this ritual was the warmth of family time. Results on the resolutions were spotty.

The gingerbread ritual was actually a little ironic. The kids might vow to eat less candy in the year ahead—while pulling a cinnamon gum-drop off the chimney. I’d more often than not announce my plan to exercise more and to eat less. Starting tomorrow. Today’s a holiday.

It’s not that we don’t intend to follow through on our resolutions. It’s just that some resolutions seem to fade in their significance after a while. What felt like such a good idea on the morning of January First doesn’t seem so compelling a month later. The day-to-day realities of our lives, the busy-ness, the responsibilities, the crises, can take precedence over our well-meaning promises.

I think that this is the nature of promises. If the promise that I make to myself or with another person didn’t have the possibility of being broken, it wouldn’t be a promise. It would simply be a willed action, achieving the desired results with certainty. Promises mean that it’s hard sometimes to do what I will but that I’ll try to do it anyway.

My father tells me the story about how he quit smoking. “What I realized,” he says, “Is that I had to quit after the last cigarette I smoked, not after the next one.” So he stopped after the last one. That was seventy years ago. Lucky thing. He’s now 90 and in vibrant health. It was hardly even a promise to himself. It was really just a willed decision, and he had the willpower to make it stick the first time. For many of us, it’s not that easy.

It was different for me. I promised to myself that I would quit smoking many times before I finally made it. Probably ten times. It is not that I’m weak willed, because I’m not. Like most smokers, it just wasn’t enough to decide to stop. I needed more help than that. Moreover, the force of will is over rated. A person may be able to push herself to a high level of achievement against all kinds of odds, but in the process she may forget the relationships with and the personal needs of her teammates. It’s as if we humans are not meant to live by will alone.

For me quitting smoking was a struggle that went on for several years, sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing. Like Billy Collins in our reading, I enjoyed the way cigarettes seemed to enhance certain experiences. Nonetheless, I committed myself to quitting, again and again. I hated turning back to the cigarettes. I hated the damage to my health. I hated my inability to keep this agreement with myself. When we struggle to keep promises, to ourselves and with each other, we sometimes treat ourselves, and each other, harshly. Which doesn’t help anyone.

I am not alone in this struggle with tobacco, and the industry does all it can to seduce people, especially teenagers nowadays, into this subtle but powerful addiction. Successful smoking cessation programs say that it takes an average of seven significant quit attempts to become a non-smoker. That means making the promise seven times. But it also means breaking the promise six.

You’d think that a student of health care would have known enough to exercise regularly, to keep body-weight under control, and to avoid tobacco in the first place. But keeping promises is not just about knowing the right answers. Sometimes it’s hard to keep our agreements. After an evening meeting at the church last week, at the end of a long day, I was exhausted. I stopped by Safeway to pick up some coffee for the next morning. I can’t tell you how loudly the pizza beckoned to me, smiling at me with pepperoni eyes from the refrigerated case at the end of the aisle. When I got home I ate the whole thing. So, tiredness is one enemy to our commitments.

Busy-ness is another. “Gotta be at work early to get the project done. No time today for a jog or stretches.” I have a sign on my mirror at home. Five yoga stretches every morning. That’s all. But at this point I only get to it a couple of times a week. That’ll be one for the gingerbread and cocoa ritual again this year.

But, I think that there’s a deeper reason why we sometimes break our promises to self and others. It has to do with our intention at the point of promise-making. If we make commitments in a spiritual context, we will find that they are more enduring. I believe that this spiritual dimension of agreements applies whether I am promising to me or to you. Let me explain.

In my medical work and in seminary I learned about twelve-step spirituality, the guiding wisdom of Alcoholics Anonymous, Alanon, and other twelve-step organizations. The medical fact about alcoholism and drug abuse is that twelve-step spirituality is the single most effective approach going. If you want to make a promise to yourself about an alcohol problem, the best thing to do is to become an active twelve-step member. Go to AA. Follow the steps. Their literature and their meetings are full of practical advice. Don’t get too tired, too sad, or too mad—you’re flirting with danger. Enter into the process of recovering, making that promise again day after day, lifelong. Never slip into the complacency that now I’m a success. Pride cometh before a fall. When tough times come up, and they will, call for help. Right away. These practical tools can be helpful to any of us.

Yet, it’s the spiritual context of the twelve-step approach that really supports recovery. You rely not on your self in the sense of your ego. Reliance on a higher power, a spiritual power greater than your limited self, a power of your own naming, a power that you personally experience, is critical to the commitment to recovery. Any promise you make to yourself or with others is powerfully supported in the context of your spiritual grounding, whatever that may be.

Let’s say that I resolve to sit down twice a day for 20 or 30 minutes to meditate. I know it’ll be good for my blood pressure, and I know it’ll lessen the stress that I am feeling in my life. But how am I going to find an extra 40 minutes? Then again, what if meditation turns out to be the answer to my spiritual longing? What if I feel it strengthening my spiritual grounding? Then the time spent may become a blessing instead of a barrier. Keeping my blood pressure down becomes just a secondary benefit.

One of my favorite theologians is Martin Buber, whose insightful book I and Thou is a must read for those who want to increase the awareness of Spirit in their lives. For Buber there are two distinctly different ways that we can be in relationship. If our connection assumes that I or the other is merely a physical object to be used and manipulated, the relationship is said to be with an “it.” This is the “I – it” relationship. But if our connection assumes that I and the other are persons or souls meeting, the relationship is said to be with a “Thou.” This is the essence of what Buber calls the “I – Thou” relationship. In Buber’s theology, a promise made in the context of an I-it relationship is an agreement of use between one object and another. If a promise is made in the context of an I-Thou relationship, with myself or with another person, the agreement is supported by its spiritual and relational context.

My contention here is this.  Promises that serve deeply personal or soul needs are a lot more likely to be kept. I was talking with a friend a few days ago who shared with me that there has been one reason above all that makes it possible for him to stay away from cigarettes: his relationship with his children. He loves them deeply, and he experiences a clear need to watch them grow up. In the context of this love, he decides every day not to smoke.

If we make a promise in the context of what Buber calls the I-it relationship, that’s a contract. The contract specifies what I’ve agreed to and what rewards or punishments might goad me into keeping my word. A covenant is a promise made in the I-Thou context. Often, in the setting of our jobs, we operate with contracts. The promise made in a marriage or committed partnership, based on abiding love between two people, is a covenant. If we make a covenant with another person, it plays out differently from a contract.

Let’s say I promise my partner that I will keep the yard in better condition this year. This would be a meaningful promise but a tough one to do, since I am in Portland for most of the year, and our yard is in Seattle. In a contractual agreement, I would see her as the party called “wife” and myself as the party called “hubby,” and I would see the yard-duty detailed in a list on the refrigerator door: trimming, weeding, digging, mowing…. It can be a long list of chores. In the relational mode of “I-Thou,” in the context of covenanted relationship, it is a different story. This is not the party of wife, but my beloved life-partner Mary. We’ve been together 25 years. She loves to have the garden colorful and producing organic vegetables all year long. The garden is part of her spiritual life, as it is mine. The garden itself comes into an “I-Thou” context when I visualize the pear trees I planted when my daughter was born, when I imagine the compost pile reducing to humus to support next year’s growth, or when I remember last year’s abundant ripe tomatoes. I am in a covenanted relationship with a sacred place called “garden” and a sacred person called Mary.

With the contracted promise between wife and hubby, I might be able to will myself to do the chores for a while, depending on the incentives. In the context of a loving relationship with Mary and garden, I will overcome significant barriers, naturally, to be a gardener again this year.

The same quality of relational promise that operates within an individual or in a committed partnership can thrive at the level of a community, as well. A covenanted community involves deep, soul-level relationships in a group of people who experience their interconnections in Spirit as the primary source of their being together. Such a community may be known as a fellowship, as we may recall in the first installment of Tolkien’s Ring trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring. I read these stories to my children when they were young. Now, as adults, they decided that they wanted to see the final film of this trilogy as a family on Christmas afternoon. It is well-done, and all of us were weeping. A family can be a covenanted community.

Our religious community, First Unitarian Church, is itself a powerful example of covenanted community. Our mission statement suggests that the promises made by the members of this religious body live in the mode of I-Thou relationships. In that document we find these words:

we covenant together:

*To create a welcoming community of diverse individuals;

*To promote love, reason, and freedom in religion;

 In a covenanted community like ours we will find many differences, even conflicts, among us. But our differences will always remain in the context of our loving promises to each other. Universalist forefather Hosea Ballou distills community covenant wonderfully for me. When I am called to a church one day, I will put his words over the door of my office.

If we agree in love,

There is no disagreement that can do us any injury,

But if we do not,

No other agreement can do us any good.

A promise made in abiding love, to God, to neighbor, to community or to self, is a promise that is more likely to be kept than one not made in love—as long as the love is present. The problem here is that we are human beings. We are by our human nature imperfect. If we were gods or angels we might live with love alone, faithful always to our promises. As human beings the truth is that our love sometimes fades. From time to time we forget our covenants. I may want to sustain the experience of the I-Thou connection, using Buber’s language, but sometimes all of us lapse into treating ourselves and each other as “it’s.”

Though I intend loving-kindness to myself, I may nonetheless treat myself harshly for perceived shortcomings. Though I experience loving intimacy with another person, it is likely that our love will grow and fade and grow again. Though we agree in love together as a congregation, there may be times that we forget covenant and get caught up in conflicts that ultimately matter less than our web of inter-connection. Though I may at times sense the sweet presence of God, or Spirit, what Buber would call pure “Thou,” it is also true for me that even that connection fades from time to time. I may begin to pray to God as an “it,” like the Janis Joplin song that says, “Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz….”

It’s because we are human. We are the promise-making, promise-breaking, reconciliation-seeking people. Being harshly self-critical of our struggle with promises does not help us to get back into the I-Thou quality of relating. Guilt is never the answer. We should be gentle with ourselves in our humanness. The answer to the reality of broken covenants in our lives is this: forgiveness. To forgive ourselves. To forgive each other. To remember how it is that we long to be connected at a spiritual level. It’s the first step to renewing the soul bond that we will build again.

A Sufi from Bangladesh who teaches at Seattle University offers a practice of self-forgiveness that goes like this. When we becoming harsh with ourselves, our tendency is to think, “Oh, that was stupid!” or “That was poorly done!” Harsh self-talk erodes our grounding in Spirit, taking us away from our ability to sustain covenants. This Sufi suggests that we begin any self-critical statement compassionately and the rest of the statement will follow in love. Like this: “Dear Bruce, there you go again. My brother, I believe you can do better next time.” To err is human. Accepting ourselves and each other wholly is to accept not only our perfection, but also the reality our broken-ness. For this is the starting point for our healing.

Decades ago now an important relationship in my life ended. For several years in covenant with each other, with rich experiences of the I-Thou dynamic as a couple, we both felt our broken-ness when we could no longer sustain our life promises. I felt sad and alone. I felt like a failure. After some years, I grew into a kind of forgiveness for her and for me.

I think the first step in my healing was when I started making bread. She had made bread for us. Now I would be a baker. It was the symbol of a new covenant, a reconnection with my Self at a soul level. Bread making became one of many meditations that opened into new covenants with Spirit and with other people. For me there is tough grace in that broken relationship so many years ago. Through broken-ness I discovered a whole new dimension of Spirit in my life—a whole new quality of being in covenant with others.

We keep our promises in love, and we live our covenants. As best we humanly can. From time to time we slip up. It’s sad, maybe, but as persons learning from life how to love, its inevitable. We are the promise-making, promise-breaking, reconciliation-seeking, covenant-renewing people. Such is our wholeness.  Amen.

Prayer after sermon

Holy Spirit of Love,

We know you are with us

When we accept ourselves wholly, including our imperfections.

We know you are with us

When we find friendship or partnership with other persons,

Even when we struggle with disagreements.

We know you are with us

When, as a church family, we covenant to affirm our intention

To serve together in faith, in love, and in justice. 

Holy One,

We ask that you walk our paths with us

And support us in our commitments

In the New Year that lies ahead.

Amen.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright 2003, Bruce Davis, Intern Minister.  All rights reserved.