by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

We come to this place today

To feel the presence of the Mystery

To experience the awe and wonder of existence;

And to commit ourselves once again to cleave to truth

And to live with hope and thanksgiving.

Come now, and let us worship together!

Over the years, over time, I have learned to listen to my heart—to this “exceedingly faint and tiny leading,” in the words of philosopher Paul Brunton.  I came across his words, I came across this phrase, somewhere—I can’t even remember where—and it struck me with its truth.  That’s how I know what to do, what to choose, where to go—if I will but listen, this exceedingly faint and tiny leading will give me sound and sure direction. 

We humans have two hemispheres in our brain, each with a different function.  Ever since this was discovered, we posited that the left brain—the side that is linear, sequential, and analytical—is superior: in fact, we dubbed this side “dominant” or “major.”  Language, reasoning, mathematics, the scientific method—all these come from the left brain.  The right hemisphere of the brain was named the “inferior” or “minor” brain by early researchers.  It is holistic and synthetic, pulling together messages from various sources and giving us images, perceptions, intuitions.  It is the source of conscience and creativity.  It brings us music, art, poetry, religious experience.

Like most of us, I am distrustful of the right side—after all, my hunches, my intuitions, are not subject to logic, and in this culture, logic and reason are the ground of truth that we stand upon.  We “think it through.”  We “weigh the options.”  We say, “Use your head.”  We warn against the foolishness of desire.  We say that our feelings will betray us.  The fact is that we need both sides of our brain to function well, and it seems to me that the left should be subordinate to the right.  Wisdom, the synthesis of truth that we need, comes from the right brain—as I see it, the left brain gives us the pieces and the right brain puts them together; the left gives us the tools of language and reason, and the right synthesizes and gives us meaning.  Albert Einstein put it like this.  He said, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.  We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

Robert Thompson, an airline pilot, tells about how he was able to dodge death one afternoon.  He walked into a convenience store to buy a few magazines and for some reason he was suddenly afraid, and he turned around and walked out.  Later that day he heard about the shooting.  He had left the store just before a police officer happened in and was shot dead by a man he surprised in the middle of a robbery.  Thinking back, Thompson remembered the customer with the big heavy jacket on, on this hot day.  He remembered that the clerk seemed nervous.  And he remembered that there were two men in a station wagon in the parking lot, with the engine running.  The unconscious mind put all the pieces together and gave him the answer he needed.  At no time is the brain more efficient than when the organism is in danger.  When you have a hunch that you are unsafe, pay attention to it.  Don’t dismiss it, or rationalize it away. 

But now I want to move into an arena that is beyond the efficient brain synthesizing information.  Sometimes we seem to get knowledge from a source that transcends anything that we would have any reasonable way to know—from, one might say, a transcendent source.  Don’t ask me how this works, but I know that it does.  It happens in big and little ways.  Just last Saturday night I was finishing up my sermon but hadn’t printed it out when I got a call from one of our Board members, Margo Clark, wanting me to e-mail her some information.  I had an uneasy feeling about it—something told me, Marilyn, if you leave this manuscript, it’s not going to come back.  But logic took over, of course, and I got out of the document, e-mailed the message, and then tried to get back in—and I was right, I couldn’t.  The text kept flashing on the screen and then disappearing, over and over again.  Since it was around 8:30 or so, and I found myself unable to retrieve the sermon, I was pretty upset.  I had Margo still on the phone, and you know Margo, she was making little jokes and laughing and I was laughing and saying, “It’s you’re fault I don’t have a sermon, I hate you!”  I finally was able to retrieve the sermon—but how did I know that was going to happen?

I have always gotten into trouble when I have denied those inner messages.  I married a man that logic said was the right man for me—a good man who would be a good father, a good provider, a man with good values.  I didn’t love him, but I should love a man like this, I reasoned, and I would in time grow to love him.  My heart was trying so hard to speak, and I wouldn’t listen.  I had to take tranquillizers to get down the aisle on my wedding day.

And then there was the infamous job interview.  Some of you have heard me tell this story before, but it bears telling again.  I was a single mom desperately needing a job, a social worker during the early 1980s when Reagan was elected President and social work programs were being shut down for lack of funding.  The director of the agency wanted me to work there—I knew that—and when she asked me near the end of the interview what I thought, I looked her in the eye and with all of my insides screaming “No!” said to her, “I would really love to work in this agency”—which was, of course, a bald-faced lie.  At that very moment, the light bulb fell out of the fixture above, fell onto my head, and burst into a thousand pieces.  Yes, I took the job, and I was out of place there, and I suffered in that position.

Do I regret these decisions?  There is little in my life that I regret.  I just don’t get a lot of mileage out of regret.  Like the rest of us, I blunder through my days, and hurt myself and sometimes hurt others as I go—but I suppose I do the best I know how to do at the time.  There are consequences.  I try to forgive myself and learn and do better next time.  These days I try not to make a choice because I can’t see a better alternative.  I wait until there is one.  For example, I did that when I chose to come here as your minister.  After interviewing at nine other churches over a two-year period, and really questioning whether or not I was even supposed to be a parish minister, then I came here, and within hours, I knew.  I told the search committee, “This is where I’m called to be.”  It took them a couple of months to come to the same conclusion, but there was something moving there between us, and I can only call it the Spirit, and that is still what bonds us to this day, almost 13 years later. 

I believe that there is this Spirit, this soul-place, at the core of each of us, and existing there is an intelligence that utterly transcends out own.  Robert Johnson writes about this “golden thread,” as he calls it, that is a constant companion to him, a guide that leads him unerringly where he needs to go.  This is the thread that pulls us toward holy work that is meant for us, but in smaller ways, if we listen, will guide us to the book to pick up, or which person to call to help us take the next step, or the sense of where to go with our writing or painting.  This is the thread that inspiration travels along, that makes meaning suddenly come out of confusion, and the final puzzle piece fall into place.

This divine center is also the source of conscience. Sometimes we face some kind of moral dilemma—we have a choice to make.   I believe that when we listen to this heart place, this faint and tiny leading, that we actually know what is the right thing to do.  Specialist Joseph Darby was the 24-year-old who reported the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison to the Criminal Investigations Division of the Army.  Others who were disturbed reported the abuse to their superior officers, but nothing was done.  Darby understood that, and went over their heads.  Records show that even doctors and medics were stitching up wounds of the detainees, giving shots for dislocated shoulders, noting sexual abuse in their records, and never reporting it.  Pretty amazing that this 24-year-old boy would have the courage to do so—though he at first sent a disk of the pictures anonymously, because he feared retaliation.  So what gave him the courage to do what his superiors failed to do?  “The Christian in me says it’s wrong,” Specialist Darby told investigators.  “I knew I had to do something.  I didn’t want to see any more prisoners being abused because I knew it was wrong.”  How did Darby know?  This abuse was the norm.  His officers were condoning it.  He was the one who was out of sync.  “The Christ in me says its wrong.”  Whether or not we are Christians, we all have the cosmic Christ within—that is, whether you call it Jesus or Buddha or Mohammed or whatever—and that is the Compassionate One, the Divine, the dwelling place of love. 

If I am right, if there is this inner guide there for all of us, how then can we go there, to this source, and how can we be true to it more often in our lives?

First of all, let it be said that it is not a matter of finding God, or achieving union with the Beloved.  All mystics from virtually all traditions have the sense of the presence of God as a given, as an eternal and ever-abiding reality which simply has to be accepted and recognized, not achieved.  So we do not in fact have to ask that God be with us—God is with us at all times—it is we who stray, it is we who are blinded to the holiness within. 

We need to start from a place of faith.  St. Anselm said:  “I <do not> wish to understand in order that I may believe, but I believe in order that I may understand.”  This is the place that we get so hung up as Unitarian Universalists—most of us are so left-brain, so used to figuring out everything with our wonderful minds, that we want to go about our religion that way, too.  But sometimes we need to say with Mary Oliver in that wonderful poem Tom read:  I know enough already, or I know enough to be perfectly content not knowing.  It is in this state of not-knowing that we can be open to the deeper knowing of the Spirit.

Sometimes when I come to a place of confusion and frustration in my life, and I know that I don’t know, I will do an exercise that I call “a dialogue with God.”  It’s very simple.  I take some blank paper to a quiet place and at the top I write the date and then the heading “Dialogue with God.”  Then I start with a capital M for Marilyn, and I just wait and see what emerges.  Sometimes it starts with my feelings of frustration or sadness or whatever.  Then when that statement comes, I write down a capital B, for Beloved, and I wait and see what comes.  I don’t think.  I just wait for the inner voice to speak.  And it does.  And I always learn something.  Part of what I learn is that I am loved, which is always a bit of a surprise to me, but you see the voice that I hear is a benevolent voice.  And I usually am reassured, and often find guidance.  I save these dialogues, and when I look back at them months or even years later, I am often amazed at the truth they told me before it unfolded in my life.  In case you want to try doing this exercise yourself, just remember that this is a relationship, not a Ouija board.  This is a way to open your heart and a way to listen to what is there.

Sometimes tears come during this exercise, or during prayer, because I find that I must do some emotional cleansing before I can get to the center.  If I stay in a place of anger or blame or frustration, then those feelings will block the authenticity I seek.  Underneath those feelings always, always rests hurt and sadness, wells and wells of tears it seems, and when I can get to that place, I am then open.  I have to get past pride and ego and get down to the hurt. 

For many months now, the direction our country has been going in has been so distressing for me that I carry that heaviness with me most all the time.  I’m referring to the agony of war—like this latest news that we may have mistakenly attacked a wedding party.  (I think about the wonderful, joyous weddings we have had lately and how we would feel if mortar shells fell upon the guests gathered there).  I think about the environmental degradation, the eroding of our precious democracy.  I know many of you are heavy with the state of things, too.  The pain we carry just now can turn to anger and sarcasm and violence of various kinds if we’re not careful.  If we’re not careful, it will drown out that faint and tiny leading from within, and we dare not let that happen.  So we have to keep opening our hearts, keep letting in the hurt and the sadness.  Our comfort is that we have one another.  There is so much goodness, so much love, so much commitment gathered here in this sanctuary today.  We will go through this together, and together we will create a better world than we yet have seen.

People often tell me that they cry in church, and they wonder why.  Well, of course, we cry.  We come into this darkened sanctuary from the world where we live, the world of fact and knowledge, carrying so much inside, and we unburden ourselves of this world for a while, here in the safety of community, and we remember the deeper truths that elude us in our everyday lives.  The music takes us to that place where we are vulnerable.  We rise together and sing “Spirit of Life.”  We sing together, for compassion, for justice; we sing “roots hold me close,” for we would be held by the best that we have known; we sing “wings set me free,” for we would be free of pettiness and grasping and all that keeps us ground down in the dirt of living.  “Wings set me free.”  Of course, we cry.  I’m so grateful that we have a place where so many feel free to weep and to laugh and to be precisely who we are.

For the seeker, the most important thing is the strength of the longing.  In that longing, we find our essence is being drawn to its source, and that source is absolute love.  We sense that there is a peace beyond all understanding there, and so our whole being begins to lean toward this pulling.  There are times, moments, when we will feel desires dissolve; all seems in balance, nothing should be changed, and we are not separate from others, or from the earth.  There is a sense of the absence of time.  We will feel an overwhelming sense of goodwill and compassion towards all living creatures.  We know beyond a doubt, at least for that moment, that we are fundamentally Spirit, that we have come to know our real identity. 

These glimpses of the Holy cannot be planned or manipulated; they will come when they will come.  They are touchstones of a reality that needs no authority other than its own.  They bring the assurance that there is an original goodness that is intact and that holds you above all the sound and the fury that life brings.  Allow yourself the longing, and listen then for the exceedingly faint and tiny leading from the heart.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

We come here today, Beloved, battered by the storms of life, and longing for peace in our world and in our own hearts.  We know you are with us; forgive us when we forget and in our anger and fear, pull away so that we can no longer hear your voice.  We are thankful for this community that we call church.  May we be ever faithful to the movement of your Spirit in our lives and in this institution.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

May the peace of God go with you; may the love of God be made manifest in your lives.