by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given January 25, 2004

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Life is a gift for which we are grateful.

We gather in community

To remember who we are,

And how we wish to live.

Come, let us worship together.

Let me begin this morning with a story that all of you know, the story known as “The Ugly Duckling.”  (First published in 1845)

It was near the time of harvest, and everything was going as it should at the farm.  The boys were pitching hay, the men were picking the fruits of the field.  Everything was going as it should for the mother duck, too, who was hatching her brood.  One by one her eggs began to tremble and shake until the shells cracked and out staggered all her new ducklings.  But there was one egg left, a very big one.  The duck mother decided to sit a little longer, and eventually the big egg began to shudder and roll, and finally out tumbled a big, ungainly creature.

The duck mother cocked her head and looked at him.  She couldn’t help herself:  she pronounced him ugly.  “Maybe this is a turkey,” she thought, “and won’t be able to swim.”  But she saw that when he got to the water, he swam straight and true.  “He is almost handsome,” she thought.  She groomed the ugly duckling’s feathers and licked his cowlicks.

But the other ducks did all they could to harass the ugly duckling.  They flew at him, bit him, pecked him, making him quite miserable.  At first his mother defended him, but then even she grew tired of it all and said, “I wish you would just go away.”  And so the ugly duckling ran away.  Looking extremely bedraggled, he struggled from one strange pond to the next all that winter, sometimes feeling that he could not go on. 

Then spring came, and the water grew warmer, and the duckling noticed how big and strong his wings had become.  They lifted him high over the land.  Down below he saw three beautiful swans, and he felt strangely drawn to them—he flew down to join them.  “What if they don’t like me?” he thought.  “They are such gorgeous creatures.”  But they swam toward him, and when they came close, he looked down at his reflection in the water, and he saw a swan in full dress.  It turned out that he was a swan, a glorious swan!  And for the first time, his own kind came near him and touched him gently and lovingly with their wing tips.  They groomed him with their beaks and swam round him in greeting.  And the children who came to feed the swans bits of bread cried out, “There’s a new one!”  And as children everywhere do, they ran to tell everyone.[1]

This is a story of exile, and a story of coming home.  We have a longing to come in from the cold, to find and join our own kind, those who know us for who we are and love us as we are, those who recognize our beauty.  When we are far from our emotional and spiritual home, we suffer.  We need to find warm waters to swim in.  We long for the life and vitality that issues from being in place. 

We start out in this life not knowing who we are—there is no notion of self at birth.  At 6 or 7 months, a child begins to recognize self as distinct from surroundings.  He will stare at his hand or foot—“This foot is me,” he thinks.  We continue to develop until we have quite a sophisticated sense of who we are, a picture of self that comes through the eyes of others.  We learn to trust the world, or not.  We learn that we are good, or not.  We learn that we have power to choose and to create, or not.  As time goes on, we compare ourselves to others, and decide how we measure up.  We begin to firm up our concept of who we are, and what we are capable of.  We have a kind of movie of our life, and that movie has a theme, and we begin to believe that culturally constructed movie so completely that in fact we may be led far from home.

The problem is, you see, that through no fault of their own, grown-ups socialize a child according to their values; they see the child through their eyes, for these are the only eyes they have.  Sometimes the eyes of these adults, seeing lack in themselves, also see lack in the child.  In addition the culture itself—and ours is not a life-giving culture—the culture itself will give messages to the child about what is good, what is valuable—certain ways of dressing both body and soul, to please.  All of this is not bad—we must be socialized to live together in this world—and yet our own true nature may be badly distorted in this process, so as we mature into adulthood, we must find the way home, to the sacred place that reflects our true nature and our true desire.  We have to see our own unique beauty reflected in the water.

Hopefully, we will grow in understanding and acceptance of self as the years pass, and being approved of will not be our most compelling value—but rather we will come to value living in a way that is congruent with the interior self, the dwelling place of the Divine.  We must develop an inner authority that will support a solid presence. We will then be able to risk displeasing others, for an inner light will have grown stronger and will provide support and direction. We need to know when to yield and when to resist, when to stay and when to go.  This is what we call living with integrity.

It’s a wonderful thing when we see our children becoming their own persons.  Well, it’s mostly wonderful.  I knew my son Madison was on the right track when he came home from school one day, and we had this encounter.  He was eight years old.  Noting that his jacket was unevenly snapped in the front, I said to him, “Madison, you’ve got your jacket snapped up wrong.” He answered, “You know, Mom, people have been saying that to me all day—they’ve been saying, ‘Madison, you’ve got your jacket snapped up wrong,’ and you know what I said to them?  I just said, ‘Wow.’”

Writer Anne Lamott reflects on how she has gradually come into her own.  She writes:  “Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life—it gave me me.  It provided the time and experience and failures and triumphs and friends who helped me step into the shape that had been waiting for me all my life.  I fit into me now—mostly.  I have an organic life finally, not the one people imagined for me or tried to get me to have or the life someone else might celebrate as a successful one—I have the life I dreamed of.  I have become the woman I hardly dared imagine I could be.  There are parts I don’t love—until a few years ago, I had no idea that you could get cellulite on your stomach—but I not only get along with me most of the time now, I am militantly and maternally on my own side.”  She continues, “I believe two things now that I didn’t at 30.  When we get to heaven, we will discover that the appearance of our hips and skin was 127^th on the list of what mattered on this earth.  And I know the truth that I am not going to live forever, and this has set me free.  Eleven years ago, when my friend Pammy was dying at the age of 37, we went shopping at Macy’s.  She was in a wheelchair, with a wig and three weeks to live.  I tried on a short dress and came out to model it for Pammy.  I asked if she thought it made me look big in the thighs, and she said, so kindly, ‘Annie?  You just don’t have that kind of time.’  I live by that story.”[2]

The theories of Sigmund Freud have been questioned and revised, and rightly so, but one principle keeps coming back to me—a human being needs to fulfill himself or herself in two arenas—love and work.  And fulfillment in both of these is dependent on a maturing of a kind of inner authority.  Yes, we—most of us—are obliged to work to make a living, but the self will wither if we work only to make a living.  And love—intimacy is possible only in the context of a differentiated self—we must know our fears, needs, hopes—that is, we must know who we are, and we must respect that self as worthy before we can offer ourselves to another.  One of the biggest temptations of couplehood is compromising that self away, in the name of love, and then hating your partner.

Individuals who have not developed this inner authority often feel a sense of emptiness, because they are constantly having to create and project a self to others, a self that may be far from their own true nature.  Such a person may believe that the hole they feel in their existence comes from something they don’t have but which they can get, and so they are future oriented.  “I’ll be happy when I get out of school,” or “I’ll be happy when I get a better job,” or “I’ll be happy when I get married.”  And happiness never comes, because what they are looking for cannot come from an external source.

When we are in exile from our spiritual home, from this sacred inner light, our unhappiness can manifest itself in various ways.  We can literally become ill—and then we are forced to stop and reflect.  Or we can find that we are angry and in constant conflict.  Everything seems to be going wrong, from the dental work to the automobile.  We can become depressed and withdrawn, or we can whine and complain, or become passive and irresponsible.  These are signals that we need to look for the path back home.

How do we do this?  I won’t tell you that it’s easy, because it isn’t.  What is easy in this culture is to let ourselves be distracted from these interior messages, to take in all sorts of useless information, but not make a quiet space for the intuitive truth that we need.

What if we begin with an assumption?  An assumption that each one of us is in essence a spiritual being in fleshly form, rather than a fleshly being who sometimes has some spiritual experiences?  It’s a different orientation than most of us have, because we have been taught to believe that the real is what we can perceive with our senses—so this hand is real, what I see is real, but intuition, well, that’s not so trustworthy.  And the Holy Spirit—oh, that’s just a superstition.  If we believe we are essentially spirit manifested in flesh, then we begin to see that our life is a miraculous expression of divinity.  I say “miraculous” because there is really no one else like you, and there never will be.  You have a destiny that is unlike any other, and a holy purpose that only you can undertake. 

I was very much moved recently by an essay entitled “Lavender,” by Andre Aciman.  He starts the essay, “Life begins somewhere with the scent of lavender,” and he recalls as a child smelling the lavender cologne his father would splash on before leaving for work each day.  “Smell lavender and I was sheltered, happy, beloved,” he writes.  Then he goes on to say that he spent much of his young adulthood going from shop to shop trying to find the right scent for himself—the right lavender.  He became obsessed with his search.  If only he could find the right one.  At the end of the essay he is in a very different place.  He describes his house in Provence, France, a house surrounded by lavender bushes, where he and his family are staying temporarily.  He’s hanging out clothes on the line, and he reflects:  “I turn around and, before picking up another shirt, I run my fingers through a stalk of lavender nearby.  How easy it is to touch lavender.  To think I fussed so much and for so long—and yet here it is, given to me, the way gold was given to the Incas, who didn’t think twice before handing it over to strangers.  There is nothing to want here.  What I want, I already have.”

He writes [there is]  “the Rosetta stone within each one of us which no one, not even love or friendship, can unburden, the life we think of each day, and the life not lived, and the life half  lived, and the life we wish we’d learn to live while we still have time, and the life we want to rewrite if only we could,  and the life we know remains unwritten and may never be written at all, and the life we hope others may live far better than we have, all of it, for all I know, braided on one thread into which is spun something as simple as the desire to be one with the world, to find something instead of nothing, and having found something, never to let it go, be it even a stalk of lavender.”[3]

“The desire to be one with the world.”  When we are truly at home in our souls, it is not circumstance we seek, but obedience.  We seek a radical independence of this world and at the same time a radical dependence on the Spirit.  You become what your deep, driving desire is.

To be at home, spiritually speaking, means to recognize that you are a particular, a very specific manifestation of the divine—and paradoxically, you are universal, you are a part of all that is.  You are finite and you are infinite. You are the unique wave on the ocean and you are from the sea itself.  When we are at one with the world, we are free to offer ourselves in service.  We know we cannot separate ourselves, the one from the other, and so we grow in compassion.  We know that all experience is experience we hold in common.  So every loss we suffer, every pain and disappointment, can find a place in our hearts, can be found holy, can be given as an offering to life itself.  We need not ask, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” because we know we and our brother are woven from the same cloth and cannot be divided.

I wish I could give you a formula—I wish I could draw you a map so you could find your way home.  But I can only invite you to do what I have been reduced to doing—throwing myself on the mercy of my God.  My will is weak, my vision so blurred at times that I lose my way.  But I come back because I know the other paths lead to ruin.  I come back, and I say in all humility, “Well, I screwed up once again.  Forgive me.  Lead me back in the way I should go.  My heart longs for home.”  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Beloved, we come before you today knowing that all too often we run from life and love, that we fail to find ourselves beautiful, fail to know that we are holy.  We ask for forgiveness when we sell ourselves short and then sell others short.  We ask this day for courage in the face of self-doubt, that we might grow in compassion, for ourselves and for others, that we might give ourselves freely in service, and that we might unfold as the rose upon the stem, becoming the person we were meant to be.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

As you go from this place today, know your beauty, know the holiness within, and manifest that in the world.  Go in love and go in peace.  Amen.