by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

We come together once again

To open our hearts,

To transform our lives,

To love one another.

Come now, and let us worship together!

Let me be the first to admit that restraint is not one of my salient qualities—in fact, on the Enneagram, a kind of spiritual personality typing, my type is 8, the “boss,” and my ruling passion is “lust,” meaning that I am forever wanting more, more, more of whatever I find to be a good thing.  If I’m shopping, and I find a sweater that looks just great, why not buy two?  If one helping of potato salad is good, why not have another?  On the positive side, I am a voracious worker and a big thinker; on the negative side, I tend to take on way too much stuff.  I have a huge appetite for living, for learning, for creating, and sometimes I just overdo it.

I must confess that I have a certain affection and sympathy for Mae West, who was certainly greatly afflicted with a lustful nature.  She was known for her clever quips, such as “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful”; “I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it”; and “When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I’ve never tried before.”

When I have a problem, I’m usually not patient: I like to hit it head on, full force.  I like to get done with it, as quickly as possible. Process is just so boring to me.  I was that way even as a child.  I remember trying to untangle a ball of string and pulling and jerking at it and just getting it more tangled in the process.  My father reached over and took it from me, and he started gently shaking the mass of string, loosening up the whole thing, and then gradually, easily, it started giving up its knots and its tightness and hung loose in his hands.  I could have used that experience as a metaphor for handling all kinds of situations my whole life long—I could have, but I didn’t.

You know, as a people, Americans are lustful and impatient—we go after more and bigger and better.  We are mainly a practical people, and we want to know things, or do things, not just sit around reflecting, or enjoying ourselves.  If this country were a book, what kind of book would it be?  Certainly not a book of poetry, because we’re not into suggestion and subtlety.  Not a novel, because story renders meaning, and meaning is not chiefly where we’re at.  Not a book of history, because Lord knows we care nothing for the lessons of the past.  At best we would be a brilliant scientific text, explaining some natural phenomenon, and at worst we would be a shallow self-help book that oversimplifies the world and gives us the dry crust of helpful hints rather than any substantial bread to chew on.

It’s the holiday season, and Christmas stuff went on sale before Thanksgiving.  I hate it when I’m thinking Pilgrims and turkeys and I see Christmas trees and Santas in all the stores.  Christmas is a religious holiday, but the newspapers are filled with what kind of news in regard to Christmas?  Economic news.  How much did people spend on Black Friday, compared to last year.  How well are certain companies expecting to do this year, as opposed to other companies.  Speaking of Black Friday, I was in Chicago with my family over Thanksgiving, and some of stores there opened at 5:00 a.m., so shoppers could rush in and take advantage of the bargains.  Can you imagine, after having a Thanksgiving dinner, getting up the next morning at 5:00 a.m. to get a bargain on an I-Pod? 

Our individual grasping fits well with our national greed, which is reflected in our country’s foreign policies.  The personal really is political.  Even the least bit of restraint would have kept us out of Iraq.  But, hey, we need the oil.  I ran into this family recently (not members of this church)—now they are not at all well-to-do—in fact, they are struggling financially.  But they own a Recreational Vehicle (RV) and an SUV and a van.  They go on family trips in the summer time, and the RV, pulling the van behind it, gets 12 miles to the gallon.  Why do we need to drive big honkin’ SUV’s?  Why do we need a tank to go to the grocery store?  When will we make the connection between our habits of living and our foreign policy?

To shift gears for a minute here, there’s a word that’s falling out of favor these days, and I want to talk about it for a few minutes in relation to the subject of restraint—that word is civility.  Whatever happened to good manners?  I think many people think that manners are a relic of the past, and good riddance.  But manners are nothing more than a kind of restraint that gives deference and care to others, that reconciles our own needs with the needs of others.  Many young people use profanity freely in public places, and rarely does someone gives an elder a seat on a crowded bus or tram.  What accounts for this shift in civility?

The other day I went to Trader Joe’s over in Hollywood to do a little shopping, and there were just no parking places in their lot.  I circled around for a while, and then I spotted a place.  I was going to have to make one wrong turn to get to it, but oh well.  Well, I found my car facing off with the car of a young man in his 30’s—a good-looking fellow, with tanned skin and stylish blond hair.  He was pointing to the spot, as if to say, “This is my spot, Lady!”  So I stopped my car, got out, and went over to talk with him.  “Hey, I’ve been circling around a while . . .” I started saying.  And he glared at me, and he said, “And you turned the wrong way!”  I thought, gee, if he wants a place that bad, let him have it, so I shrugged my shoulders and went on out and found a place on the street.  Then in the store I happened to roll my cart past him and his cart several times, and I glanced over at him, but he wouldn’t look at me.  I wanted to go up and say to him, “Is that the way your Momma raised you—to take parking places away from women your mother’s age?”  But I restrained myself.

Though restraint does not seem to be high on our list of virtues in this contemporary culture, we know that all religious traditions emphasize restraint.  Just to mention two of those traditions, for Christians, Lent is a 40-day period of fasting—usually giving up something special starting on Ash Wednesday, a day in which worshipers are marked with ashes, reminding them of their mortality, and concluding on Easter Sunday.  It is a time of self-examination and repentance.  Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar.  Every day during this month, Muslims around the world spend the daylight hours in a total fast.  This is a time of sacrifice and purification of the soul.  During Ramadan, every part of the body must be restrained.  The tongue must not be used for backbiting and gossip.  The eyes must not look upon unlawful things.  The hand must not touch anything that does not belong to it.  The ears must refrain from listening to idle talk or obscene words.  The feet must refrain from going to sinful places.

These special times of restraint ask the believer to pull back from our daily pressures and our pleasures.  We make space for acknowledging where we have fallen short and take time to reflect upon how we really want to live.

One of the most precious gifts of restraint is that of the restraint of our own speaking—that is, the gift of listening, in service to others.  Have you ever had the experience of trying to express something that was hard to express, something that you could hardly find the words for, because maybe it was deep within you, or maybe you were full of grief or pain, and you were trying to tell someone about that—and then that person speaks back as though he or she really didn’t hear you at all?  Or perhaps just uses what you said as a springboard to talk about themselves?  Or perhaps the now-common intrusion, the cell phone, cuts you off, and your companion reaches into her purse to give attention to whoever might be ringing her up.  That makes me feel so discounted.

What a rare and wonderful thing is a good listener!  A good listener listens with the whole heart and tries to hear the message of your heart.  The words we speak are only a small part of our communication—there is the wordless language of the body, the tone of the voice, the pauses, the breath.  When one listens to us whole-heartedly, we somehow become better people than we were—we might start out whining and end up with a good deal more courage than we thought we had.  In pouring out our grief, we can sometimes work our way through in one short conversation, to a moment of thanksgiving—if our friend is listening in loving attention.

Heartful listening, though, is not easy—it’s is an active, not a passive act.  A certain maturity is required, an ability to transcend one’s own ego needs for a while and be there, fully, for another.  And listening well requires a kind of patient expectation, a kind of not-knowing, and being open to the new.  Listening becomes no less than a kind of holy activity when the listener so totally accepts the person who is speaking that the speaker begins to put words together in ways he didn’t know he was capable of, and to find meaning that was hidden somewhere in the recesses of his soul.  Listening takes on that kind of blessed quality when the listener has the patience that comes with faith, and so does not need to control the speaker—he has faith that the speaker has the wisdom that he needs and he has faith in what that person is becoming.  Listening is never cheap.  You empty yourself, and you receive another.

And then what is the speaker to do, to enter into this sacred relationship of the sharing of words?  As with the listener, the speaker must enter into a genuine state of “not knowing,” which is a spiritually receptive place, a place of restraint that allows truth to unfold from within.  We must try to speak without exercising power over the other, but out of a place of humility and sincere searching.  Ideology has no place here, and we do not rush to conclusions, but we circle round, holding back, resisting, restraining ourselves that the unconscious might do its work, that the Spirit might be invited in. 

I heard someone say one time—and this was during a desperate time in her living—she said, “Maybe I’ve got my ladder against the wrong wall.”  But when we examine that metaphor, I have to wonder if any wall is the right figure of speech.  Or any climbing.  And does the direction always have to be up?  It’s a very logical metaphor for our culture, but what if clambering, climbing, competing is not the way to fulfillment?  What is the path of the soul?  That path is waiting, listening, trusting, and receiving.

It is not an easy path.  It requires a radical kind of faith, a submission, a relinquishment of desire.  But it is here that true freedom lies, for when we give up what we know and when we give up what we thought we wanted, then we make room for the authentic desires of our hearts to be met.  We are harnessed to the Spirit, in one sense, and so we are restrained, but we take on the harness gladly like the great racehorse takes on his, knowing that it is only through this harness, this restraint, that we can be truly free and, so restrained, use our powers to the fullest extent.

Let me share with you a story from the Zen tradition.  The Zen master Hakuin lived in an ordinary neighborhood, where he was known and praised by all as one living a pure life.

Now it happened that in this neighborhood there lived a family who kept a grocery store.  The hard-working parents had a beautiful young daughter for whom they had great hopes.  One day, without warning, they found that their daughter was expecting a child.  Oh, the shame and disappointment!  They hounded her to tell them who the father was, but she would not.  Finally after much badgering, the daughter said that the father of her child was the Zen master Hakuin.  Imagine, of all people!  The parents were furious!  They went to the Zen master and confronted him with this terrible news, but all he would say at every accusation was, “Is that so?”  Soon after, Hakuin lost his reputation with his neighbors, but he was not disquieted by this.

When the child was born, they brought it to live with the Zen master, who accepted the baby and cared for it quite well.  He got milk and everything that was needed, and otherwise he went on as before.  The little one flourished.

After a year, the mother could stand it no longer and confessed to her parents that her real lover was a young man who worked at the nearby fish market.  They realized that they had accused the Zen master unjustly and were the cause of his lost reputation.  What a mess!  The parents and their daughter went back to the Zen master to get the child.  This time they were very apologetic.  They begged forgiveness and told him how sorry they were, over and over.  But when Hakuin handed them back the healthy one-year-old, all he said as he closed his door was, “Is that so?”

How is it that we might be able to be increasingly free of what others expect us to be or want us to be or tell others that we are?  How is it that we might be our own true selves, answering to ourselves and to our God?  The poet Hafiz put it this way.  He said at the end of one of his poems:

“I once asked a bird,

‘How is it that you fly in this gravity

of Darkness?’

She responded,

‘Love lifts

Me.’

Yes, that reminds me of the words of that old Baptist hymn that I grew up singing: “Love lifted me, love lifted me, when nothing else could help, Love lifted me.”

We strip down the ego, bit by bit, until we know that we don’t belong to ourselves at all, that nothing is left but a path for light to enter.  We allow ourselves to become—not stiff and strong like steel, but able to bend and bow, like a sapling in the wind.  We learn that we must be sustained every minute, and that we are sustained by Grace and by Grace alone—and the less sure we are, and the more vulnerable we become, the more we will be sustained.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Beloved, these words frighten us—words like vulnerable, relinquishment—for we have learned that to be strong is to control, to take, not to make space for others, and not to not know.  Help us to let down our guard, to be open to the nudgings of the Spirit, that we might grow into the joys of real freedom.  Help us to learn restraint, that we might prepare ourselves to open and to receive.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

As you go from this place today and go out into a world of noise and clamor, remember the path of the soul: ask and you shall receive, knock and the door will be opened unto you.