by Leela Sinha, Assistant Minister

A sermon given January 21, 2007

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

When Ralph Waldo Emerson was 29 he stopped being a minister.  He couldn’t take it any more.  Turning his back on generations of ministry in his family, he resigned from his only pastorate and refused to return.

He was, he said, “not interested” in communion.

How does a Christian minister become not interested in the central ritual of his church? 

Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “We all need something to believe in.  To help a [seeker] we have to listen to him or her in mindfulness, provide him with an atmosphere of family and brotherhood, and then help him experience something good, beautiful, and true to believe in.” (Touching Peace, 100)

What if you could believe anything in the world—anything at all?  What would you believe?  What do you believe?

What do you believe, despite logic and bad experiences, despite struggles and conflicts and hopeless days and sleepless nights, despite a perfect life where no faith is necessary, after whatever obstacles you have faced, what remains?  What does your still small voice have to say?

We find out by personal revelation, by conversation, by long conversion.  Sometimes we wake up one morning and we’re just not interested.

And when you know what you believe, how do you let go of the rest of it?

Our culture tends to value longevity, stick-to-it-iveness, and persistence, even when it doesn’t support them.  Our churches tend to imply that it’s better to struggle with something than to leave it.  That may be true . . . but eventually inner wisdom will out, and convenient or not, something will fall away.  Perhaps something will take its place.  Perhaps not.  I think of personal belief as a lacework, with the gaps as important as the threads for showing the design. 

Unlike lace, we don’t usually plan the gaps.  I’m quite certain Emerson didn’t wake up one morning and decide to lose interest in communion because it was convenient for him—he was compelled to speak his truth once he discovered it, because anything else would have been falsehood. Once he began speaking, of course, his actions could not be far behind, and his entire life changed.  He was called, above all else, to live in consonance with his beliefs—to speak what he knew as truth, and to act in accordance with what he said.

As for many of us, the dissonance was too great to withstand; it would have been change which ultimately brought him closer to peace.

So if change is a fundamental part of how we are authentically religious, and if authenticity moves us to a place of peace, then we are compelled to undertake the uncomfortable, inconvenient process of becoming, which we resist, because stasis often appears easier to accomplish, if not easier to live with.  And it might actually be easier if we lived in a static world.  But the very idea of living at all implies motion, change, aging, and transformation.  We transform the elements: water, food, air; we transform ourselves; we are constantly becoming.  This is living.  This is life.

And we call ours a living tradition.

Life is messy.  I know this.  My brother does not.

He was a strange child.  I know all siblings think that about their brothers and sisters at one time or another, but even with the perspective of adulthood I can say with confidence that my brother was unusual.  He was tidy.  Very tidy.  Completely tidy.  With the precision of an engineer he would line up his books.  He would smooth his sheets until they were wrinkle-free.  He would hand wash his t-shirts, and then iron them.  It doesn’t seem to have hurt him: today he is happily studying artificial intelligence in Berkeley.

I can also say with confidence that most of us—his friends, my friends, everyone else—are not like that.  Most of us try for tidy but in the end, reality gets in the way and we slide slowly toward life among the piles: piles of papers on the desk, piles of clothes in the bedroom, piles of dishes in the sink. 

And every one of us gets seized with a cleaning bug eventually.  One day maybe you wake up and wonder why your bedroom looks more like a college dorm than a romantic getaway.  Or maybe your new year’s resolution is to know where all your socks are, and have them clean and matched every Saturday. 

I really do want to be tidier.  So a couple of months ago, giddy with possibilities and tipped off by the internet, I went to Powell’s in search of a book called Apartment Therapy.  Unlike most such books, it is a slim, bright orange paperback, written by Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, who is passionate about working with people, and trained in Waldorf education as well as design.  His premise is that there are underlying reasons why our houses don’t “feel right”—it’s not just that we need to buy another widget to store the stacks of things we’ve accumulated.  One part organizing, two parts personal coaching, the book asks you to do things a little differently.  Begin, he suggests, by sitting someplace you never sit.  Try the floor by your front door.  Then evaluate like you’ve never seen the space before.  What works, what doesn’t work?  What’s clutter, and what’s necessary?  Once you move to clutter-clearing, use a two-step process: establish an Outbox.  The author writes,

[with clutter-clearing] there are two problems: how to sort out the clutter and how to detach from individual items.  Separation anxiety is the far bigger problem.  When faced with two anxiety-provoking decisions—where something should go (its value to the world) and whether one can separate from it (its value to the owner)—most people get stuck and simply hold on to things as a default.  [The outbox] unhitches these two stressful decisions.  It deals with separation first and decides how and where to get clutter out of your apartment later. 

Choose a space that is clearly defined.  This area should be out of the way of daily activities and be a place you can comfortably allow to get messy and chaotic…..you should never be afraid to put something in the Outbox…

Once an item has sat in the Outbox for some time, it releases its hold over the owner and becomes just an ordinary object that one can easily decide what to do with.

--Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, Apartment Therapy (78)

I like this approach, because it allows us to honor things that are important to us even if they don’t get used on a regular basis.  I might not need my baby pictures, but I certainly don’t want to throw them out.  Gillingham-Ryan would say that if I want to keep them I should have a place for them, perhaps a display area for significant items from my childhood.  I should keep it down to a few significant pieces, and then give them the attention and placement they deserve. 

Thank goodness we can let the outbox get messy.  You can have lots of things jumbled up in there: the atheism of your late adolescence and the belief in absolute evil from kindergarten, or the uncertainty about predestination that your aunt planted in you as you graduated from high school.  They don’t have to go together; they don’t have to be a coherent whole.  There doesn’t even need to be logic to what goes in—you can have one idea that holds a place of honor in your life and another, very similar, that you are experimenting going without.  The spiritual outbox is a kind of toy box; like Winnie the Pooh’s “useful pot to put things in” it is helpful because it comes to you empty, and you can put things in, and take them out again, and put things in, and take them out, and put things in . . . it’s all an experiment.

Gordon Atkinson, a liberal Baptist pastor in south Texas who writes online under the name “real live preacher,” writes about an old tradition of his:

I am among the last generation of American males to grow up before video games, VCRs, and cable television. Without easy entertainment inside the house, we went outside and played catch.

You know playing catch. You grab your mitt and your best friend grabs his. You get a baseball and you throw it back and forth until it gets too dark to see the ball. You do this every day until throwing and catching is as natural and easy as walking. Around 13 you start trying to throw curve balls. You put your fingers to the side of a seam and snap your wrist hard as you throw the ball. Then you shout with great hope, “Did it break?” Your friend yells back that he thinks maybe it did, a little.

There is a secret to throwing a baseball. You can’t think too much about it, and you certainly never try to aim the ball. You lock your eyes on your target, rotate your shoulders, cock your arm, and shift your weight. <snip> You are strong and the ball zips along a straight line and pops into your friend’s glove. The sound of the ball hitting the mitt is a wonderful thing.

<snip>

[Unfortunately, after college my] mitt ended up in the back of my closet. Seminary, marriage, and children changed my life, and baseball was no longer a part of it.  (Atkinson, Gordon, http://www.reallivepreacher.com/node/864, January 20, 2007)

One of the struggles and joys of UUism is that we have to develop our own theologies.  We establish ways to explain our beliefs in elevators and in lecture halls; we come to peace with the intrinsic paradoxes which find their ways into our hearts and our practices; we develop personal and community rituals which support and deepen our faith and we continue to refine what we think we know.  After all that work, it’s tempting and easy to rest on our laurels.  After all, we worked it through.  We figured it out.  It’s exhausting to question.  We’re tired.  Can’t we just . . . stop for a while?

Well yes, we can.  And sometimes we do.  But ultimately, like Emerson, we are compelled by the foundations of our faith to keep growing, keep changing, keep seeking wisdom wherever it might find us.  And where we came from doesn’t automatically become irrelevant.

To someone who loves garlic, the pasta sauce might be just the thing.  To someone who loves bitter food the limp, brownish kale might be perfect.  Telling people what you’ve found: “the kale is bitter; the sauce is garlicky; the potatoes are bland” is helpful, and honors the others’ gifts.  Telling people “Stay away; this one tastes awful” makes a judgment for them.  Sharing your discoveries is a vital part of our life in community.  But expecting others to have the same responses you did is a quick way to throttle our vitality and leave us gasping.  That’s why the outbox works.  Perhaps someone’s new inspiration is an opportunity to mine an old belief for new perspectives and insights.  Perhaps it’s just a chance to go back and gently, sweetly honor the time when you, too, hated garlic. 

Buddhist monk, teacher, and writer Thich Nhat Hanh writes often of accepting things as they are, and then releasing them.  Anger is not helpful, but instead of resisting it, one must acknowledge it, and then let go.  So if there is a belief that we have moved away from or a choice we would not choose again we can see it, thank it for being, and then release the connecting thread that binds us together.  We can put it gently in the outbox. 

Hafiz was a Sufi Muslim, a contemporary of Chaucer, a mystic, a poet.  In the beginning he was careful, followed Muslim law carefully, wrote his love for god into poetry and taught at a university.  There came a time, though, when his writing moved away from strict Muslim observance.  He made enemies among the orthodox clergy with poems like this:

God was full of Wine last night,

So full of Wine

That He let a great secret slip.

He said:

There is no man on this earth

Who needs a pardon from Me—

For there is really no such thing,

No such thing

As Sin!

The Beloved has gone completely Wild—

He has poured Himself into me!

I am Blissful and Drunk and Overflowing.

Dear world,

Draw life from my Sweet Body.

Dear wayfaring souls,

Come drink your fill of liquid rubies,

For God has made my heart

An Eternal Fountain!

Somewhere along the line he decided that Muslim purity laws were not as important as his love for God.  Partly as a result of that, he is one of the most accessible Islamic poets I have ever read.  His religious flexibility helps build bridges hundreds of years later that are so critical in our world. 

What if we tried it?  Put everything that doesn’t fit in the outbox.  Choose just a few core beliefs and then tried to give them the place they deserve, tried to live them out every day?    Arrange your spiritual living space with your treasures at the focus.  Let everything else flex.  We have more in common than we think.

Real Live Preacher writes:

this is our [new] lectionary study group. The rules are simple. If you want to join us, you have to be a minister who is preaching, and you have to strap on your glove and whip the ball around with us. While we play catch, we talk about the Bible and what it means to us. If these requirements don’t work for you, no problem. Most lectionary groups don’t require you to play catch, so I know you’ll find something out there that works for you.

In the end you will only have a few things in your outbox at any one time.   Cleaning house is an ongoing practice if you live in your space.  There are always more dishes, more papers, more clothes.  Life is messy, so cleaning is perpetual.  Every so often you need a big spring cleaning to clear the decks, and then it’s just maintenance.  Things will keep coming through the door; the trick is to know where to put them.  But don’t panic—there’s always the outbox.  You can put things in, and take things out, and put things in . . . and who knows?  You might find that baseball and start playing catch.

Will you join me in prayer:

Prayer

In the never ending spirit of life, of love, of truth, of questions and more questions we pray,

In hope for wisdom, for guidance, for inspiration we lift up our voices this morning.

May we seek the truth in love

May we strike balance between tradition and evolution.

May we honor our brothers and sisters in religious inquiry

Even as we honor our own histories

and our own futures.

May we extend the hand of sweet companionship to all who travel with us.

Blessed be and amen.

Benediction

You are the conduit for the still small voice that speaks in your heart.

Listen well.

And then speak.

Go in peace and go in love.

Copyright 2007, Leela Sinha. All rights reserved.