by Rev. Robert Schaibly, Summer Minister

A sermon given July 22, 2007

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

A new minister arrived at his church in the Midwest and he began visiting the parishioners.  He drove into the country one afternoon to visit an elderly couple at their farm.  He pulled into the driveway.  The sky was blue, the sun was shining, the farmhouse was neatly painted white and there was a rock garden, which is one thing farmers tend to do with the rocks they clear from the fields.  On both sides of the farm were beautiful fields of wheat and corn.  Hearing their new pastor’s car, the farm couple came out the door to greet him.  The minister took a deep breath, and admiring everything in sight, said, “Isn’t it wonderful what the Lord can do!”  And the farm couple looked at each other thoughtfully.  The man said, “Well, sure.  But you should have seen this place when the Lord had it all to Himself.”

Human effort makes a difference!  You’ve probably noticed that.  We know that in our heads but sometimes we imagine it will not make a difference, and the paralysis seems related to sadness, or as we sometimes describe our condition, depression.  Obviously, sadness is not all bad – there are times when it is appropriate, as the loss of a loved one or loss of a job, and there are times when it is anticipated.  Many of us who had cancer, or any traumatic medical problem, remember how when the treatment was mostly over and done with, depression moved in.  For a recovering patient to be depressed seems counterintuitive!  We survived – why aren’t we dancing in the streets instead of needing Prozac?  There are many answers to that, and one short one is that our body, mind, and spirit are grieving our losses.  That can happen with good health merely by aging.  There is a poem by Tennyson that goes:

Come, my friends,

‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Though much is taken, much abides, and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heave; that which we are, we are.

Very philosophic and yet determined to work with what we’ve got.  “That which we are we are.”

The subject of sadness and depression has been an interest of mine from a very early age.  When my sister and I were in elementary school our mother was suicidal.  She didn’t do it; she remade her life and she lived into old age in retirement in Florida.  I was the first-born and when mom is not there, we’re in charge.  We are loyal to our parents and we mistakenly think that this means not telling anybody else about what’s happening, especially grandmother.  This period of time didn’t last long, but both my sister and I went into helping professions, and I have later in life wondered if children, who develop the ability to reassure adults that the adults will be okay and so will their kids, go on to do that type of work as adults.  Well, it’s important and worthwhile work.

Much has been said and written on the subject of sadness and depression.  It is a common human condition.  When I announced I was preaching on an aspect of this subject, a psychologist friend said, “Boy, I don’t envy you preaching about depression.”  “Oh,” I said, “You think I don’t know anything about depression?”  “No,” he said, “It’s just that the place is going to be packed with experts!”  We are not alone.  Our problem may be that we feel isolated, and unwilling to share our hearts.  And/or our problem may be that our sadness is intractable and we need to get professional help.

Sometimes we lack insight into how we sabotage ourselves.  How I suffered when the term paper was due.  It wasn’t good enough yet!  But if you don’t turn it in on time, it’s marked down.  Whenever you procrastinate I pass it along for your thoughtful consideration the saying that liberated me: “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly!”  Just get it done.  People depressed about the condition of their home wrote me a letter.  “We’ve been missing church because your sermon about not procrastinating inspired us.  Now we stay home on Sundays and we have refinished the entire dining room set and built a deck.  See you soon!”  For odious tasks I could never find time to do, I adopted the suggestion of a one-hour timer.  The advantage is that the hours pass almost painlessly, and achievement can make you feel as liberated and soaring as you feel after you have finished your income taxes.

The religions of the world – and the religious leaders of world religions – wish us well, and at peace.  They talk about waking up to life and the world, and Jesus says, I am come that you might have life and have it more abundantly.  He knows we are alive by degrees – some days less and some more.

But isn’t depression biochemistry?  Isn’t it my genetic heritage?  Aren’t some babies born melancholy?

You might as well say that God knows from the day you’re born whether you are going to Heaven or Hell!  That what the Calvinists taught and the Unitarians rebelled and said, “No, people have some free will!”  I’m here to represent the party line!  I’m a UU minister and I have seen people change.  I know a man who gets up early every morning and goes into the darkened living room and sits and says to himself, “I am an alcoholic and I am not going to have a drink today.”  And he hasn’t had a drink for many years.  Undoubtedly present right now are former smokers.  I myself am a lifetime member of Weight Watchers, yes, it’s true!  If you think I’m a big man now, you should have seen me then!  I lost 85 pounds.  Don’t tell me people can’t change!  There’s a Hindu teaching about the relationship between what’s set by nature and what’s within our power.  [Attributed to Jawaharlal Nehru] “When the cards are dealt and you pick up your hand, that is determinism; there is nothing you can do except play it out for whatever it may be worth.  And the way you play your hand is free will!”  Human beings can make up their minds to do something and do it!  It will be a mental change just as much as a behavioral change.  The Bible says, “Be ye angry and sin not, let not the sun go down upon your anger.”  That sounds like a psychiatric prescription so you can have a sound night’s sleep!  And we recognize that we have some power over that.  I once said, “The more I thought about that the angrier I got.”  That reveals my power to control the contents of what my mind will entertain.  So many, many people have chosen to forgive another person not only to restore their relationships, but also their own equanimity.

I want to make one brief diversion from the sermon, related to the subject and yet not really.  Among sensitive people there may in the course of a lifetime be thoughts of suicide.  Suicide has a different, angrier, and more mentally ill dimension.  Depression is a misperception that can override our human devotion to survival.  In the vent there is someone here considering acting self-destructively, I say “You must not do that; you are temporarily not yourself.  You would be acting on feelings that in the past have come and gone – they have gone – and they will go again.  There are children in this world who must not know that you voted against life.  It undermines us all.  Suicide is out of the question.”  I recall a New Yorker cartoon showing a bearded man in sackcloth carrying a picket sign and wearing a sandwich board.  The sign said: “The world is NOT coming to an end.”  And the sandwich board said: “Therefore you must suffer along and learn to cope.”

It helps to identify the cause of our sadness; second, there’s a list of things that help some people kick the habit; and third, there is remarkable consolation when you don’t.

Identify the cause and see some hope in relating to it, affecting it, changing it.  The ideal we try to achieve in mediation is to manage one’s emotional life rather than being subject to it.  It is to be ourselves a non-anxious presence, able to calm oneself and to calm others.  In order to do this it is necessary not to overvalue negative experiences and negative emotions.  Do not overvalue the negative.  To have failed a test is not to be a failure.  Nice quotation from the great American novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”  Work with yourself.  A man I have heard and read, Martin Seligman, in his book Learned Optimism, says, “To the extent you see a failure as something that is lasting and which you magnify to taint everything in your life, you are prone to let a momentary defeat become a lasting source of hopelessness.  But if you have a larger perspective it’s just a momentary defeat.”  Don’t over-generalize.

Listing the sources of our nurture and our vitality help some of us.  Reading the literature over the years, one thing is nearly always first at the top of the list of things individuals can do to improve their frame of mind: exercise!  (I know, for some you, that’s the last thing you want to hear today and it absolutely ruins Sunday morning!)  First you set the amount of time you want to exercise and then you choose the activity.  No, you can’t start by running three miles, but maybe you can be out walking for an hour.

It has been interesting to see what psychotherapists in other countries prescribe.  In Japan, the doctor would tell the depressed client to go home every day, empty out a drawer, sort through it, and put it back in good order with everything in its place.  Why would that be?  To put one’s mind back in order as well?  To feel a sense of orderliness within one’s home?  To restore dignity, perhaps.  In France, a few years ago sleep therapy was most used in psychiatric hospitals, about 20 hours of sleep a day.  Is the patient’s goal to work through internal conflicts in dreams?  I don’t know.

In this country at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts (one of the nation’s top psych hospitals) they were affecting people’s physical and mental health by adding protein powder shakes to the diet and giving B100, same and iron, in addition to prescription drugs, but the staff thought Americans might try these non-prescription remedies before getting professional help.  Yoga is an ancient spiritual exercise.  Read for an hour.  Walk to the river.

Our Unitarian Universalist religion is personal and experiential; what is true for you is true on the basis of your experience; what you do to cope with sadness must resonate with you.  You create a list of the things that nurture your soul.  Your list may even show your spiritual practices: rocking AIDS babies at the hospital; baking bread the old-fashioned way every Saturday morning; even refinishing furniture.

Here in Oregon in the winter, sad also means Seasonal Affective Disorder, and when we moved here the neighbor said, “The record is 52 days without direct sunlight.  If you can’t afford Hawaii or Palm Springs, just drive east until you hit the sunshine.”  Another way of coping with sad.

Those ideas are oriented directly to self-care.  In addition, do something for others.  That’s the prescription religion often makes.  I tutored two girls in 3^rd and 4^th grades.  One of the greatest things you can do for anyone in the world is teach them to read.  And multiply!  One day we made a lot of progress.  You start with what people already know: 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 . . . and then 10s.  Can you do elevens, it’s 11, 22, 33, and can you figure out what comes next?  44?  But next week when I came, they had it!  They had figured it out!  Do something for others.  One of my best friends in this church is a white-haired fellow sitting here who said, “I love teaching church school!  I love it!  I touch the future!”  You don’t go into it for what it can do for you – but it happens to work out that way as well as helping others.

There are two parallel perspectives in Judaism and in Buddhism.  In Judaism the idea is put this way: “You do not have to resolve the world’s problems, but neither are you free to put them off.”  In other words, it’s our turn to wrestle with them and we can’t shirk.  The Zen master says the same thing: “You must stay present to suffer” – which is to say, all the world’s problems – “and do what you can to alleviate human misery.”  And then Zen teaches, eternity will take care of it.

So you say to the Zen master, “I am suffering, I am sad, because the President has just approved our government’s use of torture.”  And the Zen master replies, “You related to this problem of Iraq and you must find a positive way to relate to it.”  That’s how we stay present to suffering.  And then, he adds the part about impermanence or eternity: “The President whose work you find so destructive is the President for only eight years – yes, his tenure is real, but in 800 years this President will be unknown.”  It is religious wisdom to hold both thoughts simultaneously and appreciatively.  The Zen master continues:  “You and he, however, are alive now, and you must find a way to place your weight on behalf of love and justice.”  I think perhaps the next love and justice issue will be accepting into our country as refugees those Iraqis who served as American translators and aids.  Maybe we at First Church can help lead.  Do we do it for them?  Yes, and we do it for ourselves, because our leader has incriminated us and we must do what we can to redeem a terrible situation.  In 800 years all our names will be lost, but maybe our example will live on, passed along to all the new religions of the future as an example of the best loving and just behavior the people who live din our time could manage.

I debated with myself about including one bit of information.  However, it is the tradition of the ministers to tell the truth.  Martin Seligman is a psychologist who wrote about Learned Optimism; and yet, for those of us who are sad or depressed, there is tremendous consolation indeed to be taken from his book.  “On tests that measure perceptiveness, depressives and pessimists have a far, far greater grasp of reality!  They grasp both their failures and their successes.  The evidence is overwhelming.”

[Reading from the book] “It’s a disturbing idea, that depressed people see reality correctly while non-depressed people distort reality in a self-serving way . . . There is considerable evidence that depressed people, though sadder, are wiser . . . ”

So, if you are sad, or you describe your condition as depressed, in point of fact, you have reason to be happy – whether you can be is a different matter! – because your perception of reality is accurate.  Your role is in management, not sales.  Every human venture requires both or more points of view for success.

In the reading done by Katie Radditz this morning, the poet Philip Booth is teaching his daughter to swim.  We know what this is like.  Water is unfamiliar and even threatening to the non-swimmer.  And so these tender words from a loving coach tell her to trust in what you experience, specifically the water holding you and letting you float.

. . . let go, remember when fear

cramps your heart what I told you

lie gently and wide to the light-year

stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

The poem is of course a metaphor for life as well.  Rest easy in the hands of fate.  And this is counterintuitive to Unitarians because we are used to being responsible and accountable, and so I tell it to you the poem’s truth today, When fear cramps your heart, lie gently, keep breathing, and the sea will hold you.

PRAYER

Please join in prayer with me:

We give thanks for this good life, glad days and not so glad ones.  Help us “be joyful, thought you [we] have considered all the facts.” –Wendell Berry

BENEDICTION

I leave you with the sentiment of a sentimental old Irish Blessing:

May the road rise to meet you; may the wind be always at your back may the sun shine warm upon your face and the rains fall gently on your fields.

And may the Lord hold you in the hollow of his hand

And the goddess set you on her lap and say your name.

Go your ways, remembering that

Your religion is love and justice, and finding ways to apply it!

Blessings!

Bibliography:

Goleman, Daniel.  Emotional Intelligence.

Seligman, Martin.  Learned Optimism.

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

Copyright 2007, Rev. Robert Schaibly.  All rights reserved.