by the Rev. Robert Schaibly, Summer Minister

A sermon given August 26, 2007

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Adam and Eve were married in the Garden of Eden.  The angels were in attendance and brought humanity gifts.  One angel brought the gift of intelligence, and another, the gift of a sense of humor.  Other gifts included comeliness and music.  The angel, Satan—you may recall that Satan was an angel before he became a fallen angel known as the devil—Satan, who was already mischievous, approached and presented the gift of memory.  The other angels reacted at once: they shook their heads, one rolled his eyes upward, and one cringed.  God, sensing what had transpired, approached and gave the final gift; God gave the gift of forgetfulness.  (Thank God.)

So now that we know it’s a divine gift, let’s stop complaining to one another about how we can’t remember anything anymore!  The challenge before us now is to find sufficient will power to forget what we wish to be free of.  And then we shall have inner peace, instead of inner turmoil and instead of guilt.

An elderly woman named Joan recently moved into a retirement center.  She told her son—my source for the story— that her only concern was that a former employer named Esther lived in the same retirement center.  Many years ago Joan had spoken insulting words to Esther, her supervisor, and angrily quit her job.  Now she dreaded running into the woman and revisiting the encounter, and every week on the phone she told her son about her anxiety.  When the inevitable meeting occurred, Joan reintroduced herself to Esther and said, “I worked for you at ABC Corporation.”  “Oh, really,” said Esther, “Oh, dear.  Please forgive me, but I don’t remember you.  When was that?”  Said Joan, “In 1958.”  (You do the math.)  Well, even if you have trouble considering forgetfulness a divine gift for yourself, surely you must admit that the forgetfulness of others may be God-given!

I know it’s not always so amusing.  My own inner turmoil centered on an auto accident I had more than a year ago.  I was in the hospital trying to figure out how I—Mr. Safe Driver—had had an accident.  I know there is wisdom in acknowledging that we cannot know everything.  And therefore, let it be; in some instances we must live agnostically.  Painkillers, anesthesia, and a concussion prevented my ability to remember.  Commonly trauma patients do not remember anything before or after the accident.  As I was rescued the police report said that I was “conversational and appropriate,” and the newspaper referred to me as “a gentleman.”  I asked a friend what that meant and she speculated, “Maybe it refers to how you were dressed.”  “Oh, well that would be a relief,” I said, “I wondered if maybe it was a code word for gay.” 

I felt terrible guilt for having done something wrong that caused a tremendous amount of expense and work.  I got the police reports.  The man driving behind me stopped and told the police he heard a loud pop and then my car went off the road.  In the absence of anything better I seized on that.  There is a tendency in the human personality to absolve oneself and to blame someone or something else—perhaps you are familiar with this tendency—I’m not sure which angel gave us this tendency but how grateful we are if we have someone or something to blame! 

I, who had so highly valued being independent, felt guilty about becoming dependent on so many people.  I turned to the Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching about attachments.  He used himself as an example of a person with a troubled mind.  He started a peace project and wanted to enlist the help of a man he knew, the founder of the Xerox Corporation.  But he could not remember the man’s name.  This led to sleepless nights.  Then he realized he was attached to an image of himself as a person who never forgot names.  We are attached to many things.  We are unaware of all the images we have of ourselves until something is amiss.  You may know only that it’s hard for you to ask for help, without being aware that your self image is as a highly self sufficient person.  But the nature of our world is impermanence.  Nothing will remain the same.  Mt. Hood grows smaller each time it rains or snows, freezes or thaws.  And our peace of mind is vulnerable to, well, to car accidents.

At this time of year as youngsters prepare to start school there is often a slight loss of inner peace in our homes among the young.  Will I like my teacher?  Will my teacher like me?  The Zen Master suggests a process he calls looking deeply.  This is done by considering the perspectives of all the people involved.  For example I have an insight to pass along to anyone who will be attending school this fall.  My insight is based on living with a former teacher.  (You know what’s coming, don’t you?)  The teacher is also mildly anxious about the new school year.  Looking deeply is part one.  Judeo-Christian behavior is part two.  “My name is Justin and I brought you some pears from the tree in our backyard,” or “I brought you an apple.”  You’d have to run the risk of being corny and being laughed at, but if you can do it from the heart, it’s OK.  Be pro-active to maintain your inner peace.

Having had the accident, I look deeply and then the Zen Master suggests—and this is his word—embracing our problem.  There are hymns in our Unitarian Universalist hymnal that speak (or is it sing?) to this issue.  One is For All that is our Life (#128), we sing our praise and thanks, for all life is a gift, that we are called to use to serve the common good, and make our own days glad.”  Another one (#409) reminds me to embrace the anxious part of me, which is really just a little boy inside me, by singing, “Sleep, my child, and peace attend you, all through the night.”  I place all my cares and worries and concerns on the night stand where they will be in the morning if I still need them.  Although Sleep, My Child is a lullaby, our religion is liberating, and in the absence of our parents we may sing it to ourselves.  There is within the most distinguished of us, a little girl or little boy who is anxious about the first day, or the first date, or losing control and causing work for others, or being interviewed for a job tomorrow morning.  Embracing our life even when we are not too happy with how we may have managed it will mean acceptance and forgiveness. 

And the path is discovered when we move from the head to the heart, from thinking to loving, from anger to forgiveness whether of oneself or of others.  For in bicycling from the one to the other we improve our chances of living more abundantly.  We end the war within our self.  We begin anew. 

I embraced myself as dependent in myriad ways.  Initially I thought I only needed rides to the hospital but then I realized I preferred to talk with another person going home after some procedure.  I looked forward to the presence of those of you who drove me as a reality check and the means to process what happened.  Now it is obvious that there have always been times and always will be times when we are dependent on others.  An elderly man once took me to a banquet where the speaker was introduced as “a self-made man,” and my host muttered, with scorn in his voice, “Self-made! After he chose his own parents he began to change his own diapers.”  This same fellow said, “I’m an old man and I’ve had many worries; most of them never happened.”  As if to say, “I could have had peace of mind instead!”

The Seventh Principle of Unitarian Universalism is about the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.  A strong awareness of these relationships also characterizes Zen Buddhism and Thich Nhat Hanh named his group The Order of Interbeing.  The Order of Interbeing, he says, because we inter-are.  Although the neologism grates, it freshens the meaning.  The awareness of interbeing, this mindfulness of interdependence, yields a mystical sense of oneness, and we who felt isolated belong to the world all over again.  Zen Buddhists are not theists; but they are mystics through meditation and mindfulness.

To meditate is to learn to control one’s mind, to focus on breathing and being and to stop living at the mercy of one’s negative emotions.  One Buddhist story about this is about a Samurai warrior who comes upon a monk in the otherwise deserted monastery.  His demeanor is threatening. “So, Monk, teach me all these things about heaven and hell.”  The monk forthrightly says, “There’s no point.  The teachings would be wasted on a thickheaded bully like you.”  To which the samurai predictably loses his temper.  He draws his sword and shouts, “Why you little bird, I’ll skewer your body!”  Calmly the monk leans toward him and says, “This is what hell is.”  The warrior stops, thinks, and with a softening of his face, says, “Oh.”  To which the monk replies, “And this is what heaven is.”  Bliss, or peace of mind, comes when we understand and have compassion.  It comes when our emotions or thoughts no longer obsess us and drive our behavior like the anger of the warrior did. 

We are all aware of the high level of functioning some anxious people have.  We have no quarrel with your productivity; it’s how you are around us, we who care about you.  We wish that you might travel easier.

Speaking of high-functioning people, yesterday’s Oregonian revealed the surprising lack of inner peace in—of all people!—Mother Teresa.  Her letters are about to be published.  Mother Teresa is on her way to becoming canonized as a saint, but she wrote that she could not feel God’s presence, nor that of Jesus—whom she referred to as “The Absent One,”—and not just once, but over a period of fifty years!  These phrases are direct quotations: “If there be God….  Such emptiness in heaven….  I have no faith….  My own smile is a mask….  Such terrible darkness within me as if everything was dead.”  Although the lack of inner peace obviously bothered her, it never affected her external behavior; she kept working at what she perceived Jesus had asked her to do when she was a young person. 

In those of us who are seriously ill there is often no peace of mind.  We may feel death’s presence in our bodies.  There are in our midst people who are HIV positive who imagined they would die long ago.  Now there are new drugs.  Death doesn’t happen until it does.  My family tells stories of a chronically ill great aunt who bought a dress specifically for her funeral.  It hung in the closet for decades, and by the time her day came her dress was voluminous on her body which had become slender over the years.

How are we to live with serious illness?  I heard the Zen Master tell a cancer patient who said she was doing everything she could to fight cancer day and night, that she needed daily joy.  We need daily joy so we are aware of why we would prefer to go on living, and to feed our spirits daily.  “Look to this day! For it is life, the very life of life!” (#419)  Do what you can to sustain at least some of the things that used to nourish your soul.  Join the poet Anne Sexton in being able to say (as Marcia read this morning), there is joy in the hair I brush each morning, in my clean towel, in my breakfast, in the kettle’s whistle, for she writes, “All this is God right here … each morning, and I mean, though often forget, to give thanks….  So while I think of it, let me paint a thank you on my palm for this God, this laughter in the morning, lest it go unspoken.”  Then she gives us a warning: “The Joy that isn’t shared, I’ve heard, dies young.”

There is a new novel by Ian McEwan, an Englishman whose books are widely praised.  He may the new Virginia Woolf for he can articulate subtleties with devastating honesty the way she does.  This short novel, On Chesil Beach, is about a man and woman in their twenties who meet in their native England in 1962, pre-birth control pill.  They court and become engaged and marry, without any sexual experience on her part and very little for him.  On the honeymoon night she just touches him sexually; he ejaculates and she is startled and shocked and runs out of the hotel to the beach.  She feels guilty but she also blames him for a lack of self control.  Each one of them is attached to a concept of what the wedding night will be like, and it would be an unusual person who would live up to those standards.  The meaning of this simple sexual event escalates.  The marriage is not consummated, the wedding gifts are returned and a divorce ensues.  Neither one of them ever marries again!  They lose peace of mind forever!  The woman is a musician who, for decades, when the applause begins in a particular auditorium, remembers the seat where her fiancé once sat.  The man who so briefly was her husband is now in his 60s and, while taking a walk, he remembers her having walked in this same place.  It would seem easy for people in their 20s to forgive themselves for early awkwardness.  This novel humanizes those of us who read it by demonstrating the tremendous value of simple patience; the importance of honoring the love one feels for the other, honoring one’s feelings; and the importance of honest behavior instead of theatrics, authenticity instead of pomp, being forgiving instead of self righteous.

These then are a few of your possibilities: 

            To meditate and learn to send life’s distractions on their way. 

            To sit and to look deeply. 

To let understanding become compassion.

            To forgive oneself and others. 

            Perhaps, to forget about it.

The Native American culture has a familiar remedy for building one’s empathy: “Do not judge another until you walked many miles in his moccasins.”  Then you will have understanding and empathy.  And besides that, you will have his moccasins!

Great God,

Keep us lighthearted, and when we cannot manage that, reassure us that in time we will know the peace that passeth understanding, and help us care for the little child within.

Amen.

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

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