by Rev. Leela Sinha

A sermon given March 18, 2007

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

What gives you pleasure?  What gets you so excited that you can’t stop grinning?  What gets you so jazzed that you can’t sleep, that you stay up all night thinking about it, and have energy in the morning?  What gets you singing in the shower?  What is your passion?

Think about it, because this is important.

Think about it, because if you’re tired, this is the reason you’re tired, and if you’re changing the world with every footfall, this is probably why.  So (I invite you to) relax.

Let go of the idea that pleasure is the antithesis of spiritual work.  Let go of the idea that pleasure is an obstacle to progress.  Let go of the idea that pleasure is only for children, is irresponsible, is useless, is unhelpful.  Let go of the idea that pleasure should be fitted in around the edges of your schedule.  Let go and dream of a world where pleasure is the organizing principle.  Send your heart-roots deep and your mind as far a-field as it can go.

**

Remember how good it feels to fall in love, all starry-eyed and gooey around the edges?  Research has shown that we actually do go a little crazy, that our judgment does actually shift, that we make different priorities, different choices from what we’re used to.  I think it’s good for us.

In her poem “Premenstrual Syndrome” Sharon H. Nelson lists all the weird things that happen as part of PMS, and then she wonders, “What if this is the time of the month when our perception is sharpest?”  What if the times when we are deep in pleasure and passion are the times when we have the clearest vision, the cleanest path, the deepest wisdom?  What if that addictive brain chemistry actually gives us access to a kind of knowing we otherwise miss?

Because, folks, I have seen people on fire and when they move, there is nothing that stands in their way.  I have seen people hooked into their passions bring down the moon and call the sun into the sky.  I have seen people working for pleasure do more than anyone can imagine doing for fear.  Fear leaves space to give up, to lose the will to continue.  Pleasure just begs more pleasure.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of today’s reading, writes of her time in Italy, “For me…a major obstacle in my pursuit of pleasure was my ingrained sense of Puritan guilt.  Do I really deserve this pleasure? . . . in the Italian culture, . . . people already know that they are entitled to enjoyment . . . which is probably why when I told my Italian friends that I’d come to their country in order to experience four months of pure pleasure, they didn’t have any hang ups about it . . . Go ahead!  Be our guest!  Nobody once said, ‘How completely irresponsible of you,’ or ‘What a self-indulgent luxury.’ . . . but I still can’t quite let go.  During my first few weeks in Italy, all my Protestant synapses were zinging in distress, looking for a task.  I wanted to take on pleasure like a homework assignment, or a giant science fair project.  I wondered if maybe I should spend all my time in Italy in the library, doing research on the history of pleasure.  Or maybe I should interview Italians who’ve experienced a lot of pleasure in their lives, and then write a report on the topic to be turned in first thing Monday morning.”

I find I have the same problem that Gilbert does.

I suspect this resistance to pleasure has roots in a lack of resources. When we have some of a limited resource we think we must use it all up to justify having had it, to show that we needed it, that we deserved it.  Alternatively, we can hoard it.  In this highly, almost frighteningly individualistic society based heavily on acquisition and possession, our fear of pleasure has become a way to express our love for something greater than ourselves. We shun pleasure because we associate it with excess, with waste, with using necessary resources in unnecessary ways.  We have thrown out the baby with the bathwater, losing a reasonable relationship with joy in our pursuit of communal wholeness and egalitarian society.

Oops.

So I’ve decided to take lessons from my cat.  We have two cats in our house—one is substantially my partner’s, and one is substantially mine.  We didn’t plan it like that, it just happened: they divided us between them like so much chocolate cake, and here we are.  My cat is Sebastian.  He’s a long haired black sweetheart, laid-back about everything except having his nails cut.  He likes to purr, sleep, eat, sleep, roll around on his back, play with the laser pointer, and sleep.  He is unabashed about what he likes, and he’s not afraid to ask for it.  When I’m working he’ll often come up to me and head-butt my hand until I pet him; when I’m in the bathtub he’ll come looking for a quick belly rub; when he’s hungry he asks for food; when he’s sleepy he’ll take a nap, and when things are just too good to be true he’ll lie down, stretch out, and wiggle like an ecstatic two-year-old.  He is one of the happiest, most well-adjusted beings I know, and who doesn’t want to be happy and well-adjusted?  Like the Italians in Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, he cannot imagine why anyone would think the pursuit of pleasure is irresponsible.

And I have to admit, I can’t anymore, either.

Rather than avoiding pleasure altogether and making ourselves cranky, we must seek an acceptable pleasure—a pleasure that does not destroy, that does not waste, and that is not selfish.  But is still pleasure.  We can do that.  The opposite of waste is not consumption, nor is it saving. The opposite of waste is stewardship: taking what you need when you need it to strengthen the larger whole.

“Stewardship” comes from Anglo-Saxon roots meaning “hall-keeper”—the person in charge of the stuff, but not the one who owns it.  Caring for the resources of others is a big stressful deal.

I would suggest that we consider instead sexton, which has roots in the Latin sacrare, sacred, and Middle English sacren, to consecrate.   It refers to those who are charged with the care of the holy: first the sacristy, and now the church property.  It is care of community property—something that we-among-others own and care for.

We have a long tradition of honoring the sacred in the ordinary and understanding ourselves as embedded in a holy place.  And so I find that we are more sextons than stewards, here, for this is surely holy ground.  We are truly entrusted with spiritual work, and work of the spirit requires deeper questing than most, questing deep enough to realize that using something well means enjoying it.

This is where pleasure and mindfulness intersect.  When I am not in a hurry I enjoy doing almost everything.  Dishes and laundry are calm, orderly tasks.  I choose exercise that I enjoy for its own sake, commuting is time for walking and meditation and experiencing the world.  A dear friend of mine hiked the Appalachian Trail years ago, and she reported back that there were people hiking with headphones . . . and that she couldn’t imagine choosing to block out so much of the experience that way.  I have tried wearing headphones on the commuter rail a few times and have always chosen to take them off—I like feeling in touch with the place where I live.  So when I organize it properly the worst part about my life is fitting in all the pleasurable things I want to do.   ( . . . and taking out the garbage, and cleaning up after the cats.  I’m still working on loving those.)  But in general I only get impatient, rushed, and cranky when I’m trying to fit too much in, because then I don’t have the personal resources to do everything well, and then I’m unhappy with my own performance, and I can’t take the time to enjoy what I’m doing.  There are small pieces of my life that I don’t like in the moment—certain meetings and tasks are just not pleasant.  But I love the overall shape of my work and of my daily life, and that is the thing that allows me to do ministry, which is the work that I love.  It’s a self-perpetuating cycle.

I am profoundly lucky.

The key to this cycle came when I realized that I wasn’t willing to wait for retirement to enjoy my life.  Who knows?  I may not ever be able to retire, but even if I can I don’t want to look back in thirty years and “discover,” as Thoreau said, “that I had not lived.”  With that I began wondering what I would do if I wanted to enjoy my life every day. 

That’s a dangerous question.  It can lead to major upheaval: it up-hove me from a perfectly comfortable existence into four years of seminary, a new partnership, a lot of self-examination, and eventually this new way of living.  So it’s clear to me why I’m so invested in pleasure as a means to good ends—it changed my life.

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I have a confession: I don’t like lima beans.  I never have.  Despite years of four-basic-food-group training and an honest love for cucumbers, raw broccoli stems, green beans, and eventually even spinach, vine-warm tomatoes, and Brussels sprouts (but only when they are absolutely fresh), despite fifteen years of vegetarianism, I have never developed a taste for lima beans.  Remember the broccoli incident with the first George Bush?  If he doesn’t like broccoli, I don’t really understand why he should eat it.  That’s more for the rest of us—and he can have my lima beans.

Why was America so outraged?  What in our culture says we should dislike things and eat them anyway?  I don’t understand it.  Most foods are not that unique.  They are not nutritionally irreplaceable.  Why waste time and energy and taste buds if you don’t like them?  And why deprive others of something they would enjoy?  There may be people starving in India but as generations of children have known, that's not really a good reason to eat anything.

We tend to shy away from pleasure on principle.  But pleasure in careful context is one of the most powerful forces out there.  This pursuit of pleasure thing is kind of like the free and responsible search for truth and meaning.  There’s a piece of it that involves thinking about context.  If you’re willing to think about others it all starts to make sense.

I need to be happy because it allows me to be gracious.  I am not made happy by others’ misery, so I work for their well-being.  Happiness makes me stronger for the service of others.  Happiness allows me to confront my own deepest fears and struggles. Happiness opens my heart so I can have compassion.  Happiness frees me.  My pleasure can actually serve others.  Our pleasure can actually serve others.

So I am hoping that you will dig down into yourself this morning, dig deep into your heart and soul and find that thing that drives you forward, the thing that makes you feel so good that you cannot imagine doing without it.  Whether that thing is love or hope or higher math, whether that thing is peace or economic justice, whether that thing is fantastic cooking or beautiful art, I want you to reach down inside yourself and hold it aloft.  And I want you to think about it, hold it, feel the heat and the strength and the warmth that emanate from inside your fingers, because the next thing I want you to do is to think about how that warmth is going to become fire, and how that fire is going to heat up the whole world with your extraordinary talent, with your extraordinary gift. 

Because the things we love to do, the things that give us pleasure, giving and receiving and creating, those things that we cannot imagine not doing fill us up, they fill us up and burst us open, sending sparks flying everywhere, starting little fires everywhere, and we can’t help it because the pleasure, it’s more than we can possibly turn down.  The joy, it’s more than we can turn down.  The happiness, it’s more than we can turn down and not only can’t we turn it down, we shouldn’t even try.  We should not even think of wasting our energy fighting down the urge to follow our own divine voices into that amazing future. 

That pleasure is a resource, people, it is a bottomless well of possibility.  When we are immersed in our own pleasure, pleasure becomes a right.  Happiness becomes a right.  Hope becomes a right.  And if we see people that we can help on their path to those shining beacons, well then we find ourselves bubbling over with all kinds of extra energy for that work, because we cannot imagine a world without that kind of strength. 

Now you might be afraid of pleasure.  You might  be sitting there this morning saying, Leela, I don’t know about this pleasure thing, because pleasure can make us selfish, it can narrow our view, it can keep us from understanding the gravity and the seriousness of the work we must do in the world.  And I say to you, yes, pleasure can do that, but that pleasure is not the pleasure I’m asking you to engage with this morning.  That pleasure is pleasure with blinders on, where you know there’s more and you hear there’s more but you refuse to take off your blinders and look to see what’s really going on.  No, I want you to seek a wider kind of pleasure, a deeper kind of pleasure.  And I don’t want you to be afraid.  I want you to open up your eyes and really see what’s in the world, and then with every ounce of the longing that that brings up in your gut, I want you to see what will really give you pleasure, what will help you sleep at night and sing in the mornings, what will help you carry yourself with pride and dignity, what will help you know your own truth every day.  What pleasures bring you clarity of mind and of vision?  What pleasures bring you strength of body and spirit?  What pleasures feed you and nurture you in the places that no one else can see, so that you are rich and beautiful and whole? 

What pleasures lift you up and carry you forward into who you are?

See them clearly and sing them out, all the different ones, all the brilliant lights, let the sparks rain down on this gathering here, let them alight in your eyes and your fingers and legs and toes, let them send currents to your hands and kneecaps and fingernails, let them spread out and be celebrated, let them be seen!  Because we are not the same people, each one of us and our gifts are not the same gifts, no way.

Our joys are not the same joys—for your life and mine are bound together but we are not living the same days.

Our sorrows and our outrages are not the same grief songs, and the gods we cry out to are not the same gods, no our gods are not the same gods.

Our lives are not the same lives, and we shout hallelujah for that!  We call out for joy because this is our strength, our hope, our future, we are a brilliant, glowing tapestry with all our brothers and our sisters in this world.  We are inspiration and hope and sorrow and silence, and fear, and endings and beginnings, and never, and eternity because we are it, we are all there is, we are the people of this planet.

And we are all sextons, we are all guardians, we are all together on this earth.  So find your bliss.  Find your pleasure.  Grasp it with both hands and dance like the world is ending, because then only then, will we light the fire.

AMEN.

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Copyright 2007, Rev. Leela Sinha.  All rights reserved.