by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given September 23, 2007

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

You don’t have to read the paper for long or listen to the radio or watch the television or be online long to know that we live in times of change.  Big changes.  Almost every day we seem to hear more about global warming and its impact on the earth.  This week came the news that the amount of ice recorded on the North Pole ice cap this summer is the lowest yet reported.[1]

We hear the news day in and day out, especially in our 24-hour round-the-clock world.  I don’t know about you but I experience a whole range of emotions through this.  There’s sadness, there’s despair, there’s fear.  And a lot of the time I just find myself feeling anxious.  I think this comes from so much that’s unknown.  I think that comes from knowing that I’m supposed to do something, I’m just not quite sure where to begin.

Now I do see signs of hope.  Mainly I see signs of hope when I look around and see people here and in my community trying to live more lightly on the earth.  I see people reaching out to their neighbors.  I see people going beyond their comfort zones to imagine how life might be different.  And all of that is encouraging to me.  And yet I have also come to understand that there is a much deeper shift that we are asked to make these days.  I don’t even know all the dimensions of the shift we are asked to make.  It has to do with how we see ourselves and our lives.  It has to do with the way we are together.  It has to do with the ways we tell and understand our story.

It is a shift to an awareness of our interdependence in ways that we have not seen for a long time.  It is a shift to the spirit, to a sense of interconnection, of maybe giving up some of the security that we feel like we need but that only makes us more isolated.  A shift that ultimately opens us to new ways of being and being together,

But we Americans, maybe more than anyone else, have a long ways to go.

The French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville came to this country when it was young, in the early 1800s.  He seemed to be able—almost like nobody else—to clearly define the American character.  He saw the gifts of community in this country, but he also identified our ideal of individualism and how it was our blessing and our curse.

He wrote, “Individualism is a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself.  As democratic individualism grows, there are more and more people who, though neither rich nor powerful enough to have much hold over others, have gained or kept enough wealth and enough understanding to look after their own needs.  Such folk owe no man anything and hardly expect anything from anybody.  They form the habit of thinking of themselves in isolation and imagine that their whole destiny is in their hands.”[2]

Imagine that their whole destiny is in their hands.

Those words were written a long time ago, and yet I’m struck by how they speak to us today.  His words, in fact, are prophetic. Think about those words in the context of someone in our society needing help.  You know, the poor, unwed mothers and illegal immigrants.  It is up to you to make it on your own.

The American dream is that each one of us can have what we want.  We just have to work hard for it to realize the dream. During the last century, as prosperity for so many Americans grew, it seemed that more and more people were realizing that dream. And one way that we could tell was that we kept accumulating more and more stuff and we came to build bigger and bigger houses, and we came to have bigger and bigger cars that used up more and more gasoline.

What’s happened, though, is that the divide between those who have the most and those who have the least keeps growing. What’s happened for some is that the American dream really isn’t seen as possible.  And in all of that prosperity we seemed to get more and more isolated from others.  Our neighbors seemed to get further away from us and we from them.  We want to make sure we protect what is ours and we want everything to be just so.

This week on National Public Radio I heard a story out of Bend about a woman who got in a bunch of trouble with her neighbors and her neighborhood association when she put up a clothes line to dry her clothes.  This is a place that has strict rules about what color you can paint your house.  It has to be within a certain palate.  She did it partly to save money on drying inside but mainly, it sounds like, to use less energy.  But the clothesline was visible and the fence she tried to put up was not acceptable and now she is facing legal action.[3]

This is one of those stories that speaks to me of our times.  We want our world ordered and perfect.  Of course that is not always possible.  And yet it seems to so quickly come down to their rights versus my rights.

Now I have to say that I look out my kitchen window at my neighbor’s laundry on the clothes line.  I’m not always thrilled at looking at my neighbor’s laundry.  But in the end I’ve decided that that is OK.  I have really nice neighbors and I figure that I know them just a little better by seeing their laundry out my kitchen window.

Any society struggles with the rights of one person and how they come up against the rights of somebody else.  That is part of living in community.  And it is human to want our worlds to be ordered.  I understand that we might not want to see our neighbor’s laundry. But we are also asked to look past our own particular needs and to see that there might be some value in hanging those clothes out on the line.

The question, I think, is how do we respond to any given situation that presents itself in our lives?  Do we see the situation just about us or do we see try to see the situation and how it affects our community and our world.  Too often the story gets reinforced that it is our needs versus someone else’s needs.  We come to see ourselves as isolated from others.  We come to see ourselves as autonomous and separate from others.  We can provide and we will make our way through it.  We learn what we need to do and we do it.  We learn what we have to do to feel safe and in control.

There is the story of the woman who left her apartment one morning to go to work.  She walked into the street and took out the keys to unlock her car.  Just as she was putting the key in the door lock, she noticed that her car seemed lower to the ground than usual.  When she looked down, she was shocked to see that all four of her tires had been stolen.  Her immediate response was to march off to the nearest shopping center and buy herself a pair of silk pajamas as a way to comfort herself.  Only then could she go back home and call the police.

I like that story.  I can, at times, see myself in that story.  But it also is a tale of our times in so many ways.  Certainly the message that we get from our culture is that one of our primary roles is to consume, we are to take part in the great consumption machine. When we are hurting we don’t turn to others but to the market.

And I think we do that.  When something happens we can feel powerless in our lives.  We can feel like there is so much that we can’t control.  But what might make us feel powerful?  Well, money certainly does, and the quickest way to feel that is to spend some. I can’t control this but I can control that.

The pajamas are a powerful symbol in that story.  When something has been stolen we want to feel safe and comforted. Pajamas—and certainly silk pajamas—can do that.

Now, I know these things get complicated.  It is easy to talk about our materialism.  We have so much stuff that we don’t need.  It is so easy to point fingers at others.  And sometimes we can get self-righteous about it.  We can have our own sense of superiority fueled when we see others.  But we shouldn’t get too smug.

Sociologist Juliet Schor found that almost 80 percent of respondents to a study said that most Americans are “very materialistic” but only 8 percent of respondents, however, considered themselves to be so.  As one writer noted about the study, “Apparently humility is as challenging as simplicity and moralism as tempting as consumerism.”[4]

We might miss some of the cultural messages so prevalent in our lives.  We can see it in others but not in ourselves.  It is easy to point the finger but there is something we don’t want to see.  And yet underneath those findings might be a message we need to hear.  But I think it is important to identify those needs we have.  It is important to remember what objects mean to us—because they do have meaning because we invest meaning in them.  And if we are going to get rid of some of it, we might need to first recognize the meaning we have in those things.

Where do we turn when we are afraid?  Where do we find meaning when we feel lost?  What might some other way be?  What might some new narrative look like?

If we understand that there are things we need, if we understand that there are emotional needs that need filling in our lives, we can have a better perspective on the choices we make.  Maybe we don’t need that thing, but maybe we do need to know what we’re trying to get from that thing.  And from there we can start to see how our story might be different.  That story might begin to shift from one of isolation to a story of interdependence.  We need to know that our stories get into us; they are part of how we see ourselves in the world.

Writer David Korten articulates some of this shift in his book The Great Turning.  (He has spoken here at our church.)  He sees us as a species in a time of great change.  And when generations look back, he says, it will be seen as a time of great turning—towards a story of life as fundamentally interdependent—or as a time of what he says could be the great unraveling.  One factor will be how we see the stories of our lives.  Will we see in this time the opportunities to change how we live and how we are together or will we further isolate and find ourselves and our planet in ruin.  As our environmental and social systems fail, we have our imperative, according to Korten.  The question is what will we do about it?  The question is how can we make the changes we need to make?[5]

The question is how do we see ourselves in this narrative?  Will we see ourselves as essentially consumers in life, receiving what is in the marketplace?  Or will we see our actions as affecting the whole?  Will be see our lives as part of a vast web of life?  Do we see ourselves as entitled to have whatever we want?  Or creatures mindful of relationship in all the choices we make?

We shift from an emphasis on money and material things to an emphasis on what is spiritual, greater than ourselves.  We shift from relationships that dominate others and the earth to a place of seeing ourselves as partners with others and with the earth.  We use our power not against but with.  From this comes changes in how our economic system works and what the priorities are.  From this comes changes in how we make political decisions, how we order our priorities that sacrifice the future for short term gains.

But the fundamental shift is how we see ourselves and our lives as interconnected with everything.  How we see our prayers as part of the larger collective, as a prayer of all beings.

A story.

Writer Sharon Salzberg tells the story of being at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, also known as the Wailing Wall, considered to be one of the holiest sites in Judaism.  The custom is to write a prayer on a piece of paper and place the paper in a crack in the wall.

Salzberg writes that she went one day and wrote down her prayers.  She did not address them to some supreme being, but asked for loving kindness for her friends who were sick, for her friends who had parents dying, and so on, and then put the paper in the cracks in the wall.

She went back the next day and did not know if she would be able to find her paper in the wall.  Hundreds, if not thousands, of people come and place intentions there every day.  But she did find it and was very pleased.

She went back the next day to check again and this time she was not sure if her intention was on the wall or not.  She left feeling a little disheartened.

The fourth day she went back and it was clear she was not going to be able to tell whether her paper was there or not.  She had no idea what actually happened to her prayers.

She found herself fixated with the fact that she could not see her piece of paper.  And then she had a realization. She looked at the hundreds of other pieces of paper up on the wall and she realized that it really didn’t matter if her prayer was still up there.  Her prayer was part of all the prayers that were on the wall.  In a moment she understood that it didn’t matter what was up there as much as the fact that her prayer was part of a universal prayer.[6]

What she figured out was that each intention expressed someone’s own version of the universal.  On the wall were prayers for love and compassion, for peace and healing and hope.  No matter what the particulars on each piece of paper, they actually all said much the same thing.  As we are connected together, our prayers are connected together and we come to speak in a language that transcends boundaries.  We come to see our story always, always, connected to the stories of all other beings.

It is easy in these days to feel lost and disconnected.  It is easy to wonder if our prayers make any difference at all.  It is easy to wonder where we are to give our energy when so many things call for our energy.  Part of our job is to be clear about what it is that’s important and to give fully of ourselves from that place of being.

Words of the Persian mystic, Rumi:

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty

and frightened.  Don’t open the door to the study

and begin reading.  Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

We need to be present with life.  We need to make space for the spirit in our lives.  We need to make space for the stranger who might have something to tell us.  We need to hear what the spirit is asking of us in these times.  I don’t have all the answers; none of us have all the answers.  But I have faith that the answers will come.  I have faith that we will figure it out.  Yes, we will make mistakes.  And yes, it will be all right.

I know it has something to do with being present—to the despair of our times, to the violence, to the chaos.  In the midst of all that comes is that still small voice that says this is the way, this is where you need to go next.  No, it won’t be easy, but we will likely be surprised about what we learn along the way.

One thing does lead to another, which leads to another, and then another.  The story is that we are all connected in ways known and unknown, in ways large and small.  The story is that we are precious just as we are and that a lot of the trappings we pick up aren’t really that helpful.  The story is that we are not alone but connected to something vast and mysterious, something we see, but only in fragments.  But we live with faith that those fragments will bring us to where we need to be in the story of life.

May it be so.  Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of life, we come this day seeking wholeness and peace.  We come to be of service, to build the common good and to make our own days glad.  Be with us on the journey.  Give us the courage to imagine life in new ways.  Give us the wisdom to know what is life-giving.  Sustain us—sustain the earth—in all the days ahead. Amen.

BENEDICTION

Always remember that you are part of the story.  Remember that you are precious and good.  Remember, too, to bring your light into the world.  Go in love and in peace.  Amen.

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