by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given July 29, 2007

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Reading the newspaper or turning on a news broadcast in our times takes courage. The world is full of violence, full of brokenness. The earth is warming. Politicians don’t seem to be paying attention. Chaos seems to be the order of the day.

If you are like me it sometimes feels overwhelming. I don’t know what to do with it all. I don’t know where to begin. I want to respond but I’m not quite sure how I’m supposed to do that.

We get messages from our culture about how to respond. But they are not necessarily good messages. First of all we are told to just keep busy. Often that means by consuming. Get the latest toy. Go to the opening of the latest cool store in town. Go, go, go. Faster, faster, faster. Forget, forget, forget.

But the challenge in these times is that we should not be forgetting.

The spirit, I think, asks us to be present with life, in all of its beauty and also all of its tragedy. And, I think, even in its chaos. Being present with all of life asks us to stay with what doesn’t always make sense or feel comfortable. It asks us to stay with the confusion and the anxiety of our times. It may be those places of disease that point us to the places where we need to be agents of healing. What might emerge from that place is a new sense of our place in the world, our calling, what it is we are to do, how it is we are to be.

My experience in life tells me that we usually figure out what we are supposed to be doing in the world. But sometimes I think we have to get out of the way and let the spirit do its work. Sometimes we have to get past the distractions in order to do that.

But holding it all might first mean we have to get to a place of being quiet.

The writer Kathleen Norris tells a story in her book Amazing Grace. Over the years she worked as an artist in elementary schools in North Dakota. She devised an exercise for the children about noise and silence. She would make a deal with them—first they get to make noise and then they would make silence.

The rules for the noise were simple. When she would raise her hand, they could make all the noise they wanted while sitting at their desks using their mouths, hands and feet. Norris tells about how their eyes would grow wide with these instructions, so she would add: “the important thing is that when I lower my hand, you have to stop.”

The rules for silence were just as simple. Kids couldn’t hold their breaths or make funny faces. After a couple tries, Norris found, the children were able to become still and the silence became a presence in the classroom.

Some of the children loved it, asking to do it again. Others were not so sure. One fifth grader said it was scary for him. When asked why, he said: “It’s like we’re waiting for something—it’s scary!”
Norris said that what was so interesting is how the silence liberated the imagination of the children. When making noise, most of the images they came up with were clichés. They were not that creative. But in the silence, there was a different quality to their writing. The silence seemed to make them go deeper and to be more creative.

At the end, one girl offered this wisdom: “Silence reminds me to take my soul with me wherever I go.”[1]

We can forget, I think, how to live with soul. We can lose ourselves in our 24-hour-a-day, always up close personal world. There might not be much time and space left for the imagination, much time left to simply be.

But we are asked, I think, to step back and see our lives—and our world—with some perspective. We are asked to live with the disease that a sense a chaos can bring. We naturally want order, but it might be that in holding that place of chaos that the meaning of something is more present.

Wallace Stevens in his writing focuses on the chaotic heart and describes it as “desire without an object of desire.”[2] Modern life is a cacophony of desperate wishes and cravings that are not satisfied by a great number of possessions and the newest entertainments. You have to discover what your heart really wants before that sense of chaos eases.

Carl Jung in his writings said chaos is something so valuable that we should seek it out. It is the prima materia, the original stuff, blessedly free of order and meaning, the ground of new ideas and new experience. “The egg stands for chaos,” he wrote, “Out of it will rise the phoenix, the liberated soul.”[3]

Finding that place of liberation sometimes means sitting back and staying with the whole and allowing something to come into perspective.

Rachel Naomi Remen is a doctor and writer. In her career she has focused on the connection of mind and body and finding healing through a focus on the whole person.

She writes about a woman she calls Sara who has had Crohn’s disease for many years. In the span of 30 years she has had more than 14 abdominal and joint surgeries. Remen writes that when Sara first came to her office she was chronically depressed and full of self-pity. She saw herself as a victim. Over time, however, that changed. She got to a place where she was able to work and be a part of her family’s life in a way that she was not before. Her husband described her as a new woman.

Well a year later she developed a pain in her jaw and she went to see her dentist. He diagnosed a small abscess in the bone and told her that she would need root canal surgery to correct it. As he began to describe the surgery she abruptly stood and left his office. A few hours later Remen writes how she received a call from Sara’s husband. He had come home from work to find her in her bathrobe in the living room deeply depressed. He had no idea why and said she was not willing to talk about it.

Remen asked to see Sara. When she did she was surprised at her appearance. She looked much like she had years earlier when Remen first met her. Her eyes were lifeless, her hair was uncombed, her clothes mismatched. In a flat voice she described what had happened at the dentist’s office. “It’s just too much,” she said, “I just can’t do it. This straw breaks the camel’s back.”

Remen asked her what was going on. Sara began to cry. “I don’t know,” she said, “I feel the same way I did when I first came here, sort of overwhelmed, beaten down.”

Remen encouraged her to sit back in her chair and to relax. She suggested that they try some of the imagery that was helpful in Sara’s healing in the past. Sara sat and relaxed. As her breathing slowed, Remen asked her to imagine herself in front of a closed door and told her that when she was ready she should reach forward and open the door.

When Sara opened the imaginary door she was surprised to find herself in a hospital room. The patient in the bed was herself, in a coma, at the onset of her disease 30 years before.

Over the next few minutes she visited hospital room after hospital room in her imagination. Slowly the events of her long illness began to unfold, year by year, operation by operation, setback after setback, recovery after recovery.

Remen writes that she found herself questioning whether this was going to be helpful, this process of going back and revisiting all this pain. She was afraid that Sara might come out feeling all the more hopeless and victimized.

But she writes that as Sara went on and on, her voice got stronger and stronger and she began to straighten up in her chair. She came to a place where she was in the operating room watching what was her twelfth surgery, in which her right hip was completely replaced. All of a sudden she burst out laughing. “Root canal? Root canal, schmoot canal,” she howled, tears of laughter rolling down her face. “I can do this itty bitty surgery with one hand tied behind my back.”

Remen writes: “by reviewing the story of her disease, Sara was able to experience the story behind the story, the personal meaning in the familiar facts and events. Looking deeply and honestly at her woundedness, she had found her power; experienced her own indomitable will to live, her courage, and her ability to heal herself over and over again.”[4]

In a world of brokenness we need to be in touch with our own brokenness, with our own pain. It is then we are able to be more fully present with the pain and brokenness of the world. That is not an easy task, but something that the spirit asks of us.

As we are able to be with that brokenness—with that despair—we are able to touch not only our pain but also our own sense of power. We come into touch with our own imagination and creativity. We are receptive to how we might see our story in a different way.

But it means a willingness to leave our comfort zones. It means being willing to stay in that place where we don’t have all the answers but where we can also trust that we will be okay no matter what.

Last Sunday I was in Prague in the Czech Republic and I attended worship at the Unitarian congregation there. During the year I was told they usually have 30-40 people attend worship. In the summer that drops to about half.

So we gathered together on a warm Sunday morning, fourteen of us by my count, in the meeting room on the second floor. There was a small framed copy of Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting hanging on the wall. There were ten women and two men from the congregation, all retirement age. The minister was quite a bit younger, late thirties, early forties by my guess.

I don’t speak Czech, so I knew that it was going to be a different worship experience.

The minister introduced the service. We sang an opening hymn in Czech, to the tune of Nearer My God to Thee. We did a responsive reading from our hymnbook in Czech. There was a time of sharing and another hymn.

At first I found myself asking why I was there if I couldn’t understand the language. But by the time the sermon came I found that I had somehow settled in there. I found myself thinking less and less about what I was not understanding and missing and found myself just focused on the people and how they were together. Since it was summer the minister was trying something new. He would speak for a time and then invite conversation. One person would speak, and then another.

What I noticed was the way the minister told a story, the way his face lit up. What I noticed was how attentive each person was—each in their own way.  How the woman in the red dress seemed especially attentive, the way the woman in the blue blouse looked to carry some old, old hurt with her. The way the man in the white shirt leaned forward to hear every word. The way the woman who made the coffee for the social time after the service kept looking toward the kitchen to make sure everything was in order. The way one person would quietly look towards another person, as if to check in to see how they were doing.

I realized that I probably would not have noticed all this had I been thinking about what was being said. It’s funny but a week later I can still see those faces. I can still remember the feeling that came from seeing how it was that they were together.

The language of the spirit isn’t always something that is easy to understand. It may come amid the cacophony of all that can be our lives. Sometimes we have to stay with it to hear what it is saying.

The root word that chaos comes from in Greek means to be wide open. It meant a primal emptiness, space.[5]

These are days when we are asked to be wide open. To be present to what the world might be asking of us, to be open in a way where we really don’t know the answers but have faith that we will know what it is we need to be doing.

Sometimes these days I live with a good deal of despair. You may feel that too. I really wonder how things will be different. I really wonder how that will happen. There is so much that I don’t know.

But I do know some things. What we are coming to—what we are learning—is how we are going to live in different ways.

The work that is asked of us in these days is soul work. We are being asked to listen in ways that we have not before, to see the world in ways that may not be familiar.

It is the work of healing and restoration. It is the work of living in ways that keep us in right relationship with others and with the earth, for our generation and for the generations that will follow us.

Words by Billy Collins:

But it is hard to speak of these things
how the voices of light enter the body
and begin to recite their stories
how the earth holds us painfully against
its breast made of humus and brambles
how we who will soon be gone regard
the entities that continue to return
greener than ever, spring water flowing
through a meadow and the shadows of clouds
passing over the hills and the ground
where we stand in the tremble of thought
taking the vast outside into ourselves.

Taking in the world—living in the world—with integrity and love is what we are called to do every day of our lives. So simple and yet so challenging.

It is a dance, this moving in, this moving out of this chaos and order. Moving from that place of knowing to that place of not-knowing, from that place of ease to that place of disease.

We are asked to live faithfully these days, that we will find the answers we need, that we will know our calling in the world, that we know, day by day by day, how it is we are to live.

Amen.

PRAYER

Let us pray. Spirit of life, you move in ways so subtle, so mysterious. We may see you only in fragments. Help us to be present to all that is our life. Help us to live in the presence of chaos, in the presence of wonder. Help us in the midst of all that to hear that still small voice that we might know the wonder of life, that we might see our lives as healing, as holy work. Amen.

Benediction

Rest in the grace of these summer days, good people. Always take the time to ask how it is with your soul. May you know life, may you know hope in all of your days. Go in love and go in peace. Amen.

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Copyright 2007, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.