by Rev. Leela Sinha

A sermon given April 15, 2007

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Once upon a time, not long ago, and not too far away, a UU church was having a conversation about switching from Styrofoam coffee cups to a more environmentally-friendly system.  They went back and forth and back and forth.  Volunteer time and water, foam in landfills, environmental and practical concerns balanced against each other like houses of cards.  Finally, one particularly irate member stood up and said, “But we’ve been doing it this way for hundreds of years!”  Another congregant looked over calmly and said, “Styrofoam hasn’t existed for hundreds of years.”

 But it felt like hundreds of years.  It doesn’t take long for something to start to feel familiar.  It doesn’t take much for novelty to become normal.  But over time, repeated exposure can go deeper—much deeper.

 Take foreign language.  When we learn languages as adults, we usually start with a set of vocabulary words.  This is a table, we learn, and that, a chair.  It’s good information, and it helps us begin to decipher sentences.  We pull in contextual clues, we study grammatical rules . . . but at some point we have to stop all that and start making it up on our own.  If we immerse ourselves long enough we have that one afternoon when we realize we’re thinking in our new language . . . and then the morning comes when we wake from a dream in which we were much more fluent than we are when we’re awake.  Language shapes thought; it affects what we know and how we understand. As we shift languages the immersion penetrates to the far corners of our subconscious, where it takes up residence and proceeds to change our thoughts, our dreams, our very neurons.

 ***

 There is an obscure tennis club in a remote corner of Russia which turns out a disproportionately high number of highly-ranked tennis players.  A New York Times reporter wanted to find out how, and ended up with a light lesson—not in genius, but in neuroscience.  Turns out they practice a lot—it’s three years before they are allowed any tournament play—because to their instructor, form is more important than psychology, equipment, or strategy.  Drills refine drills until the students move with incredible precision . . . and at the center of this process are determination . . . and myelin.

Myelin is an electrical insulator secreted by our bodies and wrapped around certain, select neurons.  Since neurons work by electrical impulse, when they are insulated the electricity is transmitted faster and with less loss of power than it is without insulation.  The stronger and faster the transmission, the more precise the resulting movement.  When we practice, our bodies use certain sets of neurons over and over.  When a neuron is stimulated, the myelin sheath around it thickens.  And when the sheath thickens, the next impulse is faster and stronger.  It’s a cycle—a cycle that literally drives the tennis into their brains.

When we practice, we embed an action, a thought, a way of being in our very souls.  We practice to stop thinking; we practice to get out of our heads.

And why?  Because there are some things we can’t reach until we move beyond thinking.

Language is like that; so is music.  Playing a piece for the first time is about finding the right notes, the right rests, possibly the right inflections.  But when you play a piece every day for thirty minutes, when you unpack every phrase and practice every run, it lodges itself in your fingers, in your arms, in your very breath.  My first flute teacher had a practice rule called “the rule of seven”: if you did it wrong once, you had to do it right seven times in a row to unlearn the mistake.  I don’t know if there was research or experience behind it, but I do know that it worked.  It required a kind of mindfulness, although I couldn’t have named it that when I was eleven.  I needed razor-sharp focus, total immersion in the music.  Anything—anything that distracted me could mean I had to start over.  But the joy of being so totally immersed, so wrapped in the blanket of sound, meant that I was willing to work at it.  Eventually there were a few pieces in my repertoire that I could just play, just open up the music and enjoy.  It was like speaking without words—there was that much room for expression—but you’d never have known it the first time I played it.  Practice let me move beyond the notes to the heart of the sounds.

I love watching professional musicians, because their immersion is total; watching them is like drawing back a curtain to see the person behind the performance.  They spend hours learning the passages, the skills, tricks and turns of phrase.  And all that time alone finally pays off when an audience glimpses the artist’s soul, and for a moment, we are intimately connected.

That’s a very human thing, to want to connect so deeply.  For some the connection is with people or with the earth and sky around us, and for those who experience the divine, it’s often also with god.

***

Lectio divina is the practice of sacred reading: layering the oral traditions of Christianity over themselves year after year until the holy texts are as familiar as the Christmas carols they gave rise to.  It is a practice favored by Benedictine monastics; over time, they read aloud through entire books of the Bible.  Father Luke Dysinger writes,

“THE ART of lectio divina begins with cultivating the ability to listen deeply, to hear ‘with the ear of our hearts’ as St. Benedict encourages us . . . We should allow ourselves to become women and men who are able to listen for the still, small voice of God (I Kings 19:12); the ‘faint murmuring sound’ which is God’s word for us, God’s voice touching our hearts. This gentle listening is an ‘attunement’ to the presence of God in that special part of God’s creation which is the Scriptures.”

-- Fr. Luke Dysinger, O.S.B., http://www.valyermo.com/ld-art.html

For the Benedictines it is a kind of prayer, but the prayer is in the deed; since the words are already chosen, it is the act of praying that makes it personal.  Since for them the Bible is a central part of God’s creation, they reach for union with God when they read those words aloud.  Reading brings scriptures to life the way it invigorates Shakespeare—by moving the voices into this day, this hour, this moment, here.

For those with different theologies, the sacred may be elsewhere, but the desire for relevance in religion is no less.  “Divine reading,” then, can be found in engagement with our surroundings, in our practices here on earth.  We can become one with this wondrous world of which we are so deeply a part, and it doesn’t have to be complicated.  We can sing scales or fry onions; we can meditate or read or gaze into our lover’s eyes: if it is deliberate, if it is repeated, if it is meant for us to engage more deeply with another part of our world, then it is practice.

Author Elizabeth Gilbert writes about a chanting meditation that enraged her when she spent time in an Indian ashram:

“…when I try to go to the chant, all it does is agitate me.  I mean, physically.  I don’t feel like I’m singing it so much as being dragged behind it.  It makes me sweat.  This is very odd, because I tend to be one of life’s chronically cold people…but I’m peeling layers off myself as the hymn drones on, foaming like an overworked farm horse.  I come out of the temple after the Gurugita and the sweat rises off my skin in the cold morning air like fog—like horrible, green, stinky fog.  The physical reaction is mild compared to the hot waves of emotion that rock me as I try to sing the thing.  And I can’t even sing it.  I can only croak it.  Resentfully.  Did I mention that it has 182 verses?”

--Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love, 162

But when we encounter that kind of resistance, that is usually a sign that something big is about to change, that we are balanced on a threshold of possibility and the slightest breath can tip us forward or back.  Certainly, one can justify stepping back from the edge: it’s uncomfortable, it’s difficult, it’s not natural . . . but it is at that moment that we are likely to reap the greatest rewards from moving forward.  If you have a practice you know the feeling: it’s the moment when you are stuck, when you hate the practice, when you have no idea why you thought it was a good idea.  It’s the time when the clothes have absolutely got to be washed, the kitchen scrubbed to a spotless shine, the report for your boss reformatted, and the old coffee table project that you started 25 years ago finished.  Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones calls this “monkey mind,” this moment of utter clarity that everything in the world is more important than your writing, your practice, your art.

Of course, it’s wrong.  Unless the house is actually burning (in which case please, take your art and run!) you do not need to cut your nails, plan your menus, or feed the cats.  They can wait another 20 minutes.  That’s all it takes for what Artists Way author Julia Cameron calls “morning pages,” the only practice that I have been able to sustain with any consistency over the last seven years.  Three pages, handwritten, of whatever’s on your mind, first thing: before the kids, the spouse, the breakfast, anything (I allow myself use of the toilet if necessary).  It need not make sense or even be legible.  This is the essence of a practice: if it has to make sense, you’re finished before you’ve begun, because inevitably after the novelty has worn off, something else (anything else) will look more sensible.  The point is there: large, interconnected, somehow related to skill building and to settling that uneasy feeling in your stomach . . . but in the moment it must be just because, you are doing it because you do it, and that is all.  Like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof we need practices that are because they are, such that, “every one of us knows who he is, and what God expects him to do!”  On the way to getting us deeper into each other’s souls a good tradition will help us feel secure, help us feel settled, create some safe spaces within which we can experiment.  If you know you have silent time every morning, it makes it easier to tolerate chaos at night; if you have your afternoon social time it makes it easier to concentrate in the morning.

And we practice to lose ourselves.  When I go rock climbing or sing in a choir there is nothing except the rock, or the music.  There is no sermon for Sunday, no committee on Wednesday.  There is no family, no pets, no nothing but what I am doing.  I am, at long last, at rest in the moment.

The best part is, if we want a practice in our lives, most of us are at least halfway there. We have music, we have art, we have sports, we have meditation . . . we do these things already; having a practice is as much about framing as actions.

And there’s another thing, the center of most practice, the thing that Gilbert finds is making her sweat: love.

Now I know “practice” sounds too dry, too didactic, too intellectual for love.  After all, isn’t love that thing that we all end up admitting isn’t logical, doesn’t make sense, can’t be planned for or explained?  How can you sit down to practice something that shows up when it pleases, takes over your brain and your life, and then leaves on a whim with a trail of chaos behind it?

The truth is, that’s exactly where the practice part comes in.

I don’t mean that every romantic relationship is fixable all the time, but I do think that our culture of instant gratification encourages us to move on before we’re actually done.  Culturally we’re taught that love and relationships are fickle (although we’re still supposed to find that one perfect lifetime partner), and so we often expect that eventually we will lose our beloved.  We can spend entire relationships waiting for the other shoe to drop, making contingency plans, wondering when it all is going to end.

That’s not healthy.  It causes stress, it causes unrest, it prevents further commitment—it becomes a block to deepening intimacy, which in turn can reduce the likelihood of the relationship’s survival.

The antidote—or an antidote—is practice, love’s practice.

In The Cloister Walk, author Kathleen Norris quotes a Benedictine nun who spoke about her own early infatuation with a priest, and its role in her formation as a celibate:

“I was truly infatuated, for the first time in my life…I quickly learned…[that] I was miserable as long as I tried to keep it hidden.  As soon as I admitted to myself, and then to my novice mistress, what was going on, I felt an enormous release from guilt…”  She broke off contact on the advice of her novice mistress, and about a year later, ran into the priest by accident.

 “I realized then that my obedience had dispelled the mental image that I’d built up of him.  My infatuation hadn’t taken the real person into account.  I found that love starts when you see the real person, not the one you’ve invented…I learned…that what matters is not that you’re good, but that you trust.”

She trusted in her guides, in the process, and in her decision—the decision to enter the monastic life.  “I finally realized that I had to keep in mind that my primary relationship is with God.  My vows were made to another person, the person of Christ.  And all of my decisions about love had to be made in the light of that person.”

Several nuns describe celibacy as one of the few parts of convent life that must be chosen daily.  Like fidelity, like any love, it comes up repeatedly, and it must be chosen for, or chosen against—each time.  This is the practice, to choose for, and choose for, and choose for again.  Whether you are choosing love of god or love of children or love of a partner or love of work or a community, whether you have a god, or children, or a partner, or work, or community, the commitments of love are some of the deepest practices we can choose.  We must trust our decision, and our companions on the journey.  These are the practices that reach into our hearts and extract flesh and sinew, the ones that have a cost that we are glad to pay.

And the more we practice, the deeper they go, the more they require of us.

When we are successful with our relationships time after time, year after year, it is not because we ignored the challenges or stepped into them lightly.  When we are successful it is because engaging the questions and finding our way through them proves to be richer work by far than the work of walking away or changing course.  We are not selfless—we are serving our own deepest needs when we do this work . . . or when we seek it. 

There is a series called “On Being,” produced by the Washington Post.  It consists of three minute biographical video clips, edited out of two hour interviews and published on the web.  In the vein of NPR’s This I Believe it brings the silent voices of people around us into the public sphere.

One of the people interviewed is a young nun, Sister Anne Elizabeth; she talks about her call to the monastic life: “my friends were planning their college schedules around soap operas and I was planning my schedule around morning prayer and evening prayer.”  As she came to recognize her call she says, “In some ways there was this sort of like sick stomachache…could this really be what you have in mind?  Are you kidding?”  But she continues,   “It’s the good kind of hard…it’s not hard like miserable hard.  It’s hard in a good way…in that it’s a challenge, but it’s something you want very much.”

And that’s the truth.   Whatever we choose, whichever practice speaks so softly to us that we cannot help but hear it, it stays with us because “it’s a challenge, but it’s something [we] want very much.”

***

We are drawn to practices because there’s a deep longing to have something like that, something hard and satisfying, something possible, but not easy.  We UUs have a particular challenge here, because most of our faith is not based on doing hard things.  Many of us turn to other traditions to find the practices for our spiritual lives: we are UU Buddhists and UU pagans and UU Jews and UU Christians and some of that is theology.  But I believe some of that is a missing piece of our core tradition.  We don’t often challenge ourselves to do what does not come naturally.

We all need a time to take stock, redress wrongs, meditate, contemplate, fast.  We need a time for spiritual discipline, before the next fad or fever sweeps us away.  Yes, I said “discipline.”  Natalie Goldberg writes:

“Discipline has always been a cruel word.  I always think of it as beating my lazy part into submission, and that never works.  The dictator and the resistor continue to fight:

‘I don’t want to write.’

‘You are going to write.’

‘I’ll write later; I’m tired.’

‘You’ll write now.’

“All the while my notebook remains empty.  It’s another way that ego has to continue the struggle.  Katagiri Roshi has a wonderful term, ‘fighting the tofu.’  Tofu is cheese made out of soybeans.  It is dense, bland, white.  It is fruitless to wrestle with it, you get nowhere.

“If those characters in you want to fight, let them fight.  Meanwhile, the sane part of you should quietly get up, go over to your notebook, and begin to write.”

--Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg

What she describes is a writing practice.  Regardless of the voices in your head, the day of the week, the wilting of the plants, the whining of the animals, the sane part of you knows the routine, and can do it in a roomful of dancing elephants.

Get up,

go to the notebook,

write. 

That is all.

But in order to have the awareness that we can, that the notebook is even there across the room from the warring voices in our heads, we must practice seeing the notebook every day.  We must practice sitting at the notebook every day.  We must spend so much time with the notebook that being with it feels natural and being without it feels naked.  The same is true for scales, for prayer, for dance.  The same is true for kindness, for compassion, for mindful living.  The same is true for right relations, or for lived faith.

We must have a practice, and then we will experience why we must have a practice. 

Practice calls us to faith.  Like the Benedictine sister of Kathleen Norris’ acquaintance, there will be days and times when we just do it because we know that is what we do, and that has to be enough.

There will be other days when the practice so fills us with light and longing that we cannot fathom a life without it.  Those are the days we think we live for; in fact, we need them all.  What makes a practice practice is the whole of it: the hard and the easy and the just plain bland; the days that we wrestle demons and the days that we wrestle tofu; the insipid days and the inspired ones, what makes it real is that it reflects life itself, it is a microcosm of life itself, and thus it trains us in the complex, wonderful, terrible joy of living, wholly, deeply, daily lives.

In the end, we are learning to live. 

In the end, we are living.

May we love and learn; learn, and love, into all the days of our lives.

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