by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given May 18, 2008

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

We come to this place this day

To renew our faith in the holiness of life,

To reaffirm the way of the open heart,

To reclaim the vision of an earth made fair, with

All her people one. 

Come now, and let us worship together.

I want to begin this sermon with words from Oregon’s beloved poet, William Stafford. I want to share with you the final stanza of one of my favorite Stafford poems, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other.”  The poem is a plea for us to be transparent—clear—with one another, lest we fall into unintended betrayal.  The final four lines read as follows:

“For it is important that awake people be awake,

 or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

 the signals that we give—yes or no, or maybe—

 should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.”

Who are these “awake people” Stafford is speaking of?  I think they could be no others but people like you—people who read and think and wonder and question; people who take responsibility not just for their own personal lives, but for the larger society in which they live and work.  I think he is speaking directly to us—people who try, at least, to be awake.

But staying awake, staying conscious, is not easy, is it?  I pick up the Oregonian on a single day this last week, and I read the story about the second female soldier from Oregon who has been killed in Iraq.  This young woman, Jessica Ellis, smiles broadly at me from the page of the paper.  Her grin is infectious; I want to give her a big hug.  She was a medic, killed by a roadside bomb.  Last time she was home, her parents said, they noticed a change—from always happy to serious.  “She seemed detached at times, like she was doing a lot of thinking,” her father said.  He wanted to know how she felt about the war, but she would never discuss that.  She simply said, “I’m there for my buddies.”  “The guys looked out for her and she helped them,” her father said.  “She trained with them, and she went to war with them, and she died with them.”  So I am reading this article, and I am sitting there at the breakfast table, crying once again in my cereal.  I tell myself I should not read these articles, but then I tell myself I must.  Here these parents have lost their child; it is the least I can do to read the article.

This is not where the tragic news ends of course. There is the cyclone in Burma, and the earthquake in China.  It all comes in living color on our breakfast plates or into our living rooms.  It is not easy to know, to be conscious, of the state of our world and its people. 

So how are we able to bear all of this?  To remain awake in the midst of it?  Well, sometimes we just have to take a break.  Sometimes we have to not read the newspaper for a few days, or turn away from the radio and TV.  Sometimes we need to do what Wendell Berry suggests in our unison reading this morning, to “come into the peace of wild things,” to “rest in the grace of the world.”  We need to sing together as we have done this morning.  We need to dance.  We need to celebrate the beauty of the world and to give thanks that we are alive and able still, in spite of it all, to laugh and to love.

And we need to forgive ourselves and others our failings to be fully conscious, to be fully awake.  Novelist Demetria Martinez laments the failings of her fictional characters in a wonderful essay called “Spirit Matters.”  She writes:

“Writers are contemplatives.  Daily we give ourselves over to silence, only to find the world at its worst marching across the snowy horizon of the page.  The characters one had such hope for turn out to be, well, human.  They hate, manipulate, seduce other people’s spouses.  They love money, worry about their looks, and fume about the state of the nation while making no effort to change things. 

This is not to say that grace does not happen in their lives; instances of beauty and truth, something the world’s religions have named variously as compassion, agape, wakefulness… But all it takes is a traffic jam, a bad-hair day, and my characters—those mirrors of my own heart—forget, entering once again what Buddhism calls Maya—illusion—or what Christians call sin.”

Martinez goes on to write, “The novelist is condemned to Earth.  We are called to abstract doctrine…  Our work is to stand in solidarity with those who have no answers.”[1]

I know what she means.  I come here Sunday after Sunday, step into this pulpit, and try to shed some light.  But mainly I come here to stand in solidarity with those who have no answers, who struggle as I do with my subversive flesh.  We know our essence is spirit, and yet we walk around in these frail and needy bodies.

And so we find consciousness is challenging, both public and personal.  And it is not as if the two are unrelated—when we are awake internally, we are also of necessity awake to the world around us.  I’m reminded of a cartoon I saw once.  It pictures a man with a big zig-zag line going down his body, and the caption says,  “People kept saying to me, ‘Maury, look inside,’ and so I did look inside, and what I found there was angry and had teeth.” 

Why should we look inside, when what we find there might just be disturbing?  Because, as one of my friends once said, the subconscious always wins.  To know, to be aware, is to be free to choose; to not know is to shove truth under the surface, only to have the shadow-self call the shots.  To be an emotional, spiritual grown-up is to be called to consciousness.  You feel fear?  Make friends with fear.  You have doubts?  Wonderful—they will lead you to the only truth that matters.  You have an enemy?  Ah, your greatest teacher.

Sometimes we come to a point in life when we understand that nothing that we are doing is satisfying our soul.  The usual answers, the usual distractions, just will not appease this deep hunger.  We are moved to reach for a greater consciousness than we have yet known.  We find that we must renounce the old ways and make space for something new. 

The classic renunciation story is that of the young prince Siddhartha, who gave up his privilege and place to become the Buddha.  Siddhartha was born the heir to a small kingdom in Nepal.  Just before his birth, soothsayers predicted that he would become either a powerful ruler or a holy man.  His father the king, fearful of his son becoming a wandering ascetic going around with a begging bowl, decided to surround him with luxury and keep him entirely from the harsh realities of living.  But when Siddhartha was 28, his servant helped him venture outside the palace for the first time, and he saw four things there that changed his life forever. 

He saw a man suffering from a serious illness.  He saw a very old man struggling with the afflictions of age.  He saw a corpse being taken for cremation, surrounded by mourners.  These people awakened compassion in his heart, and he asked himself why these people were suffering and what he might do to help.  As he was returning to the palace, struck with these questions, he saw a man walking peacefully along the road, wearing the thin robe of a monk and carrying a begging bowl.  That image would determine the rest of his life.  He did not hesitate—he relinquished the life of pleasure and comfort in his father’s palace and became a seeker. 

It is important to know that he did not immediately become enlightened.  He meditated, and practiced yoga, and studied.  He had to learn to let go—of opinions, ideas, beliefs, self-centered concerns.

Most of us will not become Buddhas or renounce all worldly things.  But all of us have had moments of wonder—it could be something as simple as the way the sunlight comes through the window one morning or it could be looking at the face of a child asleep.  We know intuitively that there is a deeper reality, for that reality has surprised us more than once with its peace and beauty.  And perhaps time and circumstances say to us at some point, “The time is right.”  The time is right to turn, to go in another direction.

Such was the case for Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of “Eat, Pray, Love”.[2]  Her marriage was falling apart in a terribly painful way, and she found herself at the end of her rope; both her domestic and career ropes, as it were.  She felt empty.  She felt helpless.  So where would a sophisticated, talented, brilliant woman turn?  To God?  How embarrassing!  And yet that is what she was reduced to doing.  And so she said her first, her very first, awkward prayer.  This is how she tells it:

“In the middle of that dark November crisis… I was not interested in formulating my views on theology.  I was interested only in saving my life. 

What I said to God through my gasping sobs was something like this: ‘Hello, God.  How are you?  I’m Liz.  It’s nice to meet you.’ That’s right—I was speaking to the creator of the universe as though we’d just been introduced at a cocktail party…  In fact, it was all I could do to stop myself from saying, ‘I’ve always been a big fan of your work…’

 "'I’m sorry to bother you so late at night,’” she continued, “‘But I’m in serious trouble.  And I’m sorry I haven’t ever spoken directly to you before…  I am not an expert at praying, as you know.  But can you please help me?  I am in desperate need of help.  I don’t know what to do.  I need an answer.  Please tell me what to do.  Please tell me what to do.  Please tell me what to do…’”

And so the prayer narrowed itself down to that simple entreaty, “Please tell me what to do,” repeated again and again.  She begged like someone who was pleading for her life.  And the crying went on forever.

Until, quite abruptly, she writes, “it stopped.”

So her crying stops, and she finds herself “surrounded by a little pocket of silence.”  Then she hears a voice.  It was not a voice like Charlton Heston, she says, nor was it a voice telling her to build a baseball field in her backyard.  It was merely her own voice, but it was her own voice as she had never heard it before.  The voice was full of love and certainty.  The voice said, “Go back to bed, Liz.”

Often, that is the way the Sacred enters our lives.  We are empty.  We are ready for a miracle.  “Any time now, God—just hit me with it.”  And the answer comes, “Go back to bed.”  Take care of yourself.  Do what the moment calls for.  Chop wood, carry water.

First Gilbert travels to Italy—that is the “eat” part of the title.  Then in Part Two, she goes to India and lives in an ashram, where she struggles with meditation.  I totally understand that struggle, because I too struggle with learning to meditate.  I keep trying because I know that meditation can help me become the person I want to become, can help me live more in the moment. 

I am a thinker, a planner—and mostly that is an attempt to create reality rather than simply experience reality.  Now, there is nothing wrong with thinking and planning—unless you do it all the time, thereby missing your actual life.  Then there is the ever-present problem of desire that the Buddhists point out.  They do not mean by this that you should not like or desire ice cream or a cool drink of water; I think what they mean is that when desire is in the mind, then that moment is always incomplete or unsatisfactory.  And when one desire is satisfied, another arises, and so we live in perpetual dissatisfaction.   The big picture—spiritually speaking—is that there is nothing we can hold onto; nothing to have, nowhere to go.  As Ram Dass famously said, “Be here now.”

Because I walk in a lot of fear and have done so all of my life, my mind is constantly trying to weigh and judge and control.  I am learning that it is possible to be in the world without so much judgment, that it is possible much of the time to just observe in a disinterested way, and then discern.  Discerning has a very different quality about it than does judging.  In fact, I have a bumper sticker now that I got from the Peace table down in the Parish Hall, and it says, “Non-judgment Day is near.”  I like that message on several different levels.

Much of our mind’s business is in trying frantically to uphold our image of who we think ourselves to be—that is our ego structure, or the story we have constructed about ourselves.  As our meditation practice matures, we gradually let go and move into a spaciousness of being which allows the natural coming and going of things, without the need to judge and control. 

Once the Dalai Lama was asked at a conference whether or not he ever became angry.  “Of course,” he said.  “If something happens and I don’t like it, if it is not what I want to have happen, anger arises.”  That’s very different from the way most of us experience anger—we rehearse the litany of wrongs that have been done to us, we judge the other party and think of bad names to call him, our body tenses up, and we may consider scenarios of revenge.  That is very different from saying, “Anger is arising in me.”  Now there is spaciousness, there is room to notice all of the voices from our past that are chiming in at the moment.  There is room to consider a response.[3]

The spiritual life is all about freedom, you see—not about constraint, but about freedom.  When we are pushing away or when we are grasping, we are shackled to our desire.  Every moment that we are not wanting is a moment of sheer freedom.  As we continue to practice meditation, we come to see what is freeing in our lives, and what is constraining.”[4]

Back now to where we started, back to the words of William Stafford—“it is important that awake people be awake.”  The freer we are from compulsion and grasping, the more awake we will be.  We will be awake to our own truth; we will discern well and choose well, and because we will not expect things to be other than the way they are in any given moment, we will be able to bend with the winds of the times.  We will be flexible and strong, not easily broken.

And once in a while you pick up the newspaper, as I did last Friday, and you read something in the headlines that brings tears—but rather than tears of sorrow, tears of joy:  “CALIFORNIA ALLOWS GAY MARRIAGE.”  And I know and you know that a greater consciousness is growing, and that you are a part of that.  And that when enough of us can be clear about the signals we give—yes, no, or maybe—the darkness around us will not be so deep.  And the world will shift—is shifting as we speak—towards peace and wholeness.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

We call out this day to the Mystery, to One Whose Name We Cannot Know.  We confess, in this troubled world of ours, that we don’t know what to do.  We are in desperate need of help.  Let your voice speak within us; let us know what the moment calls for, each hour of each day.  Let us be clear, let us be steady, and must of all, let us move always in love.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

As you go from this place today, may you go into this world aware and awake and free.  Go in love and go in peace.  Amen.

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Copyright 2008, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.