by Rev. Tom Disrud

A sermon given June 6, 2008

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Every spring we celebrate our seniors graduating from high school as we send them into the world—to college, to jobs, to exploration. In them we see hope for the future.  I know that I do indeed feel hopeful when I am with them.  They seem to be so alive.  They seem to be so much more aware of the world than I recall being at their age.  I know that they are going to do things that surprise us and inspire us.

And every spring when we send them into the future I also know that their lives—just like all of our lives—can’t be predicted.  They will know surprises.  They will have their share of bad experiences.  Things will happen that can’t be explained or understood.  They will be led in ways that they didn’t know that they would be led.  They will please others and they will disappoint others.  They will see—hopefully—possibilities.

No matter our age, we know that life doesn’t always go as we plan. That is one of the things we learn over and over again.  That’s the way it is.

When I got out of college I wanted desperately to get a job at a magazine called CASHFLOW, for corporate treasurers.  It wasn’t so much that I wanted to write for corporate treasurers, but the job was in Chicago, and I wanted desperately to live in Chicago, and I told myself that it didn’t matter what I was doing as long as I was living in Chicago.

I didn’t get the job—thank goodness I didn’t get the job.  I got a job in Duluth, Minnesota, and I felt like I was moving to the end of the earth (and in umpteenth month of winter it felt like I had). But you know, that was the right place for me in all kinds of ways.  Not that it was all perfect.  Turned out that the job wasn’t perfect. Other things weren’t perfect.  But it did help me find the path that I was supposed to be on. That led me to another place that lead me to another place and it all seemed like it was going according to plan.  At least that is how I see the story with some perspective.

As our lives unfold, we learn that we are shaped by all kinds of things: personality, family, class, circumstance.  We do our share of things well, some things not well at all. Sometimes we are just plain bad at things.  We live with expectations—our own, our parents, the world’s.  Sometimes we find ourselves on track and it all seems pretty effortless— but sometimes we hit walls.  Sometimes life throws us for a curve.

Sometimes there are the big failures.  Sometimes we screw up and hurt other people.  We let ourselves, and others, down.  Sometimes we are hurt.  We try to make sense of it all. We come face to face with our power to hurt as well as help.

Now many of us, I’ve noticed, think of ourselves as above-average.  We strive to do well. We do well in school, we do well at our jobs, and we do well in just about everything— and with that can come the illusion that we are in control.  Of course, we are not in control, but accepting that can be hard to do.

And so we learn to chart our course in life.  We learn what is safe and what is not safe. Some of us learn to take more risks than others.  That has to do with circumstance and personality again.  Sometimes we may want to exchange what we have for a new life.

Rachel Naomi Remen tells the story of a cancer surgeon named Josh, who came to see Remen because he was depressed.  He had become disillusioned and cynical and he was thinking about early retirement: “I can barely make myself get out of bed most mornings,” he said.  “I hear the same complaints day after day.  I see the same diseases over and over again.  I just don’t care anymore.  I need a new life.”

Remen writes that sometimes the spiritual task is not necessarily seeking out new places but seeing the place where we are with new eyes.  She assigned Josh a task.  Every evening, she asked him to take 15 minutes and review the events of his day and to write down the answers to three questions in his journal.  The three questions were: What surprised me today?  What moved me or touched me today?  What inspired me today?

Josh was dubious but he agreed to try.  When she talked to him on the phone three days later he sounded irritated.  “I have done this for three days now and the answer is always the same: “Nothing, nothing, and nothing.  I don’t like to fail at things.  Is there a trick to this?”

She laughs and says, “Perhaps you are still looking at your life in old ways.  Try looking at the people around you as if you were a novelist, a journalist, or maybe a poet.  Look for the stories.”  There was a silence.  “Right,” he said.  That was the end of the call.

He did not mention the journal for several weeks.  Their sessions focused on relieving some of his stress and reducing his workload and he seemed to be getting better.  And then, six weeks after the phone call where he questioned the journaling exercise, he came in with a small bound book and began to tell her what he thought was really helping him.

He had trouble with the journal at the beginning.  He wondered how he could be so busy and living such an empty life.  But slowly he had begun to find some answers to the three questions.  He opened the journal and began reading.

At first, the most surprising thing in a day was that a cancer had grown or shrunk two or three millimeters, and the most inspiring thing was that a new or experimental drug had begun to work.  But gradually he had begun to see more deeply.  Eventually he saw people who had found their way through great pain and darkness by following a thread of love, people who had sacrificed parts of their bodies to affirm the value of being alive, people who had found ways to triumph over pain, suffering, and even death.

In the beginning he said that he would only notice the things that surprised him or moved him or inspired him several hours after they happened, in the evening, in the privacy of his home.  “It was like one of those fairy tales,” he said, “Like being under a spell. I could only see life by looking backwards over my shoulder.”  But gradually this lag time became shorter and shorter. “I was building up a capacity I had never used.  But I got better at it.  Once I began to see things at the time they actually happened, a lot changed for me.”

She asked him what he meant.  “Well, at the beginning I couldn’t talk about it and I just wrote everything down.  But I think when I began to see things differently, my attitude started to change.  Maybe that showed in my tone of voice or in some other way.  People seemed to pick up on it because their attitude seemed changed, too.  And after a while I just began talking to people about more than their cancer and its treatment.  I began talking about what I could see.”

Over time he found himself asking his patients about more than their cancer—questions he had not been taught in medical school.  “What has sustained you in dealing with this illness?” or  “Where do you find your strength?”  He found that people with the same illness had very different things to say.  Things that he found he really wanted to hear about.  And in some way what they said could be true for him, too, as he struggled to deal with difficulties in his own life.  “I knew cancer very well,” he said, “but I did not know people before.”

A funny thing happened.  As he related to people differently, they started to relate to him differently, too.  He noticed that people started to thank him for his work, in ways that they hadn’t before.  One gave him a stethoscope engraved with his name.  When asked what he did with it, at first he was puzzled, and then he laughed out loud. “I listen to hearts,” he said. “I listen to hearts.”[1]

Life has a way of calling us into life.  It has a way of pulling us out of some place of isolation and bringing us to someplace else, a place where we may not even know we needed to be.

Sometimes it means coming face to face with our limitations.  It means failing, letting ourselves or others down.  It means living without meaning and finding ourselves searching.  It means learning lessons and changing our ways.  Sometimes it means just slowing down and paying attention.

There is a saying that to teach a snake its shape, put it in a box.  Our failures, the lessons in life have ways of teaching us our shape, who we are.  There is much in life that keeps us from taking risks, that keeps us from reaching out.  Sometimes we are just too comfortable and are so surrounded with things that we stop paying attention to what is really important.  But that can also keep us from the holy.

Anne Lamott wrote of a time in her life when she was in her early 20s.  It would be years before she would get sober.  She had a boyfriend who did not treat her particularly well. He left her for a new girlfriend and then came back to her but he was still seeing his new girlfriend.  She found herself one morning in his bed very ill and hung over and not able to make it home.  He had a date with the new girlfriend and told her that he wouldn’t be back until the next day, but she is welcome to stay there.  So she found herself in bed reading a book that the new girlfriend gave to the boyfriend.  The book was by Ram Dass and while the ideas weren’t new for Lamott, somehow, in this strange and lonely place, she was able to hear them in a very different way that time.  This is what she wrote:

“This was the day I pecked a hole out of the cocoon and saw the sky of ingredients that would constitute my spiritual path.  This was the day I knew the ingredients of the spiritual that would serve me—love, poetry, prayer, meditation, community.  I knew that sex could be as sacred as taking care of the poor.  I knew that no one comes holier than anyone else, that nowhere is better than anywhere else.  I knew that the resurrection of the mind was possible.  I knew that no matter how absurd and ironic it was, acknowledging death and the finite was what gave you life and presence.  You might as well make it good.  Nature, family, children, cadavers, birth, rivers in which we pee and bathe, splash and flirt and float memorial candles—in these you would find holiness.  

“I started praying, not the usual old prayer of “God, I am such a loser,” but new ones—“Hi” and “Thank you.”  I viscerally got that God was everywhere; poor old God, just waiting for you to notice, and enter your life like a track coach for slow people.  Kathleen Norris said, many years later,  “Prayer is not asking for what you think you want, but asking to be changed in ways you can't imagine,” and I got the message that day.”[2]

Words of Rumi, a thirteenth century mystic:

Forget your life. Say God is Great. Get up.

You think you know what time it is. It’s time to pray.

You’ve carved so many little figurines, too many.

Don’t knock on any random door like a beggar.

Reach your long hand out to another door, beyond where

you go on the street, the street

where everyone says, “How are you?”

and no one says How aren’t you?

Tomorrow you’ll see what you’ve broken and torn tonight,

thrashing in the dark. Inside you

there’s an artist you don’t know about.

He’s not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

If you are here unfaithfully with us,

you’re causing terrible damage.

If you’ve opened your loving to God’s love,

you’re helping people you don’t know

and have never seen.

Is what I say true? Say yes quickly,

if you know, if you’ve known it

from before the beginning of the universe.

It is easy to see ourselves as isolated beings—as autonomous, independent beings.  But the truth is that we are all in this together.  The truth is we are all learning and growing and fumbling and failing and succeeding together.  The truth is we are all broken and we are all whole.

That’s what life is.  It surprises us.  It makes us really mad.  Some days we learn that there really is hope.  Some days we learn that it might really be possible for anybody to be president, even an African American or a woman.  Some days we learn that the world really can be more than we have imagined it to be.

The universe—just like our lives—continues to unfold every day, in every moment, and we are part of that continuous unfolding, that continuous evolution.  As we grow and change so does the universe, in ways, we can only attempt to understand.  Asking us to bring what we have to the table and to be of use, over and over again.

Amen.

PRAYER

Let us pray:  Spirit of life, we give thanks for this day and for our lives.  Help us to acknowledge and celebrate goodness and beauty.  Help us to see the wonder in each day, in each moment.  Help us to be aware of how we are connected to this wonder: how it moves though us and in us and among us.  Help us to trust in that mystery we will never fully know.  Help us to always be open to surprise.  Grant us wisdom and courage on the journey.  Always, always, grant us hope. Amen.

BENEDICTION

May your life always be unfolding.  May each of your days be filled with wonder and hope.  Go in love and go in peace.