by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given June 22, 2008

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

We come together this morning

To renew our faith in the holiness and beauty of life,

To reaffirm the way of the open heart,

To rekindle the flame of hope—

Come now, and let us worship together.

I want to begin with a story this morning—and this story falls into the category of “be careful what you wish for.”  A friend of mine, a newly minted physician back in the 1960s, knew he was about to be drafted into the Vietnam War, and so he opted to enlist in the Navy.  They told him if he enlisted that he could have his choice of assignments.  And so he said that he would like to serve on a ship in the South Seas.  Sounds good, doesn’t it?  Fruit falling off the trees—beaches—beautiful women.  The Navy, in its infinite wisdom, granted him that wish—yes, he was sent to the South Seas—the far South, on an ice-breaker in Antarctica. 

One of only a few professionals on board the small ship, he served as the ship’s doctor, dentist, public health officer, recreation director, and minister.  As the doctor, he was the first to take out an appendix at the South Pole.  As the public health officer, he tried in vain to prevent his 18-year-old sailors from contracting venereal diseases when they stopped in port.  

One might imagine that he was disappointed that he ended up keeping company with a lot of penguins instead of basking in the sun—but actually he reported this to be one of the happiest times of his life.  I’ve often asked myself why this experience brought him so much joy, and then I recently read a fascinating article by NPR correspondent Eric Weiner, in which Weiner says that according to something called the World Database of Happiness, Iceland consistently ranks as one of the happiest countries in the world.  In some surveys, it ranks no. 1.  Weiner set out to visit the country and to find out why.  He visited in the winter, which is—well, absolutely, unfailingly, cold and dark.  That would be the true test of Icelandic happiness, he thought. 

Weiner got off the plane mid-afternoon and decided to take a nap, something which was easy to do, because afternoon in Iceland looks a lot like midnight.  Upon arising, he headed for the capital, Reykjavik, which he describes as a “cosmopolitan village.”  The entire population of Iceland is only 300,000.  There he began to discover why Icelanders are so happy. 

Parents don’t have to warn their children not to talk to strangers in Iceland, because in this small country, there are no strangers.  People are constantly running into friends and acquaintances—in fact, it’s commonplace for people to show up 30 minutes late for work because they’ve run into so many people they know on the way there.  And this is considered a perfectly good excuse for being late.

The city of Reykjavik is full of exceptionally creative people.  It’s full of art galleries, music stores, coffee shops, where writers hang out.  Why would this be true, Weiner wonders.  He thinks it may have to do with the land itself—“It doesn’t just sit there,” he says.  “It hisses.  It spits.  It belches.”  Icelanders say all this energy in the land itself is a source of inspiration to them. 

And then, another factor: there is no fear of failure.  When Weiner asks an old timer why there are so many creative people in Iceland, the man says, “It’s because of failure.  Failure doesn’t carry a stigma in Iceland.  We like people who fail, if they fail with the best intentions.”

And something else.  Weiner says Reykjavik feels “fleeting, temporary.”  Many of the structures are made from corrugated steel, and they look flimsy.  This small city is of course surrounded by massive cliffs, mountains, the roaring sea.  You feel that any minute everything man-made could be gone, enveloped by the wildness of nature.  It seems that Icelanders thrive on this sense of impending doom.  For all of us, life is provisional—for them, it is obviously so. 

In such a climate, co-operation with others is mandatory, not optional, as in more favorable climes.  Everyone must work together to be sure the fish come in, the harvest is good—or everyone dies, together.  As Weiner puts it, “Interdependence is the mother of affection.”

So where would you rather live--in the South Seas or in Iceland?  The Icelanders do not have an easy life—the next meal does not drop from the mango tree, and if you wander off in the wrong direction, you could die in minutes.  But Icelanders seem to have what we all need: a fierce connection to one another, creative energy, freedom to try and fail, and the absolute necessity to live in relationship with nature and to live in the precarious moment.[1]

The fascinating thing to me about Icelanders—and all those who live in challenging climates—whether geographical or physical or emotional—is that so often that it is the very challenge itself that stretches and hones us, that makes us more interesting, more creative, and more compassionate as human beings. 

It’s not that I think suffering is a good thing--but it should be said at this point that everyone suffers.  Everyone.  When things go wrong, it’s easy to look around and think that everyone else is okay, that you are the only one who is in pain, but believe me, as a minister, I have learned that everyone is hurting about something.  Everyone experiences loss, times of keen disappointment.  Most of us have had times when we have fallen into despair, when the ground beneath us seems to give way, and nothing, nothing seems to be holding us.  And I would venture to say that almost everyone has at one time or another even asked themselves if life is worth living.  So when we come to these dark places in our lives, interludes when our sense of joy vanishes, during these times, we have just two ways to go—either acceptance and transformation, or bitterness and despair.  As I said, I would not wish pain or tragedy on anyone, and yet paradoxically, we so often discover that what we endure and transcend gives our lives a patina, a richness and depth and beauty it would never have, had we not experienced the pain and loss.

That’s easy to say, of course—but how do you move from terrible loss to personal transformation?  It’s not that the loss disappears, of course—memory remains alive in our very flesh—but it becomes a woundedness that somehow teaches us and changes us for the better and ultimately blesses the world around us.  Christian spiritual teachers sometimes speak of “offering up” one’s personal pain, as a way of being in solidarity with people everywhere who are in pain.  Buddhists practice lovingkindness for others, both friends and those they find difficult to be with.  It’s a matter of either shutting down the heart and protecting ourselves from the pain—or being with the pain as a human experience, accepting it, moving through it, deepening from it.

It turns out, as we learned from the Icelanders, that comfort and ease do not necessarily make for happiness—what people desire most of all is that their life is fully engaged, that their life has meaning.  This morning I’m going to tell you two stories about people who found meaning through engaging difficult circumstance. 

The first is the story of Father Gary Smith, the Jesuit priest, who was featured yesterday in the Oregonian.[2]  Smith has ministered to mentally ill people on Burnside, has lived among Sudanese refugees in northern Uganda, and now during the past 16 months he has been living in Portland, recovering from prostate cancer.  It’s time for him to go back to Africa, he says—this time he has asked the Jesuits to send him to Zimbabwe. 

If you’ve been following the news, you know that political turmoil is tearing that country apart, and inflation is now at somewhere around 1,000,000% per year.  Anyone trying to do good work with the people is suspected of working against the ruling party and therefore is at risk.  But Africa is pulling at Smith. 

Now Smith lives in a single room in the Jesuit center in Southeast Portland.  “It’s a nice room,” he says.  “I can look out on five redwoods and lots of grass—I have a nice bed—without a mosquito net, and my own bathroom.”  Not like living in Uganda.  “No electricity, no plumbing, no phone, no running water.  <There I lived> in a one-room, thatch-covered house which I shared with lizards, fleas, mosquitos, plump cockroaches, and a million what-the-hell-is-that creepy crawlers.”  Not to mention the snakes, the cobras and the black mambas. 

Here, Gary is a vegetarian, but there he ate what he was given: simple meals of tea, fish or beans, bread made of maize and sorghum.  Sometimes he just longed for a cold beer or a slice of cheddar cheese.  Why, you might ask yourselves, why would he be wanting to go to Zimbabwe, into the heart of deprivation and danger?

Well, Smith says that he misses Africa and all the adjustments it demands.  “I miss the simplicity, the pain of it all,” he says.  He looks forward to packing a pair of jeans, maybe a pair of khakis and buying whatever else he needs from the used clothing vendors in an African market.  He’ll take a good flashlight, a copy of the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, two copies of the Bible (one in English, the other in Spanish), and his short-wave radio.

In Uganda, Smith advocated for refugees who needed medical care, education, food, and clothing.  In our country he sees children smiling, running, playing—there he held children, starving, in his arms.  He says, “Refugee children accept hardship and deprivation as part of daily life.  They learn the truth early: life is not fair.”  Despite the conditions he will face, Smith can’t wait to go back.  It’s hard for him to explain just why.  “It’s like falling in love,” he says.  “It’s counterintuitive.  But so is Christianity.”

Sometimes we don’t choose hardship, sometimes tragedy just comes and knocks on our door, quite unexpectedly.  That is what happened last year with Mark and Tina Lilly when their son Felix took a bad fall out of a tree and nearly died.  With multiple fractures and soft tissue injuries, Felix was unconscious and breathing with the help of a ventilator.  Doctors were trying to be optimistic without creating false hope.  A neurosurgeon used phrases such as “life-threatening, near death, and brain dead.”  Felix did recover, however, and during the long journey to recovery, his dad Mark kept a most remarkable journal, which I understand will soon be published in book form.  I have permission to share with you some of Mark’s writing about how this tragedy affected his own life.

A few days after the injury, Mark wrote:  “While I love to imagine, I have learned so painfully this past few days how it takes one away from the present moment.  With this tragedy the present moment is the only time I can safely inhabit, and it is the time . . . that is most helpful to Felix.  While hope is enticing, you cannot in this context abide by any hope unless you give equal time to hope’s companion, fear, and the fear is so devastating that I cannot go there . . . so I return time and time again to the present moment, to massaging Felix’s feet, to speaking to him of friends and games and Portland . . . , to holding my wife, to simply sitting late at night and listening to the breath being moved in and out of his body by machine, knowing that breath is breath, and he is alive, and we have not been required to step across the great chasm to the other side . . . , and for that, with each breath, I am deeply, deeply grateful.”

A week or so later, Mark writes:  “If you ever find yourself in a situation like this, you might try going straight into it.  It seems counterintuitive, but I have tried with every step to move into the tragedy, rather than away.  I have asked a million questions . . . I have asked questions for which I did not want to hear the answer.  I have found that the details help—don’t be afraid of the truth.  It will come to you one way or another, so eyes wide open, you will be able to find tiny footholds upon which to stand, when otherwise you will only fall.”

Months later, at home, during the painful period of rehabilitation, Mark writes:  “<Felix> was . . . hungry and in pain.  I came and sat with him and asked him to pray with me.  We did, then we talked about what we could know at that moment, we talked about what we have, rather than what we don’t have.  This is such a key piece of this puzzle for me.  We can spend our lives bemoaning that which we do not have, or we can be grateful for what we do have.  Both take time.  We get to choose.  So I said to Felix, who was sad about his inability to walk, sad about the pain, . . . <I said> sometimes you have to break life down into smaller and smaller chunks.  Of course it’s too much today to think of the next month of using a walker, the next six months of no bike riding, the next year with other challenges . . . .  It’s too much to bear.  And anyway, <the future’s> not real . . . .  What about today, I asked?  And even that was too much.  . . . .  So we brought it close to now—what about the breakfast I was cooking?  . . . .  ‘I’m thirsty,’ Felix said.  ‘Now that’s something we can do something about,’ I told him, and I got <him> some orange juice.”

A year has passed, and Felix is doing very well now, doing all the regular 10-year-old things: riding his bike, going to school, swimming.  He has a slight limp, and his memory skills are weaker than most kids his age.  Mark says that Felix handles small frustrations with little stress, adapts to change easily, and seems wise beyond his years—he knows what matters and what does not.

At the one-year anniversary of the accident, just a few weeks ago, on June 2—Mark and Tina and their family and friends went back to the park, back to the tree from which Felix had fallen.  For Mark, a yoga teacher, the experience was wonderful, to be <there> with the shared smiles and stories, but he also he experienced grueling back pain.  The next day he did yoga and every bit of self-chiropractic he knew, and still the pain wouldn’t lessen until all the parts of his being, he said, walked through that day at the park once more.

He wrote: “. . . we . . . who endure trauma, and it’s so many of us, we hold and suffer such a large part of the assault in our bodies.  We may think we can move on with only our emotions, but I don’t believe that is true: it’s mind, body, and spirit or it’s nothing.  That’s my big lesson for today.  I did not realize the depth of the pain dormant in me.  I moved through some of it today, breathed through it, and still it hurts.  I am humbled once again, and grateful for the chance to slow down appreciate the glories that we are offered in these lives we live.”

So what is life all about?  Happiness?  I’ve often said, “Happiness is overrated.”  Happiness as we generally think of it, I mean.  Instead, I like to use words like satisfaction, joy, peace, connection: a feeling of being in place.  There is no way to avoid suffering and loss in this world—it is the lot of us humans, I’m afraid.  Our only choice is how we respond.  The good news is that what we really need--beyond the basics of food, shelter, and medical care--money can’t buy, and what we really need is accessible to all of us.

We need to know that our life has integrity—that is, that we are being true to ourselves, to our gifts, to the times in which we live.  We need to know that our life has meaning, that because we have lived, those who follow will have a better world.  We need to be able to give and receive love—in whatever forms we are can, both to stranger and to friend.  That’s about it. 

I have a quotation from the poet Rilke that I keep on my meditation table.  I want these words to guide my living.  It reads:  “God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us out of the night.  These are the words we dimly hear: Go to the limits of your longing.”

When we are in that desperate, dark place, God speaks to each of us as he makes us—speaks to the very specific, unique creation that we are—speaks through friends, through poetry, through music, through a walk in the gorge—speaks to us “out of the night”—that is, speaks to us when we are empty, when we are needy enough to hear.  And what is it that we hear?  “Go to the limits of your longing.”  For you will find that the longing, the longing of your broken heart, is your truest prayer—trust it, for it will lead you home.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, we don’t understand why there is so much suffering and pain in our world.  Sometimes we are angry with you, angry with life itself, because of the way things are.  Help us to turn resentment and self-pity into the ability to be present with what is.  May our own pain teach us compassion; may our own suffering teach us awareness of the suffering of the world.  Give us the true joy of a life lived with integrity and fruitfulness and love.  Amen.

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