by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given May 4, 2008

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

Welcome to this place of worship—

May we this day

Make a place for the Holy

To enter our hearts, and

May we witness the Holy in one another.

Come now, and let us worship together.

Sometimes you just get to that place when you know it is time to change your life.  The bottom drops out, for one reason or another.  Meaning is elusive.  You wake up and each day seems the same and the same has little to offer, and you begin to ask yourself, “What’s it all about?”  You realize that you have begun to resemble one of the “walking dead” in those zombie movies—you know, those guys who are dragging themselves empty-eyed over the scorched earth. 

So what is there to do?  Those of us who depend on God feel lost during these times.  “Is there a God?” we ask.  “If so, where’s the access?”  We feel deserted, forlorn.  We may become ill, not only of spirit, but also of body and of mind.  We may be angry or irritated with those who care about us.  We may sink into a profound depression—for a long time.  If it is any consolation, there is a name for this, spiritually speaking.  Even the saints experience it—it is called “the dark night of the soul.”

This descent into darkness, and the desperate quest for change, is common to human experience, and this theme characterizes much of our literature.  Last Friday night I saw a film which has as its central character a man who is enduring just such a time in his life.  The film is entitled “The Visitor.”

In the film, Walter, an aging academic whose wife has died, has been reduced to a man going through the motions of living—he doesn’t really care about his students or his writing.  Then his dean forces him to go to New York to present a paper. He blunders upon some illegal immigrants, a couple living in his apartment there that he rarely visits.  He has pity on them and invites them to stay, and this is the beginning of his breakthrough.  The young man, Tarek, is a musician, and he teaches the professor how to play the drums, pulling him into new life—into caring, into love, into relationship.  We see Walter, who really looks like the walking dead at the beginning of the film, start to pay attention to his interior life, and say “yes” to its spontaneous messages.  Yes, offer these young wanderers a place to live; yes, go to the club with them and hear music; yes, even though you feel stupid and awkward, learn to play the drums yourself; yes, fight for what is right, even though you know you will lose; yes, believe that you can love a woman once again.  And the fire comes back.  Life comes back.  The film ends, and we are not sure what the next step will be for Walter, but we know that he will never be the same again.

When we are in that place of no-life, we doubt that transformation is possible, but stories, both real and fictional, tell us that it is.  Consciousness can be changed, and we can die to the old life—we can be “born again.” 

How does that happen?  Can we make it happen?  Yes, and no.

The emptiness, the longing, is ever the only place to begin.  Nobody who thinks they are A-OK ever changes.  And sometimes that longing is deep and hard and feels almost unbearable.  But you have to welcome this longing—you have to take your longing seriously.  Know that all longing is of the Divine— that is, unless you long for a new convertible and a million dollars in cash!  All longing is of the Divine.  Your very longing is an invitation for the Holy to break through.

Expect confusion.  My experience in facing significant change is that I wallow in confusion, sometimes for years.  I read, I research, I talk to wise people.  I try this; I try that.  I push and see what gives.  I offer, and see who takes.  The fact is that the awakening we seek may depend upon the depth and richness of our uncertainty.

Can this breakthrough come suddenly?  Can the Prince come with the glass slipper?  Well, yes.  But don’t forget the rest of the story.  Do not forget the years of sweeping up the cinders; do not forget the nasty stepmother and the vain step-sisters Cinderella endured so patiently.  Maybe the Prince is not a Prince at all, but a possibility that waited inside of Cinderella, waiting to mature and be born into the world.  Maybe there is such a possibility within each of us, nudging its way out.[1]

A few times in my own life I have had what I would call an epiphany; a sudden, intuitive knowing of what was true or what direction I should take.  For me, these moments have always been preceded by months, even years, of indecision and grief, loss and confusion.   But when the answer comes, it comes from deep within; it is unequivocal, and I have no choice but to follow its lead.  Let me tell you of one such experience.

I was living in Lexington, Kentucky at the time, a single mother in a dead-end job that was not paying enough to support me and my two sons.  I had a lot of education, but nothing that would command much money, it seemed.  What should I do?  I thought about getting a Ph.D. in education or perhaps in social work.  I traveled up to Smith College to check it out, went on over to Brandeis, but neither seemed to fit.  Maybe I should consider seminary; I had always been religious, after all.  So I flew out to California for the first time in my life, flew into that strange land called Berkeley to interview at our UU seminary, Starr King School for the Ministry.

I remember the interview well.  One lay member of the committee asked me, “What will you do if we don’t accept you?”  I said, “I don’t know.”  Then in another interview, a professor asked me, “What is your goal in life?”  I said, “I want to be all used up.”  He said, “Well, parish ministry should do that for you.”  They accepted me.  But should I go?  I flew back home to think it over.  I knew my decision to go would mean leaving my boys in Kentucky with their father, who had a good income and a new wife and a large extended family.  I was deeply torn and in a lot of emotional pain.

About two weeks after I returned home, I was awakened before dawn one morning. Something told me, some internal voice told me, to get dressed and go for a walk.  Well, this is not something I would ever, ever consider doing normally—I go to bed late, I get up late, and as yet I have never seen a sunrise unless forced to by some early plane I had to catch.  But I obeyed this interior message.  I got up, put on my jeans and my jacket, and walked out into the dark.  I walked about six blocks down the street to a local university.  The name of the university?  Transylvania.  I missed the significance of that name at the time.  (For those of you who might not know, this is where our Unitarian faith began in Europe centuries ago, in the country now known as Romania.)

Anyway, the campus was a broad expanse of green with one tree in sight.  As I walked toward the tree, the dark began giving way to light, and I saw there in the tree a little brown bird.  I went closer and closer to the tree and to the bird, until I was standing right next to the bird, and strangely, it did not fly away.  I stayed there with the bird for a few minutes, and then I walked back home, and without thinking—just moving automatically—I got out my old Remington portable typewriter and typed out my acceptance letter to Starr King.

Now what was this all about?  I do not know.  All I know is that that was my experience.  It was much later in seminary that I clued in on the bird as the traditional symbol of the Spirit.  You know, the dove descending and all that.  I remember recounting this story, rather reluctantly, on a car trip with my son Madison a few years ago; this son is inclined towards mathematics and physics, logic, so I did not know how he would take the story.  When I finished, I paused dramatically and waited, and he said, “Mom, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”  Well, maybe so, but I staked my life on it.  I left for Berkeley several months later with a suitcase and two boxes of books. 

So the Holy breaks through in some mysterious, mystical fashion sometimes, but more often than not, it breaks through in the everyday and the ordinary, and the conduit is another human being.  The Mystery that is Love—some would call that Mystery God, or the Divine, or a myriad of other names—that Great Mystery that works in the universe is mostly manifested through people, in my experience.  We are the hands that reach out in love to the illegal immigrant, to the sorrowing neighbor, to the hungry child.  We are the ones whose longing for love and longing to love changes others—and, more importantly, changes ourselves.

Let me tell you another story, this one about Dr. Francis Collins, one of our country’s leading geneticists.  He is the physician that headed up the Human Genome Project.  When Collins was a young man, he decided to volunteer his medical services in a small mission hospital in the Delta area of Nigeria, which was very economically depressed.  He expected the experience to be challenging, but exciting.

When he arrived there, he soon discovered that the resources he so depended on in the Western world were not available.  There was not much in the way of a functioning laboratory.  The x-ray machine was often broken.  The hospital did have a reasonable collection of drugs—if he could get the diagnosis right.  Ultimately, he found the experience discouraging.  Most of the illnesses he was asked to treat—tetanus, tuberculosis, malaria—were the result of a devastating failure of the public health system.  No attention was paid to clean water.  There was no garbage or sewer service.  Vaccinations generally were not available.  Collins did what he could, seeing far more patients per day than he usually saw in the U.S., and was rather uncertain in many cases about what illness he was really treating.  He began to wonder what on Earth he was doing there.  Most of these people would just go back to the same environment that caused them to get sick in the first place.

Then a young farmer came in with a very puzzling illness.  In the previous week his legs had swollen to twice their normal size.  He was weak, barely able to stand.  Collins examined him and realized that when he took the man’s pulse, it disappeared entirely when he took a breath in.  He knew that this is usually an indication of fluid in the sac around the heart, an extremely dangerous condition.  None of the other doctors at the hospital had ever carried out the procedure that would be needed, which would be the removal of the fluid through a needle. 

Collins wasn’t absolutely sure of the diagnosis, and there was no way to give tests.  He had never done the procedure before, and he knew that it had do be done in the most careful way, because a misplacement of the needle and a nicking of the heart muscle could be immediately fatal.  If he began drawing blood from the heart instead of from the sac around the heart, he might kill his patient.  In the developed world, a highly trained cardiologist, guided by an ultrasound machine, would do the procedure.

The young farmer understood what Collins was doing, was aware of the risk, and was remarkably peaceful about it, Collins remembers.  The needle went in, carefully, carefully.  It was touch and go, but the procedure was successful, and Collins watched his patient improve dramatically over the next few hours. 

Collins felt good that he had gotten through that, but he awoke again the next day with that same discouraged feeling.  He went about making his rounds, and when he came to the bed of the young farmer, the man, who spoke English, said to him, “You know, I get the sense that you are wondering why you came here.”  How did he know? Collins thought.  And then words came out of the farmer’s mouth that would stay with Collins for the rest of his life.  He said, “I have an answer for you.  You came here for one reason.  You came here for me.”

Collins writes:  “I was speechless.  Tears welled up in my eyes.  I had the sense that, while this was a young Nigerian farmer speaking to me—about as different from me in culture, experience, and ancestry as any two humans could be—it was really the Holy speaking to me, reminding me that what life is all about is one person at a time, trying to reach out and help somebody who needs it.  I had plunged a needle close to his heart; his words directly impaled mine.”[2]

The Holy can break through in all kinds of ways, and it comes often at times when we least suspect it might—when we’re feeling a failure, or unworthy, or thoroughly humbled by life or experience.  At times I’ve intentionally gone after renewal, and sometimes I’ve had profound experiences.  Once I took off driving to another state and spent two weeks on a farm in a Gestalt workshop with a teacher who had been described as “crazy, but really good.”  That’s where I learned to dance, among other things.  And I was changed, never to be the same, by taking a writing class with Wendell Berry and having him reject my carefully crafted but superficial work, over and over again. 

Let me mention some criteria that you might consider when seeking enlightenment.  You probably will not find what you need in a large group experience that costs a lot of money, or in any heavily commercial experience.  You will have to take some personal risks.  You will have to understand that with every change comes loss, and you must be prepared to lose and to grieve.  You know the old joke about the psychologist and changing the light bulb?  You have to really want to change.  The longing has to be there, and you have to recognize it, and sit with it, and respect it.  You could get knocked off your horse on the road to Damascus like the Apostle Paul—but you’re more likely to be peeling an orange one day and notice what a miracle that orange is, and suddenly understand that you are part of everything that exists, and that all is as it should be.  And from your heart might then spring the prayer of Julian of Norwich, “And all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

Where do these epiphanies come from?  Is there really a spiritual dimension that intrudes upon our work-a-day lives and revives us from an early death, from our terrifying stuckness, from time to time?  My experience tells me yes, beyond a doubt.  But who knows?  This is not the kind of thing you can measure or bottle up and sell. 

You see, I think there is a sacred wholeness that is the ground of all of existence, and it is always there.  When we are in relationship to that ground, there is none of the usual grasping, none of the frightened resistance.  We move from the conceptual, from our mental constructs and our explanations about life, into a realm of peace and delight.  We let go and begin to trust in the natural rhythms of the world.  We give ourselves, trusting, as we give ourselves to rest and sleep.  We do not have to carry the weight of the world.

Now—can we stay there?  No.  No one can; even the most enlightened struggle with their very human flesh, which brings fears and worries, angers and doubts.  But we have a touchstone.  And the journey is cyclical—grace will deliver us from time to time, sometimes just in the nick of time—and each time we’ll know the ground a little better and trust it more fully.

And what is that ground, that holiness?   It doesn’t have to do with belief at all.  It has to do with a heart open to love and delight.  You can’t make it happen, conjure it up, or pay for it.  But when you truly long for the Holy to visit, when you are absolutely empty and without hope of saving yourself, well, expect the fluttering of wings.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Holy One, we confess that we are so often lost and need new life.  We long for love, long for delight, in a world too full of the artificial and the distractions of commerce.  We ask that we might prepare our hearts, that you might enter our lives in whatever way grace allows, and that we might in joyous surrender, give ourselves to the path that opens before us.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

May you know, in your hour of need, that all manner of things are well with your soul.  Go now in love and go in peace.  Amen.

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