We don’t realize how much is being synchronized so that we might function normally in the world. There are some intricate balances that are being maintained at all times. Who is in charge? Who is orchestrating, directing, the action? It’s mostly unconscious, out of our awareness. “We” are just along for the ride! This was brought home to me last week when I had a bout with a bad sandwich, which I didn’t know was bad, but something knew. And, after my body got rid of the culprit, I not only did not want to repeat that particular sandwich experience ever again, but, food in its entirety was repulsive. It is as though my body was saying, “No more! If I can’t trust you any better than that, I’m not having any of it ever again!”
Well. Just try to function in the world without proper nutrition! You don’t think straight without proper nutrition. I couldn’t connect any dots. I would go to bed without taking my cholesterol medication, making coffee, or brushing my teeth. What does my body think it’s doing? It has to eat! Who is in charge here? What is he, or she, thinking? Kick my body back in, will you? Give me an appetite! How long do you expect me to wait around, subsisting on a diet of yogurt and dry toast, until you come to your senses?
Our bodies can turn against us. Disease, or a bad sandwich, can wreck the internal balancing mechanism. Our digestive system can shut down. Our auto-immune system can attack good cells and ignore the bad ones. We can hallucinate ourselves into a world no one can enter but us. Schizophrenics, and bi-polar victims, and psychotics have slipped out of balance. Their Synchronizer took an extended leave of absence, leaving no one at the controls.
I see that as more evidence of the reality of the Psyche. When the flow of life, when the internal harmony, is disrupted by a significant trauma, or maybe just a bump in the road (like a bad sandwich), things can be a long time falling back into place. And, they may never return to “normal.” Maybe “abnormal” becomes the “new normal,” and everyone in our lives has to adjust to a “balance” that is more “extreme” than “smoothly running.”
What can we do about it? What can we do when we are not in charge of the operation of what constitutes “us” in the world? What can we do when no one who might be in charge asks our opinion, or consults us in any way, or considers our ideas and suggestions? How can we bring consciousness to bear upon the unconscious processes? I can force myself to eat, but I can’t keep from throwing up. Now, there’s a pickle for you! What can be done to restore harmonious interaction of “the self” and get ourselves to a reasonably acceptable level of functioning in the world? Honor the Psyche! Bear the pain! Wait it out! Accept what comes! I know my body doesn’t want to eat, and I know my body has to eat. I honor the Psyche by attending my body and giving it what it will eat. If that is yogurt and dry toast, then, that’s that. How long can I live on yogurt and dry toast? I don’t know. How long will it take before my body moves on to something more substantial? I don’t know. But, I know I can’t force-feed myself without it coming back at me. My body has the lead here. I’m just along for the ride.
Learning, and accepting, my place in the world of the Psyche is the fundamental lesson. How might consciousness serve unconsciousness? What does unconsciousness “have in mind”? How might consciousness assist the unconscious processes? Who is in charge here? Who is in control? Toward what end are “we” living? How might “we” be better coordinated in the work to realize that end? How does consciousness commune with unconsciousness for the good of the whole? How do we wake up to the reality of the Psyche? Metaphor. Images. Stories. Ink blots. Art. Music. Dreams. Play. Nature. Silence. Meditation. Retreats. Reflection. Walk-a-bouts. Wool-gathering. Day-dreaming. Writing. Conversation. Slips-of-the-tongue. The list is long.
The human predicament is that we know what we want, but we don’t know what to want, and we don’t want what we should want. We want what we have no business having. Which, of course, is the essence of sin. Wanting what we should want is the essence of right-living and peace. It is our life’s work to align ourselves with the right things, to align ourselves with what might be called “the way of the Psyche.”
The Psyche’s agenda, so to speak, seems to be on the order of things like: wholeness, integrity, completion, fulfillment, harmony, concord, and peace. The Psyche is not concerned about our personal advantage. Jesus can die, for instance, in the service of his alignment with the Psyche, in the service of a greater good than his own, personal good. What is good for us may not be good at all, and thus, the factor determining action is not what’s in it for us, or what we stand to gain or lose, or what the advantage or benefit to us might be, but what integrity requires, what wholeness and peace demand.
I am well-integrated in the mountains or desert with a camera, yet, I would be radically disintegrated on a tour bus with forty other photographers, or at a week-long photography convention. Some experiences reconnect us and help us get it together, and some experiences fragment us and tear us apart. Neither the Army nor an ashram would be good for me. I do not live well on someone else’s terms, on someone else’s schedule. In some places we are splintered, in some places we are whole. It helps to know where we belong, and where we have no business being.
Our work is wholeness, authenticity, realness. But, being authentic, genuine, and real does not mean telling people what we think or saying what’s on our minds. That’s nothing more than bad manners. The work of authenticity is the work of bringing ourselves to life in the world. It is the work of waking up and becoming a true human being.
Yet, it is never enough to be awake, personally and individually. Enlightenment is not for our edification. It is for the transformation of the world. As Tom Jackson reminded us last week, waking up implicates us in the process of waking others up—to the extent that they can be awakened—by identifying, and supporting, and participating in institutions and traditions that offer alternative ways of seeing and living in the popular culture of our day. Alternative, enlightened and enlightening, movements are everywhere. It is just a matter of realizing that and linking up with them in the work of redefining the legitimate goals and purposes of life, and transforming—waking up—the world.
This social side of what we might call salvation, of what is awakening and enlightenment, has often been neglected in favor of a religion of personal piety and individual realization. Whether it is accepting Jesus, or achieving satori, the work is private and the impact on culture and society is more symbolic than substantive. We might outlaw alcohol, for example, but leave the darker, deeper matters of racism, wealth-and-poverty, and inequality, unaddressed and undisturbed.
The culture is always happy for people to get religion or become enlightened because that occupies the people’s attention while the culture is busy reducing their freedom and limiting their lives, and binding them to the service of the culture. Whom does the culture serve? Who benefits from the way life is lived? Who is harmed by it? In the west, do we exist for the economy, or does the economy exist for us? Do we serve the economy, or does the economy serve us? Who benefits from the economy? Who is harmed by it?
When Clinton said, “It’s about the economy, stupid,” he meant we will do anything to be wealthy. We will do anything to feel wealthy. We will do anything to be apparently wealthy. The economy owns us, and we will not do anything to hurt our economic chances, no matter how saved or enlightened we may be. The culture doesn’t care about our religion because it knows our real religion is our economic self-interest, and we will not allow ourselves to be any more awake than we can afford to be.
Jesus said, “No one can be my disciple unless you give up everything you have and follow me.” Jesus was dead-on, but now he’s just dead. And all the talk about his resurrection and his getting us to heaven when we die keeps him dead, and keeps us from having to deal with the deep truth of his counter-cultural challenge to the powers and principalities that force apparent life down one path and keep real life from branching off onto others.
The writer of John’s gospel had Jesus say, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father but by me.” John wasn’t putting Jesus forth as the only alternative to all the other religions in the world. John was putting Jesus forth as the only alternative to the predominant culture of the world. John is having Jesus talk to Caesar here. John is having Jesus say, “Rome doesn’t know beans about what is important. If you do it Caesar’s way, you will be lost and gone forever. I am the way, the truth, and the life. Stop serving the culture—stop serving the idea of your own personal wealth—and serve God.” Ah, but, we want all this and heaven, too, so, we bow to God and marry Caesar. And, the call is the same one that rolls through the ages: “Wake up! Realize what you are doing!”
Our work is that of waking up, waking ourselves up, waking each other up, catching ourselves in the act of sleeping on the job. Tools for the work are fresh eyes, “beginner’s eyes.” Ah, now that’s the trick! Looking at what we have always seen and seeing it differently! Who can do that on cue, on schedule? What’s the formula for seeing something else, something more? Where DOES seeing come from? How DOES seeing happen? It occurs, more often than not, don’t you know, just by fooling around. We stumble our way into enlightenment, and wake ourselves up by tripping over the cat, or going for a walk with the dog, or taking a shower. Which makes it an inexact science, and puts the outcome quite beyond our control. Nothing is more important or less manageable than waking up. And, that’s what’s waiting on us—to wake ourselves up and everyone else as well.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Monday, September 10, 2007
09/09/07, Sermon
Wake up! Realize what you’re doing! That should be the mantra of our lives. That is the foundational awareness, and is basic to the identity of, the definition of, the self, us, who we are. We know who we are by knowing what we are doing—and by doing mostly, if not only, those things that “ring true” to, that “square up” with, the drift of our heart and soul, and reflect, express, who we are for all to see.
We are here to wake up, realize what we are doing, and reclaim our life—the life that is ours to live! No more mindlessly following the black foot prints! No more doing what we are told just because we are told to do it! No more doing what is done because it has always been done that way and that’s what’s supposed to be done and that’s the way we are supposed to do it!
Ah, but. There is a reason things are the way they are, you know. The reason is that it’s easier that way. Things would be different if it weren’t so difficult. Living our own lives is the hardest thing in the whole book of things. Knowing what we are doing and being responsible for making clear choices, recognizing and solving our own problems every day for the rest of our lives, and dealing successfully with the opposition and resistance that comes our way in response to the way we are in the world, well, that is more of a burden that most people care to carry. It’s easier to just fall in line, read from the script, and make no waves. It’s easier to be dead than alive.
Waking up and realizing what we are doing comes with a price tag attached. It is the price of being alive. It is the cross Jesus is talking about when he says, “Those of you who would be my disciple, pick up your cross daily and follow me.” Now, you have to understand the deal about discipleship. You have to understand what is at stake in following Jesus. This is the real cross: “The disciples become like the master in following no master.” When you follow Jesus, you reclaim your life. You take your life back, and become, not who Jesus was, but who you are. When you follow Jesus, who was exactly who Jesus was, you have to become exactly who you are. There are no black footprints! So, you follow Jesus by following no one, don’t you see? By finding your own way, making your own path!
But, there is a cross. It is the price of being alive. It is the agony of living our own lives, of being true to ourselves, of waking up and realizing what we are doing, and doing mostly, if not only, those things that “ring true” to the drift of our heart and soul, and reflect, express who we are for all to see. The price is what it costs us to stand apart from the culturally imposed ideal in order to “be true to ourselves” and live the life that is authentically ours to live. The culture thinks we were born to support the economy, take our place in the cultural organization, be a “good company woman, or man,” a “good team player,” and go shopping a lot. The culture dangles trinkets before our eyes, and robs us of our soul.
Our life task is to determine, decide, discover, discern who we are and what we are going to do about it. How does what we are doing express, exhibit, relate to who we are? In what ways does what we are doing bury, conceal, hide, deny who we are? The glitter and sheen of the culture’s beads and mirrors can distract us from the essential matters, and lead us away from the service of heart and soul. Diversions abound. What is the legitimate core, focus, center of our life? What is the “organizing principle” around which “we” coalesce? The central identity by which we recognize ourselves? The spiritual quest, the spiritual journey, the search for the Holy Grail is the adventure of seeking our own heart, our own soul, living the life that is ours to live.
There should be a course on the order of “Life 101” taught in every Jr. High School and church in the land. We have to learn to live. Life does not come naturally. When John had Jesus say, “I came that you might have life and have it abundantly,” we understood that to mean eternal life in heaven with God and the saints and the angels after our biological death. That’s wrong. Abundant life has to do with a simple shift in perspective, seeing through what the world offers as life to the solid core of life, to what actually constitutes life, true life, “abundant life.”
John also has Jesus say, “Not as the world gives, do I give unto you,” and “My kingdom is not of this world.” Again, we think Jesus is talking about the heavenly regions. But, Jesus is talking about life, about being alive, and saying that the basis of life, the solid ground of life, is not what the culture, the world, sets us up to believe that it is.
The question Jesus lived to answer was not, “How can I get these people to heaven when they die?”, but, “What does it mean to be alive in this life, right here, right now?” Think a yellow Hummer will do it? How about another yellow Hummer? Maybe a red one for the weekend? What does the culture, the world, say it takes to “really live”? What is the culture’s idea of “abundant life”? Jesus stood apart from all of it.
Jesus’ idea was that life was a function of integrity, of being grounded in what is deepest, truest, and best about us, of being true to ourselves—loving ourselves—in relationship with one another and with God. We lose our lives, in Jesus’ view, when we try to save our lives, when we store up things for ourselves, when we live with our advantage, our gain, our boon as our primary concern. But, when we live in the service of our gift, our genius, our talent, our calling, using what we have at hand in doing what needs to be done (which is not necessarily what we want to do or what we think we ought to do), there is life, abundant life, spilling out, over-flowing, blessing all.
We do not find the Grail by thinking our way to it, in the comfort of our recliner, with something to sip on at our side. We do not find ourselves by thinking about ourselves. We find ourselves the way we find God—by living our way there. And, when we find ourselves, we find God. When we find God, we find ourselves. We live our way to the discovery of ourselves, of God. The trick is to do it—to live—with our eyes open.
The process of waking up is exactly the story of the species and of our individual lives. It consists of living and being aware of our living, talking about our living, examining our living, opening ourselves to the experience of being alive. Crucial to the process of waking up is being alert to the inconsistencies, and incongruities, and contradictions, and discrepancies at work in our lives. We say one thing but do another. What’s going on there? When we do what we think we want to do and our bodies develop symptoms, what’s going on there? When we do what we think we are supposed to do and keep meeting resistance and opposition, what’s going on there? Where do we go to explore these questions? With whom do we process our lives?
The failure of the Bush administration is the failure to process its experience, the failure to wake up and realize what it’s doing. Global warming is what it is today because Bush refused to wake up and realize what was happening. Every pickle you have ever found yourself in would have been less severe if you had realized sooner what you were doing and what was going on. We will not wake up. It’s too hard to wake up. It asks too much of us to wake up. It’s so much easier to drive with the accelerator to the floorboard, asleep at the wheel.
How long before we learn the lessons of life: Easy is hard. Short is long. Fast is slow. Immediate gratification accrues compound interest by the minute to be paid out over long our lifetime and that of our children’s children. But. We don’t want to hear it. Don’t wake us up with the facts! Let us dream our way sleepwalking to oblivion! Anything more than that requires too much of us! So. What about the dream world? What’s it like there?
Security, right? And, comfort. Peace of mind. Denial. Diversion. Distraction. In the Dream World, we are the center of the universe. Everything exists for our pleasure, serves our ends, works to our advantage. We can do whatever strikes our fancy without impact or repercussion. In the Dream World, we can eat whatever we want, exercise as little as we want, weigh as much as we want because diabetes and heart disease and strokes happen to someone else. In the Dream World, we can smoke, and drink too much, and drive too fast, and have sex with whomever we can talk into having sex with us because there are no consequences, and medical science is working feverishly to produce a pill to fix everything. In the Dream World, we can live lavishly, excessively, charge everything to some credit card, and when it maxes out get a new credit card, because there is no day of reckoning, no comeuppance, no end to the dream, and no one and no thing to take into account.
What are we thinking? Oh, that’s right! We are NOT thinking! We are DREAMING! And we are angry at Bush for dreaming with us. He’s the one who is supposed to be thinking, curing global warming, fixing the economy, finding more fossil fuel, so that we can go on with our endless fantasy of life like we like it in the Dream World.
And, the solution would be what, exactly? How do you cure those who don’t want to be cured? How do you fix those who don’t want anyone tampering with their controls? How do you wake people up who are perfectly happy dreaming of endless ease, perpetual comfort, and complete security, with the accelerator to the floorboard, asleep at the wheel?
If we are to Wake up! Realize what we are doing! We are going to have to pay attention. We are going to have to become increasingly aware of who we are and what we are about and how that is expressed in the way we live. We are going to have to develop eyes that see, ears that hear, and a heart that understands. Then, it is only a matter of living with essential integrity by doing things that are integral with, aligned with, in synch with, what is deepest, truest and best about us. "You shall not cease from exploration /And the end of all our exploring /Will be to arrive where we started /And know the place for the first time." (T.S. Elliot in Little Gidding V, from 'Four Quartets' 1942).
We are here to wake up, realize what we are doing, and reclaim our life—the life that is ours to live! No more mindlessly following the black foot prints! No more doing what we are told just because we are told to do it! No more doing what is done because it has always been done that way and that’s what’s supposed to be done and that’s the way we are supposed to do it!
Ah, but. There is a reason things are the way they are, you know. The reason is that it’s easier that way. Things would be different if it weren’t so difficult. Living our own lives is the hardest thing in the whole book of things. Knowing what we are doing and being responsible for making clear choices, recognizing and solving our own problems every day for the rest of our lives, and dealing successfully with the opposition and resistance that comes our way in response to the way we are in the world, well, that is more of a burden that most people care to carry. It’s easier to just fall in line, read from the script, and make no waves. It’s easier to be dead than alive.
Waking up and realizing what we are doing comes with a price tag attached. It is the price of being alive. It is the cross Jesus is talking about when he says, “Those of you who would be my disciple, pick up your cross daily and follow me.” Now, you have to understand the deal about discipleship. You have to understand what is at stake in following Jesus. This is the real cross: “The disciples become like the master in following no master.” When you follow Jesus, you reclaim your life. You take your life back, and become, not who Jesus was, but who you are. When you follow Jesus, who was exactly who Jesus was, you have to become exactly who you are. There are no black footprints! So, you follow Jesus by following no one, don’t you see? By finding your own way, making your own path!
But, there is a cross. It is the price of being alive. It is the agony of living our own lives, of being true to ourselves, of waking up and realizing what we are doing, and doing mostly, if not only, those things that “ring true” to the drift of our heart and soul, and reflect, express who we are for all to see. The price is what it costs us to stand apart from the culturally imposed ideal in order to “be true to ourselves” and live the life that is authentically ours to live. The culture thinks we were born to support the economy, take our place in the cultural organization, be a “good company woman, or man,” a “good team player,” and go shopping a lot. The culture dangles trinkets before our eyes, and robs us of our soul.
Our life task is to determine, decide, discover, discern who we are and what we are going to do about it. How does what we are doing express, exhibit, relate to who we are? In what ways does what we are doing bury, conceal, hide, deny who we are? The glitter and sheen of the culture’s beads and mirrors can distract us from the essential matters, and lead us away from the service of heart and soul. Diversions abound. What is the legitimate core, focus, center of our life? What is the “organizing principle” around which “we” coalesce? The central identity by which we recognize ourselves? The spiritual quest, the spiritual journey, the search for the Holy Grail is the adventure of seeking our own heart, our own soul, living the life that is ours to live.
There should be a course on the order of “Life 101” taught in every Jr. High School and church in the land. We have to learn to live. Life does not come naturally. When John had Jesus say, “I came that you might have life and have it abundantly,” we understood that to mean eternal life in heaven with God and the saints and the angels after our biological death. That’s wrong. Abundant life has to do with a simple shift in perspective, seeing through what the world offers as life to the solid core of life, to what actually constitutes life, true life, “abundant life.”
John also has Jesus say, “Not as the world gives, do I give unto you,” and “My kingdom is not of this world.” Again, we think Jesus is talking about the heavenly regions. But, Jesus is talking about life, about being alive, and saying that the basis of life, the solid ground of life, is not what the culture, the world, sets us up to believe that it is.
The question Jesus lived to answer was not, “How can I get these people to heaven when they die?”, but, “What does it mean to be alive in this life, right here, right now?” Think a yellow Hummer will do it? How about another yellow Hummer? Maybe a red one for the weekend? What does the culture, the world, say it takes to “really live”? What is the culture’s idea of “abundant life”? Jesus stood apart from all of it.
Jesus’ idea was that life was a function of integrity, of being grounded in what is deepest, truest, and best about us, of being true to ourselves—loving ourselves—in relationship with one another and with God. We lose our lives, in Jesus’ view, when we try to save our lives, when we store up things for ourselves, when we live with our advantage, our gain, our boon as our primary concern. But, when we live in the service of our gift, our genius, our talent, our calling, using what we have at hand in doing what needs to be done (which is not necessarily what we want to do or what we think we ought to do), there is life, abundant life, spilling out, over-flowing, blessing all.
We do not find the Grail by thinking our way to it, in the comfort of our recliner, with something to sip on at our side. We do not find ourselves by thinking about ourselves. We find ourselves the way we find God—by living our way there. And, when we find ourselves, we find God. When we find God, we find ourselves. We live our way to the discovery of ourselves, of God. The trick is to do it—to live—with our eyes open.
The process of waking up is exactly the story of the species and of our individual lives. It consists of living and being aware of our living, talking about our living, examining our living, opening ourselves to the experience of being alive. Crucial to the process of waking up is being alert to the inconsistencies, and incongruities, and contradictions, and discrepancies at work in our lives. We say one thing but do another. What’s going on there? When we do what we think we want to do and our bodies develop symptoms, what’s going on there? When we do what we think we are supposed to do and keep meeting resistance and opposition, what’s going on there? Where do we go to explore these questions? With whom do we process our lives?
The failure of the Bush administration is the failure to process its experience, the failure to wake up and realize what it’s doing. Global warming is what it is today because Bush refused to wake up and realize what was happening. Every pickle you have ever found yourself in would have been less severe if you had realized sooner what you were doing and what was going on. We will not wake up. It’s too hard to wake up. It asks too much of us to wake up. It’s so much easier to drive with the accelerator to the floorboard, asleep at the wheel.
How long before we learn the lessons of life: Easy is hard. Short is long. Fast is slow. Immediate gratification accrues compound interest by the minute to be paid out over long our lifetime and that of our children’s children. But. We don’t want to hear it. Don’t wake us up with the facts! Let us dream our way sleepwalking to oblivion! Anything more than that requires too much of us! So. What about the dream world? What’s it like there?
Security, right? And, comfort. Peace of mind. Denial. Diversion. Distraction. In the Dream World, we are the center of the universe. Everything exists for our pleasure, serves our ends, works to our advantage. We can do whatever strikes our fancy without impact or repercussion. In the Dream World, we can eat whatever we want, exercise as little as we want, weigh as much as we want because diabetes and heart disease and strokes happen to someone else. In the Dream World, we can smoke, and drink too much, and drive too fast, and have sex with whomever we can talk into having sex with us because there are no consequences, and medical science is working feverishly to produce a pill to fix everything. In the Dream World, we can live lavishly, excessively, charge everything to some credit card, and when it maxes out get a new credit card, because there is no day of reckoning, no comeuppance, no end to the dream, and no one and no thing to take into account.
What are we thinking? Oh, that’s right! We are NOT thinking! We are DREAMING! And we are angry at Bush for dreaming with us. He’s the one who is supposed to be thinking, curing global warming, fixing the economy, finding more fossil fuel, so that we can go on with our endless fantasy of life like we like it in the Dream World.
And, the solution would be what, exactly? How do you cure those who don’t want to be cured? How do you fix those who don’t want anyone tampering with their controls? How do you wake people up who are perfectly happy dreaming of endless ease, perpetual comfort, and complete security, with the accelerator to the floorboard, asleep at the wheel?
If we are to Wake up! Realize what we are doing! We are going to have to pay attention. We are going to have to become increasingly aware of who we are and what we are about and how that is expressed in the way we live. We are going to have to develop eyes that see, ears that hear, and a heart that understands. Then, it is only a matter of living with essential integrity by doing things that are integral with, aligned with, in synch with, what is deepest, truest and best about us. "You shall not cease from exploration /And the end of all our exploring /Will be to arrive where we started /And know the place for the first time." (T.S. Elliot in Little Gidding V, from 'Four Quartets' 1942).
Sunday, August 26, 2007
08/26/07, Sermon
Here is your life’s task, the meaning of life, the whole point, what it’s all about: Be who you are, without denying who you also are, while assisting, enhancing, everyone else’s ability to be who they are. That’s about it as far as I can see. What else could there be? Self-realization, self-determination, self-expression, while helping others to achieve the same ends. That’s it as I see it. Being who we are, within the context and circumstances of our lives. Being true to ourselves while enabling others to be true to themselves. How’re you going to beat that?
The problem is, of course, that we try to be true to ourselves at the expense of other people. We can define ourselves, most days, fairly well. But defining ourselves while “staying in touch” with one another is tricky, and doing it while “staying in touch” with those who are opposite from us in every way is out of the question. What do we have in common with them? In relationship with those who aren’t like us, it is “every person for herself, for himself.” Self-interest above all interests is our motto. It’s gotten us where we are today. But, it all begins to change with self-awareness. Awareness is the solution to all of our problems today. And tomorrow. And all the way down the road.
Awareness. Awareness. Awareness. It’s the avenue to all that is worth our time. Eyes that see, ears that hear, and a heart that understands are predicated upon, and flow from, awareness. There is nothing beyond being awake, aware, and alive to have, or do, or achieve, or be. All we have to do is wake up. How hard could that be?
How much can you see, before you have to stop looking? There is no pain quite like the pain of awareness. What keeps us going, once we know what we are up against and what our chances are? When we can no longer fool ourselves, or kid ourselves, or pretend that things are different than they are—what do we do then?
Then, everything hangs on our belief in the innate value of self-realization, self-determination, and self-expression within the context and circumstances of our lives. We may never have what we need. There may be no paper in the home of the poet. No paints and brushes in the life of the artist. No piano for the young Mozart, the old Beethoven. Then what? Then, we have to deal with what is ours to deal with, and find a way. Awareness. Awareness. Awareness.
We are always up against something. We always have to find a way. We always have to be who we are with the resources available to us in the time and place of our living. We cannot abandon the work of self-realization, self-determination, self-expression just because we have the gifts of Michael Jordan and basketball hasn’t been invented.
We have to be who we are, within the context and circumstances of our lives. That is the divine imperative. We have to bring to life the gift that is ours. We have to serve the genius within. It may not look like much to those who are watching, but it is our gift to give and we have to bestow it upon the world to the best of our ability.
In Batesville, Mississippi I discovered my gift of raking earth smooth and level. We bought a house there with nearly an acre of land attached, which had drainage problems and holes and depressions which made it impossible to mow. Over our six years there, I spread eight dump truck loads of top soil with a shovel, a wheelbarrow and a rake. I found God in the dirt.
When you discover your gift, there is God. Don’t know where your gift lies? Here are some questions to point you in the general direction: Where is the harmony? The peace? The pleasure? The satisfaction? What brings you joy? Where do you come alive? What do you love? Don’t discount or dismiss what is there in favor of what you think ought to be there, or of what you wish were there, or hope will be there. We are always looking past our gift, thinking it has to be something on the order of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to count. We think if we can’t compose a Sonata in E-flat, it doesn’t count for a gift. If we aren’t being paid 8 million dollars a year to hit home runs, we are shamefully un-gifted and should not be seen in public.
Let me explain something to you fine people: Raking Dirt! My gift is Raking Dirt! So, don’t disparage your gift! How could your gift be less significant than raking dirt? So, recognize and embrace your gift. That’s the first rule. Your gift is your gift! If your gift is hitting home runs, hit home runs. If it is raking dirt, rake dirt. It is all about you and your gift. Self-realization, self-determination, self-expression. You can’t find God without finding your gift. You can’t serve God without serving your gift. If you think you are too good for your gift, you are too good for God. But, here’s the second rule: Don’t think your gift is your actual gift. It’s all metaphorical. Don’t forget that.
What do you think the Promised Land is all about? Latitude and longitude? Political boundaries? Standing armies, and sewage treatment, and garbage pickup? I guess you think the Holy Grail is about the actual vessel Jesus used to hold the wine when he served the Last Supper! You’re wearing me out. What am I to do with you people?
Take a deep breath and think of all you know about the Bible and let me ask you this one: When, throughout all the Bible, was God present and known in the lives of the people? Let me just cut to the chase. It was only when the people were wrestling themselves into alignment with, and living out the expression of, their gift, their genius, their calling. God is never known to, or by, anyone for the simple joy of paling around with God. We lost this bit of insight with the invention of doctrine, which became a substitute for God. Once thinking about God became confused with knowing God, we just sat around talking about God, thinking we were doing something. If you want to know God, you have to walk away from the sermons and the Sunday school discussions, and the Bible studies, and take up your life. The realness of God is simultaneous with, and contingent upon, self-realization, self-determination, and self-expression. God, gentle people, is in the dirt!
But—and here it gets tricky—the literal is always disappearing into the metaphorical. The Promised Land, the Holy Grail, Dirt were all literal, actual, tangible, concrete, physical realities at one point, but their literal and physical truth is nothing compared to their metaphorical and spiritual truth. There is more to your gift, your genius, your calling—there is more to you—than meets the eye. Much more. The depth of you, you might say, is the boundless joy of God. The physical expression of your gift, of you, is just the doorway to the depth and breadth of you. Heraclitus said, “You would not find the boundaries of the soul, even by traveling along every path, so deep a measure does it have.” He is talking about you and me. Our depth is as boundless and God’s.
We wake up to ourselves in the dirt, but it isn’t about the dirt, or the rake, or the wheelbarrow, or the shovel. Those babies are just the mechanism by which you discover you, through which you stumble into your gift, your genius, your calling, you. And, remember that your gift is not yours, but the gift you are to the world. And, don’t think your gift is actually working with dirt, smoothing dirt, raking dirt! Not any more than your gift is the actual, physical, geographical and political boundaries of the Promised Land!
Think about the Bible once more, and take yourselves back to the early days of the realization of the Land of Promise, and the failure of the people to understand that it really wasn’t about the land. The prophet knew, but was unable to convince the people, that their gift, their genius, their calling had nothing to do with having a king. Ah, but, the people were on a literal track, and could not be dissuaded. And the king (that would be David) knew that the truth of God had nothing to do with the construction of a temple. Ah, but, all the other lands had capital cities and capital temples, central places of commerce and worship. That must be how it is done. And so, the concretizing began.
The literalization of religion is the death of religion. God is in the dirt, but God is not the dirt. The dirt has nothing to do with God. How’s that for double talk? Well. Here’s the deal. The straightest talk is crooked. Bent. Gnarled and knotted. Nonsense. I wouldn’t lie to you about this. Here’s the deal: You have to dive into the darkness and hope you pop out on the other side. You can’t figure it out first. You have to live your way to the answers which just open the way to more questions. There are no answers in the sense of an explanation that ties everything off and wraps everything up and leaves nothing more to be known. So, when you pop out on the other side, you pop out in mystery and wonder, awe and laughter, and giggle a lot for no apparent reason. In the darkness, however, there is a lot of groping around in frustration, fear, anxiety and anger. It takes a while to understand that answers don’t save us, and information is useless. By the time you understand what the information means, you don’t need it. So, there is no point in my saying anything more, or in you listening to it. You either know it already, or you can’t use it. One of the 10,000 spiritual laws is “You have to know what I mean before you can understand what I’m saying.” That’s one of the things you’ll giggle about when you pop up on the other side.
Here’s some more of the deal (he said, still talking, to those who are still listening, in spite of what he just said and they heard): We wake up to God in the dirt, but we move on, we move on. When we arrive at the Promised Land, we may put down roots and set up shop, but we keep moving. We don’t need kings, and temples, and standing armies and nuclear warheads, because what we have cannot be kept safe, or taken from us.
What we have is who we are. What do we need to be who we are? Upon what does our who-we-are-ness depend? I smooth dirt! YOU CAN’T TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME!!! No one can. I cannot lose it, or keep it safe. It is who I am. It is what I do. I can do it anywhere, any time. I can do it without rakes, and wheelbarrows, and shovels. I can do it, get this, pay attention now, this is crucial, it is the heart of the whole entire thing, I can do it WITHOUT DIRT!
The problem is, of course, that we try to be true to ourselves at the expense of other people. We can define ourselves, most days, fairly well. But defining ourselves while “staying in touch” with one another is tricky, and doing it while “staying in touch” with those who are opposite from us in every way is out of the question. What do we have in common with them? In relationship with those who aren’t like us, it is “every person for herself, for himself.” Self-interest above all interests is our motto. It’s gotten us where we are today. But, it all begins to change with self-awareness. Awareness is the solution to all of our problems today. And tomorrow. And all the way down the road.
Awareness. Awareness. Awareness. It’s the avenue to all that is worth our time. Eyes that see, ears that hear, and a heart that understands are predicated upon, and flow from, awareness. There is nothing beyond being awake, aware, and alive to have, or do, or achieve, or be. All we have to do is wake up. How hard could that be?
How much can you see, before you have to stop looking? There is no pain quite like the pain of awareness. What keeps us going, once we know what we are up against and what our chances are? When we can no longer fool ourselves, or kid ourselves, or pretend that things are different than they are—what do we do then?
Then, everything hangs on our belief in the innate value of self-realization, self-determination, and self-expression within the context and circumstances of our lives. We may never have what we need. There may be no paper in the home of the poet. No paints and brushes in the life of the artist. No piano for the young Mozart, the old Beethoven. Then what? Then, we have to deal with what is ours to deal with, and find a way. Awareness. Awareness. Awareness.
We are always up against something. We always have to find a way. We always have to be who we are with the resources available to us in the time and place of our living. We cannot abandon the work of self-realization, self-determination, self-expression just because we have the gifts of Michael Jordan and basketball hasn’t been invented.
We have to be who we are, within the context and circumstances of our lives. That is the divine imperative. We have to bring to life the gift that is ours. We have to serve the genius within. It may not look like much to those who are watching, but it is our gift to give and we have to bestow it upon the world to the best of our ability.
In Batesville, Mississippi I discovered my gift of raking earth smooth and level. We bought a house there with nearly an acre of land attached, which had drainage problems and holes and depressions which made it impossible to mow. Over our six years there, I spread eight dump truck loads of top soil with a shovel, a wheelbarrow and a rake. I found God in the dirt.
When you discover your gift, there is God. Don’t know where your gift lies? Here are some questions to point you in the general direction: Where is the harmony? The peace? The pleasure? The satisfaction? What brings you joy? Where do you come alive? What do you love? Don’t discount or dismiss what is there in favor of what you think ought to be there, or of what you wish were there, or hope will be there. We are always looking past our gift, thinking it has to be something on the order of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to count. We think if we can’t compose a Sonata in E-flat, it doesn’t count for a gift. If we aren’t being paid 8 million dollars a year to hit home runs, we are shamefully un-gifted and should not be seen in public.
Let me explain something to you fine people: Raking Dirt! My gift is Raking Dirt! So, don’t disparage your gift! How could your gift be less significant than raking dirt? So, recognize and embrace your gift. That’s the first rule. Your gift is your gift! If your gift is hitting home runs, hit home runs. If it is raking dirt, rake dirt. It is all about you and your gift. Self-realization, self-determination, self-expression. You can’t find God without finding your gift. You can’t serve God without serving your gift. If you think you are too good for your gift, you are too good for God. But, here’s the second rule: Don’t think your gift is your actual gift. It’s all metaphorical. Don’t forget that.
What do you think the Promised Land is all about? Latitude and longitude? Political boundaries? Standing armies, and sewage treatment, and garbage pickup? I guess you think the Holy Grail is about the actual vessel Jesus used to hold the wine when he served the Last Supper! You’re wearing me out. What am I to do with you people?
Take a deep breath and think of all you know about the Bible and let me ask you this one: When, throughout all the Bible, was God present and known in the lives of the people? Let me just cut to the chase. It was only when the people were wrestling themselves into alignment with, and living out the expression of, their gift, their genius, their calling. God is never known to, or by, anyone for the simple joy of paling around with God. We lost this bit of insight with the invention of doctrine, which became a substitute for God. Once thinking about God became confused with knowing God, we just sat around talking about God, thinking we were doing something. If you want to know God, you have to walk away from the sermons and the Sunday school discussions, and the Bible studies, and take up your life. The realness of God is simultaneous with, and contingent upon, self-realization, self-determination, and self-expression. God, gentle people, is in the dirt!
But—and here it gets tricky—the literal is always disappearing into the metaphorical. The Promised Land, the Holy Grail, Dirt were all literal, actual, tangible, concrete, physical realities at one point, but their literal and physical truth is nothing compared to their metaphorical and spiritual truth. There is more to your gift, your genius, your calling—there is more to you—than meets the eye. Much more. The depth of you, you might say, is the boundless joy of God. The physical expression of your gift, of you, is just the doorway to the depth and breadth of you. Heraclitus said, “You would not find the boundaries of the soul, even by traveling along every path, so deep a measure does it have.” He is talking about you and me. Our depth is as boundless and God’s.
We wake up to ourselves in the dirt, but it isn’t about the dirt, or the rake, or the wheelbarrow, or the shovel. Those babies are just the mechanism by which you discover you, through which you stumble into your gift, your genius, your calling, you. And, remember that your gift is not yours, but the gift you are to the world. And, don’t think your gift is actually working with dirt, smoothing dirt, raking dirt! Not any more than your gift is the actual, physical, geographical and political boundaries of the Promised Land!
Think about the Bible once more, and take yourselves back to the early days of the realization of the Land of Promise, and the failure of the people to understand that it really wasn’t about the land. The prophet knew, but was unable to convince the people, that their gift, their genius, their calling had nothing to do with having a king. Ah, but, the people were on a literal track, and could not be dissuaded. And the king (that would be David) knew that the truth of God had nothing to do with the construction of a temple. Ah, but, all the other lands had capital cities and capital temples, central places of commerce and worship. That must be how it is done. And so, the concretizing began.
The literalization of religion is the death of religion. God is in the dirt, but God is not the dirt. The dirt has nothing to do with God. How’s that for double talk? Well. Here’s the deal. The straightest talk is crooked. Bent. Gnarled and knotted. Nonsense. I wouldn’t lie to you about this. Here’s the deal: You have to dive into the darkness and hope you pop out on the other side. You can’t figure it out first. You have to live your way to the answers which just open the way to more questions. There are no answers in the sense of an explanation that ties everything off and wraps everything up and leaves nothing more to be known. So, when you pop out on the other side, you pop out in mystery and wonder, awe and laughter, and giggle a lot for no apparent reason. In the darkness, however, there is a lot of groping around in frustration, fear, anxiety and anger. It takes a while to understand that answers don’t save us, and information is useless. By the time you understand what the information means, you don’t need it. So, there is no point in my saying anything more, or in you listening to it. You either know it already, or you can’t use it. One of the 10,000 spiritual laws is “You have to know what I mean before you can understand what I’m saying.” That’s one of the things you’ll giggle about when you pop up on the other side.
Here’s some more of the deal (he said, still talking, to those who are still listening, in spite of what he just said and they heard): We wake up to God in the dirt, but we move on, we move on. When we arrive at the Promised Land, we may put down roots and set up shop, but we keep moving. We don’t need kings, and temples, and standing armies and nuclear warheads, because what we have cannot be kept safe, or taken from us.
What we have is who we are. What do we need to be who we are? Upon what does our who-we-are-ness depend? I smooth dirt! YOU CAN’T TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME!!! No one can. I cannot lose it, or keep it safe. It is who I am. It is what I do. I can do it anywhere, any time. I can do it without rakes, and wheelbarrows, and shovels. I can do it, get this, pay attention now, this is crucial, it is the heart of the whole entire thing, I can do it WITHOUT DIRT!
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
08/19/07, Sermon
The more we see, the more it hurts to look. And so, we have to bear the pain of knowing how things are, and how they also are. We do not belong in this world. We are the “strangers in a strange (and inhospitable) land.” We have been locked in an adversarial relationship with our environment from the beginning. It is the plight of the living to have to fight for life, for life is not the natural way of things.
The natural way of things is to be inert, disinterested, un-invested, uncaring. Like water flowing around a rock, or a rock being eroded by flowing water. Who cares about time if you are a river? You can carve out the Grand Canyon over lifetimes past counting, because no one is counting. Time becomes important only if you don’t have long to live. Then, you have to get things done, if they are going to be done, now. Then, you have to push, or resist, or force, or compel, or demand and insist because you can’t wait for things to take their natural course. Besides, you may not like their natural course. Their natural course may not be in your best interest, or that of the tribe, or that of all living things. But, rocks and rivers don’t care about these things, so the natural course of a river is nothing to a rock, even though the river clearly does not have the rock’s best interest at heart.
The natural course of the Yellowstone Caldera is to destroy life as we know it. It would be smart for us to stop it if we could, to alter the natural course. Or to stop forest fires, or to irrigate crops during droughts, or kill the tiger that is preying on the people of the village, or inoculate the children of the village against polio and whooping cough. To stand aside and let nature take its course is not always prudent, even rarely so, and thus, the fight for life is always against some natural course. Life, then, is always artificial, at odds with the world that was here long before life. Life is an after-thought of sorts, and self-interest is the most un-natural of things in the annuls of things.
But, here we are. Stuck on a world, in a universe, that doesn’t care if we live or die. That being the case, we better learn to enjoy the ride. Don’t be expecting life to be different than it is, that’s my best advice. Don’t be surprised if it’s difficult, if we don’t get enough, or any, cooperation, if there is opposition, and adversity, and resistance, and contentiousness, and hostility. When has it ever been otherwise? When has the world ever moved over and made room for us and asked what it could do to make us comfortable? It’s been hell here from the start. THAT is the nature of things. Living will take the life right out of you, and heart is the easiest thing to lose. So, we better have what it takes. We better know what it takes. We better do what it takes. Because, we are up against it, and the world is not on our side.
So the question: What does it take? Or, to phrase it a bit differently, What is the bottom line? What is the legitimate “ultimate concern” of the species (And how can individuals within the species have a different ultimate concern than the species?)? Survival? Are we to survive at all costs, at any price? What is the absolute necessity that governs our choices and our actions? We serve what with our lives?
How about “The future!”? We serve the future with our lives, the future of our planet, the future of our—collective—children. We are to live here and now in ways that enable them to live then and there. In order to do that, we have to take everything into account. We have to foster eyes that see, ears that hear, hearts that understand. We have to proceed very slowly. It is a slippery path to a future worth having, and fraught with peril. And, we are walking it for everyone, not just for ourselves and those like us.
Taking everyone into account pretty well erases the profit motive as the bottom line. No one benefits at the expense of everyone else. We are all in this together. The boon is shared in equal lots around the table, across the board. Hardly the American Way! Here is the bad news: The way into a worthy future is not the American Way! Or, to phrase it differently: Competition is not good for the soul.
There are two things wrong with competition. The first is the idea that “the winner takes all.” The second is the idea that the job goes to the lowest bidder (unless it’s a government job which then goes to your closest friend or family member). What’s wrong with the first idea is that the winner who takes all will do anything to win. And, we have the cheating scandals and the steroid scandals and the payola scandals, etc. to prove it. And, what’s wrong with the second idea is that in order to get the job, bidders will say anything and cut any corner and sign off on any piece of shoddy construction. You only have to live a little while with your eyes open to know that it is so.
We will not compete our way into a worthy future for everyone. Buying low and selling high will not do it. We come out on top when no one comes out on top. What do you think our chances are? How are we going to split the “future pie” so that everyone has an equal piece? It doesn’t matter what we think because the people who control the path to the future aren’t asking us for directions. We can only hang on and hate the ride.
This, too, is part of the process. We have always been carried to places we didn’t want to go by those who didn’t know what they were doing. Of all the kings, and princes, and presidents in charge of charting a course to the future for their country, how many made wise and prudent choices that benefited all people everywhere—or, even, their own? Let’s say you can come up with a name or two. Can you come up with a name or two whose wise choices weren’t eradicated by those of the next dufus in line? We can lament the mad meandering of history, but what can we do about it? Who are you going to talk to? Who is in charge here, or anywhere?
Here’s the plan: We do what we can in our sphere of influence and work to expand our influence. What are the common agreements? What is “the common good”? How homogeneous do we have to be? What are the sacrifices individuals must make for the sake of the whole? What are the sacrifices the whole must make for the sake of the individuals? How do we find the way forward together? How do we begin to serve a good beyond our own personal good?
The first common agreement is that we cannot do it alone. The second common agreement is that there are going to be significant disagreements. All the other common agreements will be worked out in light of the first two. That’s a problem, because we believe we CAN do it alone, and we walk away from significant disagreements. We have been forced to walk away from significant disagreements, and forced to do it alone, because of the presumption of agreement as the foundation of our life together. Somebody wins and somebody loses. We take a vote and do it the way the majority wants it done. It’s the majority’s way or the highway. How else would you ever make a decision?
The voice of dissent may well be over-ridden but must always be taken seriously. The minority opinion is honored and has a place at the table. Perspectives are respected and heard across the board. No one is pushed aside or required to abandon her, abandon his, position for the appearance of unanimity and agreement. Dissension is the seed of change and transformation. William Blake said it well: “Without contrary, there is no progression.” So, we honor all views, and find the way forward together. But that doesn’t mean stupid opinions carry the day. How to honor the opposition without being hamstrung by it is the cross conscious communities have to bear.
The work is to find what matters and build a life around that, and come alive its service, and save the world. The work is to save the world by being who we are in the world. The work is to be who we are—to be true to ourselves—within the context and circumstances—within the relationships, and the obligations, and the duties—of our lives. We do not get to be who we are in a perfect world that is built to recognize our genius and fall at our feet and ask how it can be of help and what it can do for us and would we like a pillow for our head and maybe a nice massage for our back. We get to be who we are in THIS world that doesn’t care a thing about us and our lives. We get to save THIS world that does not want to be saved and will not cooperate in the work of its salvation, and will even resist our efforts in its behalf, and punish us for daring to be who we are, for trying to bring our gift to life in the service of the world. And we need the right kind of community to help us with the work of being who we are in this world.
Here we enter the real wilderness, and become entangled in the paradox of the individual and the community, the collective. We are an “I” and a “We” at the same time. But, the “We” has to be more than a arbitrary grouping of “I’s.” The “We” has to be a true “We” if the “I’s” who compose the “We” are to have any chance at being true “I’s.” The search, then, is for true “We-ness,” true “I-ness,” and the search is an agony. The good of the group is always clashing with the good of the individual, and vice-versa. And the struggle for compromise is essential to the good of both.
True “We-ness” brings true “I-ness” to light, and to life. True “I-ness” finds itself in resisting conformity to the “We,” questioning authority, pushing against the limits and restrictions of the “We’s” way of thinking and being, and imagining alternative and creative ways to think and be—within the context of the “We.” The “We” has to be accommodating, and gracious, and receptive, and kind, knowing when to yield and when to hold the line. The “I” has to be iconoclastic, and persistent, and patient, and bold. Too much “We,” and there is no “I.” Too much “I” and there is no “We.” And so, the dance.
The natural way of things is to be inert, disinterested, un-invested, uncaring. Like water flowing around a rock, or a rock being eroded by flowing water. Who cares about time if you are a river? You can carve out the Grand Canyon over lifetimes past counting, because no one is counting. Time becomes important only if you don’t have long to live. Then, you have to get things done, if they are going to be done, now. Then, you have to push, or resist, or force, or compel, or demand and insist because you can’t wait for things to take their natural course. Besides, you may not like their natural course. Their natural course may not be in your best interest, or that of the tribe, or that of all living things. But, rocks and rivers don’t care about these things, so the natural course of a river is nothing to a rock, even though the river clearly does not have the rock’s best interest at heart.
The natural course of the Yellowstone Caldera is to destroy life as we know it. It would be smart for us to stop it if we could, to alter the natural course. Or to stop forest fires, or to irrigate crops during droughts, or kill the tiger that is preying on the people of the village, or inoculate the children of the village against polio and whooping cough. To stand aside and let nature take its course is not always prudent, even rarely so, and thus, the fight for life is always against some natural course. Life, then, is always artificial, at odds with the world that was here long before life. Life is an after-thought of sorts, and self-interest is the most un-natural of things in the annuls of things.
But, here we are. Stuck on a world, in a universe, that doesn’t care if we live or die. That being the case, we better learn to enjoy the ride. Don’t be expecting life to be different than it is, that’s my best advice. Don’t be surprised if it’s difficult, if we don’t get enough, or any, cooperation, if there is opposition, and adversity, and resistance, and contentiousness, and hostility. When has it ever been otherwise? When has the world ever moved over and made room for us and asked what it could do to make us comfortable? It’s been hell here from the start. THAT is the nature of things. Living will take the life right out of you, and heart is the easiest thing to lose. So, we better have what it takes. We better know what it takes. We better do what it takes. Because, we are up against it, and the world is not on our side.
So the question: What does it take? Or, to phrase it a bit differently, What is the bottom line? What is the legitimate “ultimate concern” of the species (And how can individuals within the species have a different ultimate concern than the species?)? Survival? Are we to survive at all costs, at any price? What is the absolute necessity that governs our choices and our actions? We serve what with our lives?
How about “The future!”? We serve the future with our lives, the future of our planet, the future of our—collective—children. We are to live here and now in ways that enable them to live then and there. In order to do that, we have to take everything into account. We have to foster eyes that see, ears that hear, hearts that understand. We have to proceed very slowly. It is a slippery path to a future worth having, and fraught with peril. And, we are walking it for everyone, not just for ourselves and those like us.
Taking everyone into account pretty well erases the profit motive as the bottom line. No one benefits at the expense of everyone else. We are all in this together. The boon is shared in equal lots around the table, across the board. Hardly the American Way! Here is the bad news: The way into a worthy future is not the American Way! Or, to phrase it differently: Competition is not good for the soul.
There are two things wrong with competition. The first is the idea that “the winner takes all.” The second is the idea that the job goes to the lowest bidder (unless it’s a government job which then goes to your closest friend or family member). What’s wrong with the first idea is that the winner who takes all will do anything to win. And, we have the cheating scandals and the steroid scandals and the payola scandals, etc. to prove it. And, what’s wrong with the second idea is that in order to get the job, bidders will say anything and cut any corner and sign off on any piece of shoddy construction. You only have to live a little while with your eyes open to know that it is so.
We will not compete our way into a worthy future for everyone. Buying low and selling high will not do it. We come out on top when no one comes out on top. What do you think our chances are? How are we going to split the “future pie” so that everyone has an equal piece? It doesn’t matter what we think because the people who control the path to the future aren’t asking us for directions. We can only hang on and hate the ride.
This, too, is part of the process. We have always been carried to places we didn’t want to go by those who didn’t know what they were doing. Of all the kings, and princes, and presidents in charge of charting a course to the future for their country, how many made wise and prudent choices that benefited all people everywhere—or, even, their own? Let’s say you can come up with a name or two. Can you come up with a name or two whose wise choices weren’t eradicated by those of the next dufus in line? We can lament the mad meandering of history, but what can we do about it? Who are you going to talk to? Who is in charge here, or anywhere?
Here’s the plan: We do what we can in our sphere of influence and work to expand our influence. What are the common agreements? What is “the common good”? How homogeneous do we have to be? What are the sacrifices individuals must make for the sake of the whole? What are the sacrifices the whole must make for the sake of the individuals? How do we find the way forward together? How do we begin to serve a good beyond our own personal good?
The first common agreement is that we cannot do it alone. The second common agreement is that there are going to be significant disagreements. All the other common agreements will be worked out in light of the first two. That’s a problem, because we believe we CAN do it alone, and we walk away from significant disagreements. We have been forced to walk away from significant disagreements, and forced to do it alone, because of the presumption of agreement as the foundation of our life together. Somebody wins and somebody loses. We take a vote and do it the way the majority wants it done. It’s the majority’s way or the highway. How else would you ever make a decision?
The voice of dissent may well be over-ridden but must always be taken seriously. The minority opinion is honored and has a place at the table. Perspectives are respected and heard across the board. No one is pushed aside or required to abandon her, abandon his, position for the appearance of unanimity and agreement. Dissension is the seed of change and transformation. William Blake said it well: “Without contrary, there is no progression.” So, we honor all views, and find the way forward together. But that doesn’t mean stupid opinions carry the day. How to honor the opposition without being hamstrung by it is the cross conscious communities have to bear.
The work is to find what matters and build a life around that, and come alive its service, and save the world. The work is to save the world by being who we are in the world. The work is to be who we are—to be true to ourselves—within the context and circumstances—within the relationships, and the obligations, and the duties—of our lives. We do not get to be who we are in a perfect world that is built to recognize our genius and fall at our feet and ask how it can be of help and what it can do for us and would we like a pillow for our head and maybe a nice massage for our back. We get to be who we are in THIS world that doesn’t care a thing about us and our lives. We get to save THIS world that does not want to be saved and will not cooperate in the work of its salvation, and will even resist our efforts in its behalf, and punish us for daring to be who we are, for trying to bring our gift to life in the service of the world. And we need the right kind of community to help us with the work of being who we are in this world.
Here we enter the real wilderness, and become entangled in the paradox of the individual and the community, the collective. We are an “I” and a “We” at the same time. But, the “We” has to be more than a arbitrary grouping of “I’s.” The “We” has to be a true “We” if the “I’s” who compose the “We” are to have any chance at being true “I’s.” The search, then, is for true “We-ness,” true “I-ness,” and the search is an agony. The good of the group is always clashing with the good of the individual, and vice-versa. And the struggle for compromise is essential to the good of both.
True “We-ness” brings true “I-ness” to light, and to life. True “I-ness” finds itself in resisting conformity to the “We,” questioning authority, pushing against the limits and restrictions of the “We’s” way of thinking and being, and imagining alternative and creative ways to think and be—within the context of the “We.” The “We” has to be accommodating, and gracious, and receptive, and kind, knowing when to yield and when to hold the line. The “I” has to be iconoclastic, and persistent, and patient, and bold. Too much “We,” and there is no “I.” Too much “I” and there is no “We.” And so, the dance.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
08/12/07, Sermon
There are psychic realities that are as actual as gravity and the change of seasons. “A witness to violence is a victim of violence,” is a psychic law. We cannot live in this world without witnessing violence. Violence violates, brutalizes, traumatizes, shatters, fragments, destroys our world on a psychic level. After the encounter with violence, things might be put back in order on a physical level, but they may never be put back together on a psychic level. We have to understand the importance of healing the psyche, and engage in practices that restore harmony and balance to the soul—and “psyche” is the Greek word for “soul.”
Part of our work in the physical world is to provide ourselves with safety and comfort, security and stability on a psychic level. We have to know that we are okay, psychically. In order to really be okay, we have to find the way to the world beyond the world of fear and desire, and live there consciously, intentionally. We have always been helpless, and we have always hated it. We have always been at the mercy of forces quite beyond us. The elements, animals, natural catastrophes, bullies, thugs, hooligans, raiding parties, warring nations, disease, debilitation, death… It’s all out there, arrayed against us, biding its time, what can we do?
Our lives consist of imagining ways of protecting ourselves against the inevitabilities of life in this place. We have invented insurance, and nuclear weapons, and certificates of deposit, and neighborhood watch as hedges against the encroaching realities in order to provide ourselves with a little peace of mind and breathing room, so that we might sleep at night and avoid the constant seizure of panic attacks.
Life, it seems, is out to get us. It is as though we don’t belong here with our dreams of convenience, and comfort, and cooperation, where we harvest what we plant, and reap what we sow, and live in what we build, and enjoy the endless pleasure of the fruit of our labor and the laughter of our children, and grand children, and great-grand-children through long generations into the far distant future. There is always the looming specter of the great loss of everything. Those who can afford it live behind high walls in gated, and guarded, communities. But, who can feel safe, even there? Once we get behind the fence, we are still in the world. In the world of fear and desire.
The Bush Administration has played to the fears, and insecurities, and uncertainties of the nation, but I don’t think it has been an intentional and deliberate strategy to fleece us of our freedom and burden us with national debt. I think it is because George Bush, and Dick Cheney, and Carl Rove are exceedingly afraid, and insecure, and uncertain themselves. Just as “the influence of a vital person vitalizes,” so the influence of a terrified person terrifies. We elected to office bullies who are terrified of bigger bullies, and who will die haunted by the uncontrollable possibilities of their lives.
It is important that we not go with them down that path. We avoid the descent into panic and dread by experiencing our experience and reflecting on it, thinking about it—experiencing it. When we experience our experience, we understand how grounded we are in the world of fear and desire, and how little we know of the world beyond fear and desire. There are two aspects of that world which are psychically healing, nourishing, and restorative: Being present to others and being present to ourselves.
Jesus practiced being present, and offered two guidelines to his followers, “the greatest commandment,” and a popular (in his day) version of “the Golden Rule.” “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and mind, and soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Rumi says, “If you are not here faithfully with us, you are causing terrible damage.” From their standpoint, it isn’t about amassing a fortune, having it made, and being safe. It’s about being a positive, not a negative, force in the world. It’s about being a source of encouragement, not throwing a wet blanking over sputtering enthusiasm or stamping out sparks of optimism and joy.
We have all known people who can take the life out of a room just by walking into it. These are black holes of gloom and despair who devour happiness and well-being, and seem to delight in removing delight from the world. “If you are not here faithfully with us, you are causing terrible damage.”
From the standpoint of the world beyond fear and desire, which is also the world of having our own way, there is no reason to despair. The foundation of despair is the hopelessness of ever having our way. But, hope isn’t about having our way! Life isn’t about having our way! The quality of our lives, and the value of life, cannot be gauged according to the number of check marks on our wish list.
Life does not consist of buying, spending, amassing, consuming, acquiring, producing, accumulating, owning, having, controlling, achieving, accomplishing, gaining, getting, and raking it in. These things constitute the foundation of life-as-we-know it, and have served as the ground of civilization since the beginning of time, but they have nothing to do with being alive. Being alive comes down to eyes that see, ears that hear, and a heart that understands. Being alive is about being awake and aware and perceptive to the point of taking our own perception into account, so that we see ourselves seeing, think about our thinking, and realize what we are doing at every point in our lives, and know how what we are doing connects us to, or disconnects us from, the world of psychic reality.
Joseph Campbell says, “Realize what you are doing when you’re giving a cocktail party (for instance). You are performing a social ritual. (Pay attention when sit down to eat a meal). When you are eating something (that once was alive, but now is dead so that you might live), this is something quite special to do. And you ought to have that thought when you eat a carrot as well as when you eat (a hamburger). But, you don’t know what you are doing unless you think about it. (That’s what attention does). You do things with intention (and awareness), and not just in the animal way, ravenously, without knowing what you are doing.”
Attention, and awareness, are the foundation of appreciation, and gratitude, and humility, and life. None of us is here by virtue of our own strength, and cunning, and skill. We owe it all to the help that we have been given along the way. For better or worse, we are at the mercy of the benevolence, or the malevolence, of the drift of our lives. Our contribution in making things as good as they can be is the way we think about what happens to us. To think properly about it, we have to think about our thinking, and evaluate the things we tell ourselves about “the human condition.”
Protection from “the slings and arrows of time” is found in perception. The value of any religion is in the quality of the perception it engenders among its adherents—in the way it structures the thinking of its followers to deal with what happens to them in their lives. The question of every religion is the very practical matter of “How well does it enable us to live day-to-day?” To what extent is it a boost, or a burden? To what extent does it enable us to be present with one another and to be present to ourselves.
To be present to ourselves is to be alert to, aware of, the genius, the gift, the knack, the passion we carry within, and nurturing that to life in the world, so that it becomes our gift to the world—in the sense that “as we do it unto one of the least of these” we do it unto all the world. We think life is the ultimate good, and make significant sacrifices for the sake of what we call “the good life,” but the way we live is a waste of life. “You call that living?”, comes the chastising scorn of God upon those of us who live in the service of our fear and desires. “Wake up, won’t you, to that which has need of you beyond all fear or desire?”
Speaking for myself, I must write, whether anyone reads it or not. I must take photographs, whether anyone views them or not. I must say what must be said, whether anyone hears it or not. It all has to do with apprehending and exploring the truth of experience, and I do it for its own sake, not to get anything out of it beyond the joy of doing it. Lance Armstrong had his bicycle and I have my words and images. “What I do is me, for that I came,” said Gerard Manly Hopkins. If we look closely enough at the life we have lived, and are living, we will see something of who we are.
The truth shines through. The essence cannot be completely hidden or denied. Our work is to get out of the way and let who we are be what we do. The hero’s journey and the search for the Holy Grail, and the spiritual quest come down to the same thing: the recognition and bestowal of our gift to the world. This is not about having our way, but about getting out of our way, so that we might take up the way of the True Human being.
The difference between this world of my-way-ness, fear and desire, and that world of the True Human Being is highlighted by our answer to the question, “What are we interested in?”. Money, right? In the world of my-way-ness, we are interested in money and the things money can buy. Well, money is not the primary concern in the world of the True Human Being. Money is not the goal of the spiritual quest. Money is not the Holy Grail, and the Hero’s Journey is not for booty, loot, and plunder. We have to consider who we are and what we are about apart from the question of how much money it’s going to make us, or what’s in it for us. Money is not the bottom line. Our work is to discover, to remember, what is.
Part of our work in the physical world is to provide ourselves with safety and comfort, security and stability on a psychic level. We have to know that we are okay, psychically. In order to really be okay, we have to find the way to the world beyond the world of fear and desire, and live there consciously, intentionally. We have always been helpless, and we have always hated it. We have always been at the mercy of forces quite beyond us. The elements, animals, natural catastrophes, bullies, thugs, hooligans, raiding parties, warring nations, disease, debilitation, death… It’s all out there, arrayed against us, biding its time, what can we do?
Our lives consist of imagining ways of protecting ourselves against the inevitabilities of life in this place. We have invented insurance, and nuclear weapons, and certificates of deposit, and neighborhood watch as hedges against the encroaching realities in order to provide ourselves with a little peace of mind and breathing room, so that we might sleep at night and avoid the constant seizure of panic attacks.
Life, it seems, is out to get us. It is as though we don’t belong here with our dreams of convenience, and comfort, and cooperation, where we harvest what we plant, and reap what we sow, and live in what we build, and enjoy the endless pleasure of the fruit of our labor and the laughter of our children, and grand children, and great-grand-children through long generations into the far distant future. There is always the looming specter of the great loss of everything. Those who can afford it live behind high walls in gated, and guarded, communities. But, who can feel safe, even there? Once we get behind the fence, we are still in the world. In the world of fear and desire.
The Bush Administration has played to the fears, and insecurities, and uncertainties of the nation, but I don’t think it has been an intentional and deliberate strategy to fleece us of our freedom and burden us with national debt. I think it is because George Bush, and Dick Cheney, and Carl Rove are exceedingly afraid, and insecure, and uncertain themselves. Just as “the influence of a vital person vitalizes,” so the influence of a terrified person terrifies. We elected to office bullies who are terrified of bigger bullies, and who will die haunted by the uncontrollable possibilities of their lives.
It is important that we not go with them down that path. We avoid the descent into panic and dread by experiencing our experience and reflecting on it, thinking about it—experiencing it. When we experience our experience, we understand how grounded we are in the world of fear and desire, and how little we know of the world beyond fear and desire. There are two aspects of that world which are psychically healing, nourishing, and restorative: Being present to others and being present to ourselves.
Jesus practiced being present, and offered two guidelines to his followers, “the greatest commandment,” and a popular (in his day) version of “the Golden Rule.” “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and mind, and soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Rumi says, “If you are not here faithfully with us, you are causing terrible damage.” From their standpoint, it isn’t about amassing a fortune, having it made, and being safe. It’s about being a positive, not a negative, force in the world. It’s about being a source of encouragement, not throwing a wet blanking over sputtering enthusiasm or stamping out sparks of optimism and joy.
We have all known people who can take the life out of a room just by walking into it. These are black holes of gloom and despair who devour happiness and well-being, and seem to delight in removing delight from the world. “If you are not here faithfully with us, you are causing terrible damage.”
From the standpoint of the world beyond fear and desire, which is also the world of having our own way, there is no reason to despair. The foundation of despair is the hopelessness of ever having our way. But, hope isn’t about having our way! Life isn’t about having our way! The quality of our lives, and the value of life, cannot be gauged according to the number of check marks on our wish list.
Life does not consist of buying, spending, amassing, consuming, acquiring, producing, accumulating, owning, having, controlling, achieving, accomplishing, gaining, getting, and raking it in. These things constitute the foundation of life-as-we-know it, and have served as the ground of civilization since the beginning of time, but they have nothing to do with being alive. Being alive comes down to eyes that see, ears that hear, and a heart that understands. Being alive is about being awake and aware and perceptive to the point of taking our own perception into account, so that we see ourselves seeing, think about our thinking, and realize what we are doing at every point in our lives, and know how what we are doing connects us to, or disconnects us from, the world of psychic reality.
Joseph Campbell says, “Realize what you are doing when you’re giving a cocktail party (for instance). You are performing a social ritual. (Pay attention when sit down to eat a meal). When you are eating something (that once was alive, but now is dead so that you might live), this is something quite special to do. And you ought to have that thought when you eat a carrot as well as when you eat (a hamburger). But, you don’t know what you are doing unless you think about it. (That’s what attention does). You do things with intention (and awareness), and not just in the animal way, ravenously, without knowing what you are doing.”
Attention, and awareness, are the foundation of appreciation, and gratitude, and humility, and life. None of us is here by virtue of our own strength, and cunning, and skill. We owe it all to the help that we have been given along the way. For better or worse, we are at the mercy of the benevolence, or the malevolence, of the drift of our lives. Our contribution in making things as good as they can be is the way we think about what happens to us. To think properly about it, we have to think about our thinking, and evaluate the things we tell ourselves about “the human condition.”
Protection from “the slings and arrows of time” is found in perception. The value of any religion is in the quality of the perception it engenders among its adherents—in the way it structures the thinking of its followers to deal with what happens to them in their lives. The question of every religion is the very practical matter of “How well does it enable us to live day-to-day?” To what extent is it a boost, or a burden? To what extent does it enable us to be present with one another and to be present to ourselves.
To be present to ourselves is to be alert to, aware of, the genius, the gift, the knack, the passion we carry within, and nurturing that to life in the world, so that it becomes our gift to the world—in the sense that “as we do it unto one of the least of these” we do it unto all the world. We think life is the ultimate good, and make significant sacrifices for the sake of what we call “the good life,” but the way we live is a waste of life. “You call that living?”, comes the chastising scorn of God upon those of us who live in the service of our fear and desires. “Wake up, won’t you, to that which has need of you beyond all fear or desire?”
Speaking for myself, I must write, whether anyone reads it or not. I must take photographs, whether anyone views them or not. I must say what must be said, whether anyone hears it or not. It all has to do with apprehending and exploring the truth of experience, and I do it for its own sake, not to get anything out of it beyond the joy of doing it. Lance Armstrong had his bicycle and I have my words and images. “What I do is me, for that I came,” said Gerard Manly Hopkins. If we look closely enough at the life we have lived, and are living, we will see something of who we are.
The truth shines through. The essence cannot be completely hidden or denied. Our work is to get out of the way and let who we are be what we do. The hero’s journey and the search for the Holy Grail, and the spiritual quest come down to the same thing: the recognition and bestowal of our gift to the world. This is not about having our way, but about getting out of our way, so that we might take up the way of the True Human being.
The difference between this world of my-way-ness, fear and desire, and that world of the True Human Being is highlighted by our answer to the question, “What are we interested in?”. Money, right? In the world of my-way-ness, we are interested in money and the things money can buy. Well, money is not the primary concern in the world of the True Human Being. Money is not the goal of the spiritual quest. Money is not the Holy Grail, and the Hero’s Journey is not for booty, loot, and plunder. We have to consider who we are and what we are about apart from the question of how much money it’s going to make us, or what’s in it for us. Money is not the bottom line. Our work is to discover, to remember, what is.
Sunday, August 05, 2007
08/05/07
What should we care about? How should we express our caring? In light of what, toward what, should we live? The questions raise Hugh Macleod's inquiry: “Is it a tool or a prop?” Does it ground us in the heart of things, or keep us fluttering about in the shallows on the periphery of our lives? Eyes that see, ears that hear, a heart that understands seem to know shallow when they are in its presence, seem to recognize “it” and “not-it.” And so, the importance of seeing, and hearing, and understanding--of taking the time to look, and listen, and apprehend. And, that means stepping back from fear and desire.
Standing apart from our fears and desires, what do we need? What do we need for what--with no fear or desire to propel us? What governs our action, our direction, our needs, then? Then, perhaps, we are open to consider “What needs us?” The question enlarges to “What do we need to do what, what needs us to do?” Does the Grail serve us, or do we serve the Grail? I need a camera to serve the Seer, and I need to take the Seer to the places the Seer needs to see. Or, am I only kidding myself here? As the Seer is satisfied, I am certainly satisfied as well. As I fail the Seer, I fail myself as well. There is a point at which the Seer and I are one. But, then, I can wander off, on my own, seeking my own ends, my own advantage, my own profit. The Seer and I can part ways. I can live in the service of things the Seer doesn't need at all. We can co-opt our calling, and aim for the Big Time at any time. It is the story of the Lost Way of the species, and of each of us, as well. It could be called The Lost Calling.
What do we need to do what we are here to do? It depends, doesn’t it, on our vision of who and how we see ourselves, and what we think we are here for. All the questions stir, and our pulse rate increases, as we approach the point of transition, and wonder how different the future needs to be from the past.
Who ARE we? What ARE we about? What do we need to help us do what we are here to do? What are we here to do? If we were building the church over, from the ground up, what would we need to bring our idea of church into existence? There’s that word again, twice. Church. Do we see ourselves as the church, the ecclesia, the Body of Christ, the Bride of Christ? The Community of the Faithful? Faithful to whom, to what? Do we see ourselves carrying forward any of the things we have inherited from the church of our experience? The Sacraments? The rituals? The theology? Doctrines? What do we tell our children about the unknowns that shape our lives? About the values that are the foundation of our living?
How do we talk of grace, mercy, and peace? Of justice and compassion? Of the divine “ought-to-be-ness” that grips our hearts and carries us into the service of a good that is greater than our own good? How do we grapple with the mystery? How do we say what is meaningful, and why do we say that is meaningful and not something else instead? What stories do we tell to communicate what we believe? What do we believe? What do we believe about believing?
I believe it is important to do our believing within a context that governs, not the what of believing, but the how. In the past, doctrines have determined the content of belief. We have been told what to believe. Our faith consisted of specific body of belief. We could talk of “the Christian faith,” for instance as being different from “the Hindu faith” by virtue of the difference in the content of the beliefs of those perspectives. I believe we have to do our believing in a different context.
The first rule is that the process is always being defined—the process of believing is itself in process. The second rule is that the process of believing, or, you might say believing itself, does not rule out contradiction and paradox but rather engages them, even creates them. Believing is a balancing act whereby experience counterbalances and enlarges and deepens experience. We believe what makes sense at any point in our experience, but experience informs belief. Belief does not restrict or limit experience, but it shapes experience even as it is shaped by experience in the eternal dance of yin and yang. Believing is balancing, a way of balancing our experiences, and being balanced by them.
Something happens, and we believe this or that about what caused it to happen, why it happened, what the purpose of its happening was. And we formulate theories, and doctrines, and explanations which provide a framework for understanding the experience, and the theories can prevent us from examining the experience, and the doctrine can keep us from thinking about the experience. And superstition and religion and astrology are just different ways of thinking—or not thinking—about experience in ways that accommodate us to is and offer us a way of living in relationship with it. Religion needs to become much more scientific in its approach to experience, else we will be bound inextricably to the world views of the past, and persecute gay people because “the Bible says they are sinful,” and go to war with the infidel because they are a threat to “true belief.” Belief that is truly “true belief,” looks at what it believes and asks, “What makes me think this is true?”
Believing has to be done in a context that sets the ground-rules for believing, in a context that defines the process of believing. Essential to the process of belief is the practice of inquiry and investigation, of asking, seeking, and knocking, of pushing against the limits and challenging authority and questioning assumptions. “This means, of course, that we can never claim to have truth cornered, captured, and incarcerated, and that what we have to offer is not a stilted list of things to think and believe and do, but an atmosphere which encourages the examination of what is known and the exploration of what is unknown so that what is worth knowing might emerge”(Jim Dollar, “On Being Presbyterian” ca.1985 ).
There is always more to see than has been seen, to hear than has been heard, to understand than has been understood. And, our beliefs are always evolving to take new information into account. We are always believing our way into different ways of perceiving, and perceiving our way into different ways of believing. What we see is a function of how we see, and the challenge is always to see in ways which take what else there is to see into account.
So, I believe we tell our children things that open them to the truth of their own experience, that ground them in confidence to trust themselves unknowing to questions that are not quickly dismissed as improper or heretical, or blocked with answers. And we need to do that in a spirit of playfulness and easy-going-ness and good humor that, itself, calls into question the seriousness with which we are prone to take things, and asks, of itself, “Is the seriousness with which I am taking things justified?” How we treat our children, and what we tell them, and how we tell them what we tell them is crucial to the future that we are creating. We have always heard in the church, “Our children are the future of the church.” That is not true. The future of the church does not depend upon the children of the church but upon the perspective of the church. The perspective of the church is the future of the church. How we treat our children is a reflection of that perspective. How we treat our children is the future of the church.
It is important that our children learn to think. Not that they think what we think, but that they think. And, that they think about their thinking. Toward that end, we need to provide our children with experiences that develop their creativity and open them to a sense of wonder and joy. We need to connect our children with what brings them to life and makes them alive, and enable them to trust their own voice, and learn to discern the voices within, so that they might perceive and follow their own sense of direction, their own guide. And we need to give ourselves permission to start over in developing our own understanding of the world, the universe, life, and our place in them all.
There are six statements that turn Christian theology as we have received it on its head, and open the way for new way of understanding ourselves and the way things are. We have talked of them before, here they come again:
Our idea of God is not God. What could be more scripturally sound? “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9), and, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how fathomless his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor? Or who has first given to God, that God needs to repay him? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever! Amen” (Romans 11:33-36). Even Lao Tse gets into the act with, “The Tao that can be said is not the Eternal Tao.” Yet, we act as though our idea of God IS God. We declare our beliefs to be “true beliefs.” And we excommunicate people, or call them heretics, or declare war on them because theirs is a different idea of God than ours.
The Garden of Eden did not have latitude and longitude. There was no primordial Paradise from which we were expelled for disobeying God, and hence no Original Sin which requires the atoning death of God’s only Son to patch things up with God and get us back in God’s good graces if we confess, repent, and believe. The whole thing goes with the Garden of Eden, and we have to start over, and create “out of nothing” the perspective with which we view the world, the universe, life and our place in them all.
The church was before the Bible. Of course the church was before the Bible. The Bible was the creation of the church. The church decided what was to be included in the Bible and what was to be excluded, and when part of the church disagreed with the officials of the church, the church declared itself to be the infallible voice of God and that was that. And the church said everything it said was true because it was in the Bible, yet the church decided what was in the Bible. Surely, you see the illogic at work here, even if your name isn’t Shirley.
We are the ones who say so. We believe what we believe because we believe what we believe is worth believing We are the authority by which we declare something to be authoritative, believable and true. Of course, we say we have to “take it on faith,” but why do we take “this” “on faith” and not “that”? We are the ones to decide. God is who we say God is.
Every step forward is a step into heresy. Everything that we believe with such fervor and proclaim with such gusto was, at some point in the past, rank heresy, the embrace of which was punishable by death or exclusion from the circle of orthodoxy of the day. Some present heresy is the hope of the future.
The ants find the picnic, the flowers turn to the sun. We are perfectly capable of evaluating what we experience and determining what truth is. We know “it” when we see it, and we know “not-it” when we see it. “The truth will out.” “The truth shines through.” It’s only a matter of time. All it takes is time. And attention.
We find the way forward in fits and starts. Hits and misses. Rights and wrongs. Who knows what we should do? What we should care about? How we should express our caring? Just care about something! Just start caring! And keep our eyes open. The way will open before those who are open to the way. We don’t have to figure it all out before we start walking!
Standing apart from our fears and desires, what do we need? What do we need for what--with no fear or desire to propel us? What governs our action, our direction, our needs, then? Then, perhaps, we are open to consider “What needs us?” The question enlarges to “What do we need to do what, what needs us to do?” Does the Grail serve us, or do we serve the Grail? I need a camera to serve the Seer, and I need to take the Seer to the places the Seer needs to see. Or, am I only kidding myself here? As the Seer is satisfied, I am certainly satisfied as well. As I fail the Seer, I fail myself as well. There is a point at which the Seer and I are one. But, then, I can wander off, on my own, seeking my own ends, my own advantage, my own profit. The Seer and I can part ways. I can live in the service of things the Seer doesn't need at all. We can co-opt our calling, and aim for the Big Time at any time. It is the story of the Lost Way of the species, and of each of us, as well. It could be called The Lost Calling.
What do we need to do what we are here to do? It depends, doesn’t it, on our vision of who and how we see ourselves, and what we think we are here for. All the questions stir, and our pulse rate increases, as we approach the point of transition, and wonder how different the future needs to be from the past.
Who ARE we? What ARE we about? What do we need to help us do what we are here to do? What are we here to do? If we were building the church over, from the ground up, what would we need to bring our idea of church into existence? There’s that word again, twice. Church. Do we see ourselves as the church, the ecclesia, the Body of Christ, the Bride of Christ? The Community of the Faithful? Faithful to whom, to what? Do we see ourselves carrying forward any of the things we have inherited from the church of our experience? The Sacraments? The rituals? The theology? Doctrines? What do we tell our children about the unknowns that shape our lives? About the values that are the foundation of our living?
How do we talk of grace, mercy, and peace? Of justice and compassion? Of the divine “ought-to-be-ness” that grips our hearts and carries us into the service of a good that is greater than our own good? How do we grapple with the mystery? How do we say what is meaningful, and why do we say that is meaningful and not something else instead? What stories do we tell to communicate what we believe? What do we believe? What do we believe about believing?
I believe it is important to do our believing within a context that governs, not the what of believing, but the how. In the past, doctrines have determined the content of belief. We have been told what to believe. Our faith consisted of specific body of belief. We could talk of “the Christian faith,” for instance as being different from “the Hindu faith” by virtue of the difference in the content of the beliefs of those perspectives. I believe we have to do our believing in a different context.
The first rule is that the process is always being defined—the process of believing is itself in process. The second rule is that the process of believing, or, you might say believing itself, does not rule out contradiction and paradox but rather engages them, even creates them. Believing is a balancing act whereby experience counterbalances and enlarges and deepens experience. We believe what makes sense at any point in our experience, but experience informs belief. Belief does not restrict or limit experience, but it shapes experience even as it is shaped by experience in the eternal dance of yin and yang. Believing is balancing, a way of balancing our experiences, and being balanced by them.
Something happens, and we believe this or that about what caused it to happen, why it happened, what the purpose of its happening was. And we formulate theories, and doctrines, and explanations which provide a framework for understanding the experience, and the theories can prevent us from examining the experience, and the doctrine can keep us from thinking about the experience. And superstition and religion and astrology are just different ways of thinking—or not thinking—about experience in ways that accommodate us to is and offer us a way of living in relationship with it. Religion needs to become much more scientific in its approach to experience, else we will be bound inextricably to the world views of the past, and persecute gay people because “the Bible says they are sinful,” and go to war with the infidel because they are a threat to “true belief.” Belief that is truly “true belief,” looks at what it believes and asks, “What makes me think this is true?”
Believing has to be done in a context that sets the ground-rules for believing, in a context that defines the process of believing. Essential to the process of belief is the practice of inquiry and investigation, of asking, seeking, and knocking, of pushing against the limits and challenging authority and questioning assumptions. “This means, of course, that we can never claim to have truth cornered, captured, and incarcerated, and that what we have to offer is not a stilted list of things to think and believe and do, but an atmosphere which encourages the examination of what is known and the exploration of what is unknown so that what is worth knowing might emerge”(Jim Dollar, “On Being Presbyterian” ca.1985 ).
There is always more to see than has been seen, to hear than has been heard, to understand than has been understood. And, our beliefs are always evolving to take new information into account. We are always believing our way into different ways of perceiving, and perceiving our way into different ways of believing. What we see is a function of how we see, and the challenge is always to see in ways which take what else there is to see into account.
So, I believe we tell our children things that open them to the truth of their own experience, that ground them in confidence to trust themselves unknowing to questions that are not quickly dismissed as improper or heretical, or blocked with answers. And we need to do that in a spirit of playfulness and easy-going-ness and good humor that, itself, calls into question the seriousness with which we are prone to take things, and asks, of itself, “Is the seriousness with which I am taking things justified?” How we treat our children, and what we tell them, and how we tell them what we tell them is crucial to the future that we are creating. We have always heard in the church, “Our children are the future of the church.” That is not true. The future of the church does not depend upon the children of the church but upon the perspective of the church. The perspective of the church is the future of the church. How we treat our children is a reflection of that perspective. How we treat our children is the future of the church.
It is important that our children learn to think. Not that they think what we think, but that they think. And, that they think about their thinking. Toward that end, we need to provide our children with experiences that develop their creativity and open them to a sense of wonder and joy. We need to connect our children with what brings them to life and makes them alive, and enable them to trust their own voice, and learn to discern the voices within, so that they might perceive and follow their own sense of direction, their own guide. And we need to give ourselves permission to start over in developing our own understanding of the world, the universe, life, and our place in them all.
There are six statements that turn Christian theology as we have received it on its head, and open the way for new way of understanding ourselves and the way things are. We have talked of them before, here they come again:
Our idea of God is not God. What could be more scripturally sound? “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9), and, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how fathomless his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor? Or who has first given to God, that God needs to repay him? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever! Amen” (Romans 11:33-36). Even Lao Tse gets into the act with, “The Tao that can be said is not the Eternal Tao.” Yet, we act as though our idea of God IS God. We declare our beliefs to be “true beliefs.” And we excommunicate people, or call them heretics, or declare war on them because theirs is a different idea of God than ours.
The Garden of Eden did not have latitude and longitude. There was no primordial Paradise from which we were expelled for disobeying God, and hence no Original Sin which requires the atoning death of God’s only Son to patch things up with God and get us back in God’s good graces if we confess, repent, and believe. The whole thing goes with the Garden of Eden, and we have to start over, and create “out of nothing” the perspective with which we view the world, the universe, life and our place in them all.
The church was before the Bible. Of course the church was before the Bible. The Bible was the creation of the church. The church decided what was to be included in the Bible and what was to be excluded, and when part of the church disagreed with the officials of the church, the church declared itself to be the infallible voice of God and that was that. And the church said everything it said was true because it was in the Bible, yet the church decided what was in the Bible. Surely, you see the illogic at work here, even if your name isn’t Shirley.
We are the ones who say so. We believe what we believe because we believe what we believe is worth believing We are the authority by which we declare something to be authoritative, believable and true. Of course, we say we have to “take it on faith,” but why do we take “this” “on faith” and not “that”? We are the ones to decide. God is who we say God is.
Every step forward is a step into heresy. Everything that we believe with such fervor and proclaim with such gusto was, at some point in the past, rank heresy, the embrace of which was punishable by death or exclusion from the circle of orthodoxy of the day. Some present heresy is the hope of the future.
The ants find the picnic, the flowers turn to the sun. We are perfectly capable of evaluating what we experience and determining what truth is. We know “it” when we see it, and we know “not-it” when we see it. “The truth will out.” “The truth shines through.” It’s only a matter of time. All it takes is time. And attention.
We find the way forward in fits and starts. Hits and misses. Rights and wrongs. Who knows what we should do? What we should care about? How we should express our caring? Just care about something! Just start caring! And keep our eyes open. The way will open before those who are open to the way. We don’t have to figure it all out before we start walking!
Friday, August 03, 2007
07/29/07, Sermon
It helps to know what we are after, what we are about, what we intend. For instance, where photography is concerned, I am more interested in pleasing the eye, in calming, restoring, the soul, than with taking a picture that is a completely accurate rendition, or representation, of some aspect of the “real world.” I am about making pleasing, calming, renewing, restoring images—images that assist us in the art of living well. I mean for each image to be a sanctuary of sorts, which provides breathing room between ourselves and our lives, and allows us to shift a bit in the saddle, regain a sense of perspective, and ride on.
As we think about ourselves in this place and our point, our purpose, in coming together—as we wonder what we mean, what we desire—as we ask “What business are we in here? What are we about?”—as we stand before our future and craft our intention regarding what that future will be—I can think of no better term for all of that than “sanctuary.” No soul can survive with out sanctuary in the world of space and time.
Life is abusive. Our lives, at best, are sources of low grade, yet, cumulative, posttraumatic stress disorder. We need a sanctuary. A place of retreat and restoration, regeneration, renewal and recovery. A “hospital of the spirit,” so to speak, where we can heal and be well. But, sanctuary doesn’t just happen. It is an intentional creation by and of the people who gather as sanctuary. Just as it is the people who are the church, it is the people who are the sanctuary. We generate sanctuary by the quality of our being together. We foster sanctuary by the way we receive and treat one another, particularly in the absence of the other. How you treat me when I am not with you is the simple key in determining whether you are a sanctuary for me and whether I will be healed through my association with you.
Kindness and compassion, grace, mercy and peace are healing agents, balm for our wounded-ness. We need the right kind of lap. We are only the right kind of lap away from being able to handle our lives. We need gentle, caring presence. We need loving laughter.
We think that explanation will make our pain disappear. If we only understood, then it would be okay. But, after we know why things are the way they are, we still have to deal with it, with life as it is. The best reason in all the world will not erase our pain. “Reason cannot uproot what reason didn’t plant.” Pain is impervious to the power of logic. Knowing what happened and why will not ameliorate the impact of what happened. But, the right kind of lap will. Sanctuary restores our souls.
Once we see all there is to see, we have to make our peace with it. Making our peace with it doesn’t mean leaving things as they are. It means doing what we can to make things like they ought to be, and letting what we can do be what we can do.
What can we do about poverty, for instance, or racism? What can be done about those things? Smart people have been trying to imagine solutions for years, yet, poverty and racism continue to abound. We have to make our peace with the work to end poverty and racism with no real strategy in mind or turning point in sight. The work goes on, and the work requires our dedication to the task, without payoff or reward. A good bit of life is like that.
Sanctuary offers no false promises or empty encouragement, but exists for us as a solid source of hope in our lives. Hope is not optimistic. Sanctuary is where we gather to know how things are and see what must be done, where we regroup, recover, and rededicate ourselves to the work that is before us, without regard for impact or outcome. Grounded in sanctuary, our lives have a source of vitality that has nothing to do with the results of our living.
We come here out of life situations that are beyond remedy. There is no solution for any of the real problems that beset us. We have worries and concerns for which there is no fix. On a global scale, the world is running out of oil and terrorism is not going away. On a personal level, we have health issues, and mood swings, and family problems that laugh at everything we throw at them. We cannot get away from the stuff we don’t like about our lives, about life. But, we can come here.
Coming here provides us with a practical perspective. No one here has it made. Everyone here deals with incorrigible realities. Some of us do that with greater aplomb and style and skill than others of us, but none of us escapes the work of having to deal with what we don’t like and can’t do anything about. What we can do about the things we can’t do anything about is make our peace with doing what we can and letting that be that. We gather here to find what it takes to pick ourselves up and go on with our lives. One of the things it takes is knowing how important we are to the rest of us. When we get to the point of being unable, or unwilling, to go on with our lives, we think the world would be better off without us, and that we would be better off without the world. That is the depressive fallacy. Sanctuary exists, in part, to ward off the depressive fallacy.
Look. It’s like this: We are all crucial to the experience and expression—to the creation and cultivation—of Optimal Mind. Optimal Mind is exactly what we need to do what must be done. Optimal mind is group-think, or mob mentality, at its best. It is the product of our coming together in the service of the best we can imagine, of our commitment to living together in ways that serve a good beyond our own personal good, in ways that take the good of an increasingly wide circle of our neighbors into account.
Optimal Mind is created by the mutual impact and influence of one another in the service of the good we recognize as good. We produce a we-ness by virtue of our participation in the collective way of thinking and doing and being. This is the culture, or the mind, or the soul of the group. When we belong only to one tightly knit group, a family, or clan, or tribe, the group mind is the controlling force directing the thinking of the individuals within the group. As the culture grows and differentiates, we have membership in a number of groups, and think of ourselves as separate individuals with our own personal minds. We need to re-think the concepts of “self” and “mind,” and understand that who we are is more a function of the groups we belong to than of the idea of “the rugged individualist” we would like to be. We are more of a “we” than an “I” or a “me.” Because of that, it is crucial that we focus on being the right kind of “we.”
We participate in our own becoming by creating the right kind of “we.” Optimal mind is a self-reflective loop of awareness and values and action produced by those who intentionally come together to be more than they could ever be alone. It begins with sanctuary.
We come here in a mental state that is bruised and battered and wrung out and exhausted. We are psychically spent. At the end of our emotional ropes. We don’t have what it takes to do our lives alone. We cannot find the way forward and see no reason to go on. But we come here, don’t you see, because there is more to us than meets the eye—because there is more to IT, to life, and living, and being alive than meets the eye. And, something knows that. And, brings us here, hoping that we will find what we need to get up and do what must be done. Hoping that we will find hope.
Optimal Mind is hope at its best. Hope is not optimistic, remember. Optimism is a cheap imitation of hope, a manikin put together with duct tape and super glue and hawked as Elle MacPherson or Cindy Crawford, or a inflatable man that you invited to think of as George Clooney or Antonio Banderas. Hope, on the other hand, is grounded solidly in the realization of the way things are (and also are). Hope doesn’t care what its chances are. Hope sees what needs to be done and does it, in season and out of season, around the clock, in all weather conditions, no matter what, whether it feels like it or not, whether its in the mood for it or not, whether it wants to or not. If we can hope like that, we have it made, and the world will be saved through us.
Sanctuary is the source of this kind of hope. Sanctuary is a quality of mind that might be called “mindfulness,” or “awareness.” Sanctuary is a presence that sees into the heart of things, understands what’s what, knows how things are and how things also are, and lets things be as they are for as long as it takes for them to change into what they ought to be. Sanctuary doesn’t hurry anything, doesn’t push, or force, or compel, but it transforms everything simply by calling attention to things and allowing things to be known for what they are, and also are.
There are a number of foundational realizations at the heart of sanctuary. These are called “the ten thousand spiritual laws.” Two of them are: We can see and hear only what we are capable of seeing and hearing, only what our life experience has prepared us to see and hear. Once we see or hear we cannot unsee or unhear what we have seen or heard. Seeing and hearing (eyes that see, ears that hear, and hearts that understand) are the evolutionary tools of soul which transform the world. Sanctuary fosters the perspective that changes the world.
It is our work together to create the kind of perspective, the kind of sanctuary that saves lives, restores souls, cultivates Optimal Mind, and reforms the world. We are not here to believe a certain way, or think a certain way, or even to act a certain way. We are here to see, and hear, and understand, and to allow our living to flow from our seeing, and hearing, and understanding. Amen! May it be so!
As we think about ourselves in this place and our point, our purpose, in coming together—as we wonder what we mean, what we desire—as we ask “What business are we in here? What are we about?”—as we stand before our future and craft our intention regarding what that future will be—I can think of no better term for all of that than “sanctuary.” No soul can survive with out sanctuary in the world of space and time.
Life is abusive. Our lives, at best, are sources of low grade, yet, cumulative, posttraumatic stress disorder. We need a sanctuary. A place of retreat and restoration, regeneration, renewal and recovery. A “hospital of the spirit,” so to speak, where we can heal and be well. But, sanctuary doesn’t just happen. It is an intentional creation by and of the people who gather as sanctuary. Just as it is the people who are the church, it is the people who are the sanctuary. We generate sanctuary by the quality of our being together. We foster sanctuary by the way we receive and treat one another, particularly in the absence of the other. How you treat me when I am not with you is the simple key in determining whether you are a sanctuary for me and whether I will be healed through my association with you.
Kindness and compassion, grace, mercy and peace are healing agents, balm for our wounded-ness. We need the right kind of lap. We are only the right kind of lap away from being able to handle our lives. We need gentle, caring presence. We need loving laughter.
We think that explanation will make our pain disappear. If we only understood, then it would be okay. But, after we know why things are the way they are, we still have to deal with it, with life as it is. The best reason in all the world will not erase our pain. “Reason cannot uproot what reason didn’t plant.” Pain is impervious to the power of logic. Knowing what happened and why will not ameliorate the impact of what happened. But, the right kind of lap will. Sanctuary restores our souls.
Once we see all there is to see, we have to make our peace with it. Making our peace with it doesn’t mean leaving things as they are. It means doing what we can to make things like they ought to be, and letting what we can do be what we can do.
What can we do about poverty, for instance, or racism? What can be done about those things? Smart people have been trying to imagine solutions for years, yet, poverty and racism continue to abound. We have to make our peace with the work to end poverty and racism with no real strategy in mind or turning point in sight. The work goes on, and the work requires our dedication to the task, without payoff or reward. A good bit of life is like that.
Sanctuary offers no false promises or empty encouragement, but exists for us as a solid source of hope in our lives. Hope is not optimistic. Sanctuary is where we gather to know how things are and see what must be done, where we regroup, recover, and rededicate ourselves to the work that is before us, without regard for impact or outcome. Grounded in sanctuary, our lives have a source of vitality that has nothing to do with the results of our living.
We come here out of life situations that are beyond remedy. There is no solution for any of the real problems that beset us. We have worries and concerns for which there is no fix. On a global scale, the world is running out of oil and terrorism is not going away. On a personal level, we have health issues, and mood swings, and family problems that laugh at everything we throw at them. We cannot get away from the stuff we don’t like about our lives, about life. But, we can come here.
Coming here provides us with a practical perspective. No one here has it made. Everyone here deals with incorrigible realities. Some of us do that with greater aplomb and style and skill than others of us, but none of us escapes the work of having to deal with what we don’t like and can’t do anything about. What we can do about the things we can’t do anything about is make our peace with doing what we can and letting that be that. We gather here to find what it takes to pick ourselves up and go on with our lives. One of the things it takes is knowing how important we are to the rest of us. When we get to the point of being unable, or unwilling, to go on with our lives, we think the world would be better off without us, and that we would be better off without the world. That is the depressive fallacy. Sanctuary exists, in part, to ward off the depressive fallacy.
Look. It’s like this: We are all crucial to the experience and expression—to the creation and cultivation—of Optimal Mind. Optimal Mind is exactly what we need to do what must be done. Optimal mind is group-think, or mob mentality, at its best. It is the product of our coming together in the service of the best we can imagine, of our commitment to living together in ways that serve a good beyond our own personal good, in ways that take the good of an increasingly wide circle of our neighbors into account.
Optimal Mind is created by the mutual impact and influence of one another in the service of the good we recognize as good. We produce a we-ness by virtue of our participation in the collective way of thinking and doing and being. This is the culture, or the mind, or the soul of the group. When we belong only to one tightly knit group, a family, or clan, or tribe, the group mind is the controlling force directing the thinking of the individuals within the group. As the culture grows and differentiates, we have membership in a number of groups, and think of ourselves as separate individuals with our own personal minds. We need to re-think the concepts of “self” and “mind,” and understand that who we are is more a function of the groups we belong to than of the idea of “the rugged individualist” we would like to be. We are more of a “we” than an “I” or a “me.” Because of that, it is crucial that we focus on being the right kind of “we.”
We participate in our own becoming by creating the right kind of “we.” Optimal mind is a self-reflective loop of awareness and values and action produced by those who intentionally come together to be more than they could ever be alone. It begins with sanctuary.
We come here in a mental state that is bruised and battered and wrung out and exhausted. We are psychically spent. At the end of our emotional ropes. We don’t have what it takes to do our lives alone. We cannot find the way forward and see no reason to go on. But we come here, don’t you see, because there is more to us than meets the eye—because there is more to IT, to life, and living, and being alive than meets the eye. And, something knows that. And, brings us here, hoping that we will find what we need to get up and do what must be done. Hoping that we will find hope.
Optimal Mind is hope at its best. Hope is not optimistic, remember. Optimism is a cheap imitation of hope, a manikin put together with duct tape and super glue and hawked as Elle MacPherson or Cindy Crawford, or a inflatable man that you invited to think of as George Clooney or Antonio Banderas. Hope, on the other hand, is grounded solidly in the realization of the way things are (and also are). Hope doesn’t care what its chances are. Hope sees what needs to be done and does it, in season and out of season, around the clock, in all weather conditions, no matter what, whether it feels like it or not, whether its in the mood for it or not, whether it wants to or not. If we can hope like that, we have it made, and the world will be saved through us.
Sanctuary is the source of this kind of hope. Sanctuary is a quality of mind that might be called “mindfulness,” or “awareness.” Sanctuary is a presence that sees into the heart of things, understands what’s what, knows how things are and how things also are, and lets things be as they are for as long as it takes for them to change into what they ought to be. Sanctuary doesn’t hurry anything, doesn’t push, or force, or compel, but it transforms everything simply by calling attention to things and allowing things to be known for what they are, and also are.
There are a number of foundational realizations at the heart of sanctuary. These are called “the ten thousand spiritual laws.” Two of them are: We can see and hear only what we are capable of seeing and hearing, only what our life experience has prepared us to see and hear. Once we see or hear we cannot unsee or unhear what we have seen or heard. Seeing and hearing (eyes that see, ears that hear, and hearts that understand) are the evolutionary tools of soul which transform the world. Sanctuary fosters the perspective that changes the world.
It is our work together to create the kind of perspective, the kind of sanctuary that saves lives, restores souls, cultivates Optimal Mind, and reforms the world. We are not here to believe a certain way, or think a certain way, or even to act a certain way. We are here to see, and hear, and understand, and to allow our living to flow from our seeing, and hearing, and understanding. Amen! May it be so!
Monday, July 23, 2007
01/22/07
Whatever happened to being nice? It’s been replaced, hasn’t it, with being real. Being real has come to mean being raw. Being in somebody’s face. Nothing hidden or held back. You can only be gracious if you are genuinely gracious, and nobody ever is these days. If you are in a vicious mood, tear into ’em. Being real is an excuse to indulge our moods, to say what we feel like saying, to do whatever we please. Road rage is realness in the extreme. Spare me. It is really okay to fake it. No kidding.
Deliver me to those who are working to be gracious, and kind, and decent. Give me over to the decent human beings. Whatever happened to “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, take account of these things”? Oh, TRUE, right, “whatever is TRUE.” So, if it’s TRUE we get to say it, do it, act it out. Right? All in the service of the highest value, being real. Anything less is hypocrisy, and hypocrisy is among the lowest of values.
Three things flow from here. One is the idea of the highest (and lowest) value. Thanks to Abraham Maslow, we are convinced there is a “hierarchy of values,” with “self-actualization,” O brother, at the top. Joseph Campbell brings some sanity into the picture when he says that in the grip of a worthy vision everything goes. For example, you don’t care a whet about “self-actualization,” O brother, when you’re in love. You’ll sacrifice all the values in the entire hierarchy of values to be with who, or what, you love. Or, I would add, when we are in fear. (Desire and fear, seem to be the controlling influences which override our values. We do weird things in the grip of desire and fear. Or anger—which arises when something blocks the way to what we desire, or blocks the way from what we fear.)
And, if I am in love with me, then I have to be true to myself at the expense of everyone around me. The family goes, the job goes, the house goes, and I go off chained forever to the truth of my mood of the moment. “Self-actualization,” O brother, feeds our Narcissistic tendency to place ourselves at the top of the hierarchy of values, and justifies our infantile desire to do what we feel like doing when we feel like doing it. When we are being real, we are being Narcissistic.
How does “self-actualization,” O brother, relate to “self-surrender,” and “self-sacrifice”? The most mature people I know spend very little time on themselves, doing what they want to do, like to do, feel like doing. When is the last time you heard Nelson Mandela going off on someone, anyone, in the name of “being real”? Or the Dali Lama? Or Thich Nhat Hanh?
How do “self-actualized,” O brother, individuals orchestrate themselves into community? How does a group of Narcissists create community by “being real” to/about one another? How can vulnerability, and intimacy, and trust exist in an atmosphere in which people are continually exposed to the critique of the heartless and the unmerciful delivered under the guise of “being real”? Realness, in terms of me venting my mood of the moment, is not what it’s “cracked up to be.” Neither is truth. This is the second thing.
Vance Arnold passed along a quote from Jonathan Shay, in his book, Odysseus in America, in which he compares the Odyssey with the experience of combat soldiers suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Shay says that the Song of the Sirens, which you know was irresistible and enticing, and drew those who listened inescapably to their death, was nothing other that the promise to get to the bottom of things. Or, as Homer has them say, “For we know all that the Achaeans and Trojans sufferer on the broad plain of Troy by the will of the gods, and we have foreknowledge of all that is going to happen on this fruitful earth.” [The SIRENS to Odysseus. Homer, Odyssey 12.184]. “Come to us,” they say, “and we will disclose to you the secrets of the ages, and tell you how it really is!”
Sound familiar? Garden of Eden? Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? The Original Sin is the search for truth, the desire to know what the deal is, to understand what is going on. The sin is getting to the bottom of the matter. Unveiling the truth. “You shall know the truth,” says the serpent, in a manner of speaking, “and your eyes will be opened and you will be like God.” Interesting, don’t you think, that this is the same thing John says Jesus says in John 8:32: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” John puts the serpent’s promise on Jesus’ tongue. In John, Jesus becomes the serpent.
Or, perhaps, John has become the serpent over the two thousand years from the story of Eden to the Gospel of John. Perhaps, we all have. Believing, as we do, in the truth, in knowing the truth, in possessing the truth, and failing to see the emptiness of it all. We cannot see it. We want the truth! Tell the Truth! Find the Truth! Know the Truth! “Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” The truth about truth is that it isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. THAT is what sets us free! Free from the burden of having to get to the bottom of things! Shay says, “Complete and final truth is an unachievable, toxic quest, which is different from the quest to create meaning from one’s experience in a coherent narrative.”
We cannot get to the bottom of it. There is no bottom to get to. The search for absolute truth is a black hole, and a waste of time. More than a waste of time, a toxic, poisonous, deadly, preoccupation. We kill the Jews because we are the truly superior race and they are a threat to the gene pool. We kill the witches and the infidel because we have the Truth and they are besmirching it with their unbelieving presence. The myth of absolute truth creates hell. The search for absolute truth is a black hole to hell. And, on that day when all is revealed, what will be revealed is the wonderful convoluted nature of our mixed motives, and miscommunications, and missteps, and poor judgment, and bad guesses. There is no plan. There never was one. It is a complete mess all the way around. And, it is wonderful, just as it is. This is the third thing.
The good does not cancel out the bad. The bad does not cancel out the good. That’s what I like best about life, about my life. The things I love are the things I hate. That’s great. The things I hate are not necessarily the things I love. That’s also great. It’s so great that you can’t draw it up in some neat little formula, and put it in a box, wrap it with paper and ribbon, stick a bow on it and hand it to me with a note that says “The secret to happiness.”
Unhappiness is part of the package! Understanding that is the real secret to happiness! You’re going to be unhappy! It’s no big deal! It’s only a matter of time before you will be happy again. But, that’s no big deal either, because it’s only a matter of time before you are unhappy again. It doesn’t matter how you feel because your feelings are going to change, for no apparent reason.
It’s like this. I love my computer and I hate my computer. Truly. You know I’ve dealt with two complete crashes over the last six months. Had to replace the hard drives the first time and had to replace everything on the hard drives the second time. Well. This past week the power supply went out. Only it took calling the fire department to realize it was the power supply. There was just a significant odor of electrical over-heating in the air. In the air some distance from the computer. But, I cut the computer off when I called the fire department, and, by the time they left shaking their heads because they couldn’t find the source of the odor, and telling me to up-grade our smoke alarms, and asking if there is a window we could get out of in the bedroom if we had to, the odor had diminished considerably. Aha! So, out with the old power supply, in with the new.
I hate doing that kind of thing. Screws and switches and plugs and wires. I hate the mechanical side of computering. And I love it. I know what to do. I can do it. Couple of hours later and I’m back in business. And the business I do, the writing and the photography-ing could not be done without my computer, any more than plowing in the 1850’s could have been done without a horse or a mule. And, the degree to which I hate computers pales in comparison to the degree to which I detest fooling with horses and mules. But, it’s wonderful. It is absolutely wonderful that we can do what we can do with the mechanical side of computering or with the care and feeding and working of horses and mules. And, I hate it.
The truth is that both things are true, at the same time. It doesn’t get any truer than that. But, we think opposite things can’t be true. One has to be truer than the other. “How do you REALLY feel?” “Do you REALLY love me? If you REALLY loved me, you would like Brussels sprouts (or horses, or mules, or the mechanical side of computering).” “No, I wouldn’t!” I can REALLY love you and hate the stuff you REALLY love. I can really love the stuff you really love AND really hate the stuff you really love. So can you.
We’ve spent some time here, back and forth, over the four years we have been together, talking about “the Shadow.” There is the Ego, we say, and the Shadow. The Shadow represents the repressed side of the Ego, the part of us that we wish wasn’t there. We want to present a certain persona to the world, create a particular impression, be seen in a certain way. But, that is never the whole story. There is always more to us than meets the eye. The psychological law at work seems to be that whoever and however we most don’t want to be is who and how we also are. And the more we deny it and pretend it is not so, the more apparent it is to others. This “other side” is the Shadow.
The concept of the Shadow is a beautiful rendition of the opposites that are work within us. Dr. Jekyll is Mr. Hyde. Neither is how you REALLY are. BOTH are how you REALLY are. No wonder we are ambivalent, torn, conflicted about nearly, practically, everything! We ARE ambivalent, torn, conflicted! We love what we hate!
The solution, of course, is not psychotherapy wherein we dig down to the real truth and become who we really are. The truth is that there is no truth greater than the truth of our conflict within. We love what we hate. That’s the truth. The solution, of course, is to love it. And hate it.
Deliver me to those who are working to be gracious, and kind, and decent. Give me over to the decent human beings. Whatever happened to “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, take account of these things”? Oh, TRUE, right, “whatever is TRUE.” So, if it’s TRUE we get to say it, do it, act it out. Right? All in the service of the highest value, being real. Anything less is hypocrisy, and hypocrisy is among the lowest of values.
Three things flow from here. One is the idea of the highest (and lowest) value. Thanks to Abraham Maslow, we are convinced there is a “hierarchy of values,” with “self-actualization,” O brother, at the top. Joseph Campbell brings some sanity into the picture when he says that in the grip of a worthy vision everything goes. For example, you don’t care a whet about “self-actualization,” O brother, when you’re in love. You’ll sacrifice all the values in the entire hierarchy of values to be with who, or what, you love. Or, I would add, when we are in fear. (Desire and fear, seem to be the controlling influences which override our values. We do weird things in the grip of desire and fear. Or anger—which arises when something blocks the way to what we desire, or blocks the way from what we fear.)
And, if I am in love with me, then I have to be true to myself at the expense of everyone around me. The family goes, the job goes, the house goes, and I go off chained forever to the truth of my mood of the moment. “Self-actualization,” O brother, feeds our Narcissistic tendency to place ourselves at the top of the hierarchy of values, and justifies our infantile desire to do what we feel like doing when we feel like doing it. When we are being real, we are being Narcissistic.
How does “self-actualization,” O brother, relate to “self-surrender,” and “self-sacrifice”? The most mature people I know spend very little time on themselves, doing what they want to do, like to do, feel like doing. When is the last time you heard Nelson Mandela going off on someone, anyone, in the name of “being real”? Or the Dali Lama? Or Thich Nhat Hanh?
How do “self-actualized,” O brother, individuals orchestrate themselves into community? How does a group of Narcissists create community by “being real” to/about one another? How can vulnerability, and intimacy, and trust exist in an atmosphere in which people are continually exposed to the critique of the heartless and the unmerciful delivered under the guise of “being real”? Realness, in terms of me venting my mood of the moment, is not what it’s “cracked up to be.” Neither is truth. This is the second thing.
Vance Arnold passed along a quote from Jonathan Shay, in his book, Odysseus in America, in which he compares the Odyssey with the experience of combat soldiers suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Shay says that the Song of the Sirens, which you know was irresistible and enticing, and drew those who listened inescapably to their death, was nothing other that the promise to get to the bottom of things. Or, as Homer has them say, “For we know all that the Achaeans and Trojans sufferer on the broad plain of Troy by the will of the gods, and we have foreknowledge of all that is going to happen on this fruitful earth.” [The SIRENS to Odysseus. Homer, Odyssey 12.184]. “Come to us,” they say, “and we will disclose to you the secrets of the ages, and tell you how it really is!”
Sound familiar? Garden of Eden? Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? The Original Sin is the search for truth, the desire to know what the deal is, to understand what is going on. The sin is getting to the bottom of the matter. Unveiling the truth. “You shall know the truth,” says the serpent, in a manner of speaking, “and your eyes will be opened and you will be like God.” Interesting, don’t you think, that this is the same thing John says Jesus says in John 8:32: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” John puts the serpent’s promise on Jesus’ tongue. In John, Jesus becomes the serpent.
Or, perhaps, John has become the serpent over the two thousand years from the story of Eden to the Gospel of John. Perhaps, we all have. Believing, as we do, in the truth, in knowing the truth, in possessing the truth, and failing to see the emptiness of it all. We cannot see it. We want the truth! Tell the Truth! Find the Truth! Know the Truth! “Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” The truth about truth is that it isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. THAT is what sets us free! Free from the burden of having to get to the bottom of things! Shay says, “Complete and final truth is an unachievable, toxic quest, which is different from the quest to create meaning from one’s experience in a coherent narrative.”
We cannot get to the bottom of it. There is no bottom to get to. The search for absolute truth is a black hole, and a waste of time. More than a waste of time, a toxic, poisonous, deadly, preoccupation. We kill the Jews because we are the truly superior race and they are a threat to the gene pool. We kill the witches and the infidel because we have the Truth and they are besmirching it with their unbelieving presence. The myth of absolute truth creates hell. The search for absolute truth is a black hole to hell. And, on that day when all is revealed, what will be revealed is the wonderful convoluted nature of our mixed motives, and miscommunications, and missteps, and poor judgment, and bad guesses. There is no plan. There never was one. It is a complete mess all the way around. And, it is wonderful, just as it is. This is the third thing.
The good does not cancel out the bad. The bad does not cancel out the good. That’s what I like best about life, about my life. The things I love are the things I hate. That’s great. The things I hate are not necessarily the things I love. That’s also great. It’s so great that you can’t draw it up in some neat little formula, and put it in a box, wrap it with paper and ribbon, stick a bow on it and hand it to me with a note that says “The secret to happiness.”
Unhappiness is part of the package! Understanding that is the real secret to happiness! You’re going to be unhappy! It’s no big deal! It’s only a matter of time before you will be happy again. But, that’s no big deal either, because it’s only a matter of time before you are unhappy again. It doesn’t matter how you feel because your feelings are going to change, for no apparent reason.
It’s like this. I love my computer and I hate my computer. Truly. You know I’ve dealt with two complete crashes over the last six months. Had to replace the hard drives the first time and had to replace everything on the hard drives the second time. Well. This past week the power supply went out. Only it took calling the fire department to realize it was the power supply. There was just a significant odor of electrical over-heating in the air. In the air some distance from the computer. But, I cut the computer off when I called the fire department, and, by the time they left shaking their heads because they couldn’t find the source of the odor, and telling me to up-grade our smoke alarms, and asking if there is a window we could get out of in the bedroom if we had to, the odor had diminished considerably. Aha! So, out with the old power supply, in with the new.
I hate doing that kind of thing. Screws and switches and plugs and wires. I hate the mechanical side of computering. And I love it. I know what to do. I can do it. Couple of hours later and I’m back in business. And the business I do, the writing and the photography-ing could not be done without my computer, any more than plowing in the 1850’s could have been done without a horse or a mule. And, the degree to which I hate computers pales in comparison to the degree to which I detest fooling with horses and mules. But, it’s wonderful. It is absolutely wonderful that we can do what we can do with the mechanical side of computering or with the care and feeding and working of horses and mules. And, I hate it.
The truth is that both things are true, at the same time. It doesn’t get any truer than that. But, we think opposite things can’t be true. One has to be truer than the other. “How do you REALLY feel?” “Do you REALLY love me? If you REALLY loved me, you would like Brussels sprouts (or horses, or mules, or the mechanical side of computering).” “No, I wouldn’t!” I can REALLY love you and hate the stuff you REALLY love. I can really love the stuff you really love AND really hate the stuff you really love. So can you.
We’ve spent some time here, back and forth, over the four years we have been together, talking about “the Shadow.” There is the Ego, we say, and the Shadow. The Shadow represents the repressed side of the Ego, the part of us that we wish wasn’t there. We want to present a certain persona to the world, create a particular impression, be seen in a certain way. But, that is never the whole story. There is always more to us than meets the eye. The psychological law at work seems to be that whoever and however we most don’t want to be is who and how we also are. And the more we deny it and pretend it is not so, the more apparent it is to others. This “other side” is the Shadow.
The concept of the Shadow is a beautiful rendition of the opposites that are work within us. Dr. Jekyll is Mr. Hyde. Neither is how you REALLY are. BOTH are how you REALLY are. No wonder we are ambivalent, torn, conflicted about nearly, practically, everything! We ARE ambivalent, torn, conflicted! We love what we hate!
The solution, of course, is not psychotherapy wherein we dig down to the real truth and become who we really are. The truth is that there is no truth greater than the truth of our conflict within. We love what we hate. That’s the truth. The solution, of course, is to love it. And hate it.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
07/15/07, Sermon
Where IS that “very present help in time of trouble”? When “the rain falls on the just and the unjust,” what’s the point? Where does that leave us? Are we on our own here, or, as they say, what?
We are very much on our own. It all depends on us. It is up to us. The future is resting squarely on our shoulders, life is in our hands. And. We can’t do it alone.
We like to think we have the division of labor figured out. It works one of two ways. Either we hatch an idea, incubate a plan, cook up a scheme, organize a work crew, buy the materials, pick a day to have a ground breaking ceremony at which time we ask God to bless our endeavor, over-see construction, and bring our dreams happily into being. Or, we pray for God’s will to be revealed to us which generally always means showing us the way to bringing our dreams happily into being. Either way, it’s all about us, and our dreams, and our good fortune, and our future.
As we see it, God is here to help us do our will, or show us God’s will which will be even better for us than our will. But, we don’t have any sense of God’s will for us being different in kind or degree from our will for us, and we don’t have any sense of God needing help in achieving God’s will. It’s all about us needing God’s help in achieving our will. After all, what does Almighty God need from us? As much, it seems, as we need from God.
Think of God as the creative urge for the good. I’m not saying God IS the creative urge for the good. I’m saying think of God AS the creative urge for the good. Just pretend. Just imagine. With compassion and grace. When we put ourselves in the frame of mind, in the mindset, of imagining the possibilities with compassion and grace, God begins to stir within us and we become as God is.
Think of God as the creative will to the good. What is good? Grace is good. Compassion is good. Peace and Justice are good. Democracy for Iraq? Probably not good. A personal annual income in the six figure range? Not even on the table. A new car and cheap gas? Not even in the room.
We pray for the Big Three. Oh, sometimes something of a lesser number slips in, but, mainly our prayers are for one or more of the Big Three for ourselves or someone else. We pray for money, or its equivalent (a job, for instance, a well-paying job, or a career, perhaps, or acceptance into grad school, etc.). We pray for health (or safety and security). And we pray for time. We figure with money, health, and time we will have it made. But, that is not necessarily good. If George Bush, and Dick Chaney, and Carl Rove had more time, well, don’t even think about it.
My point is that we rarely pray for grace and compassion, peace and justice, or any of the other wonderful old values that have characterized the good through time. We think of the good in terms of material goods and services, money (or the things money can buy), health, and time. That’s what we pray for. And, we miss the boat. God is not the dispenser of material goods and services. God is the creative will to the good at work in our lives and in our world and all of creation.
God is the spark that comes to life in us, wakes us up, and gets us going. If you sit imaginatively open to the possibilities of the good with a mindset, a spirit, of compassion and grace, God will begin to stir and whack you a good one in your Idea Haver as if to say, “There you are, now get going!”
But, if we begin to balk, and object, and complain, and say, “Well, what does that have to do with money, health and time? And what’s in it for us? And what are we getting out of it? And why should we do that?”, God will roll over and go back to sleep, and we’ll be no closer to God than we ever were.
And, at this point, you have to remember all you have ever heard me say about ambition, and the profit motive, and striving to gain-have-and-maintain the advantage in all of our undertakings, endeavors, and relationships. You’ll save us a lot of time if I don’t have to cover that ground again. Let’s just say that we will never be as God is with the least hint of personal gain in mind, or the slightest interest in our best interest, or the briefest concern for our advantage.
Do you begin to see how difficult is my task of getting you together with God? Or, of getting me together with God, for that matter? God cares not for God, don’t you see? Only for the good. But, with me and you, the good is somewhat farther down on our list of priorities. First me, then you, or those of you I like best, and then those who are most like us, then, maybe, if we don’t have a better idea, the good. So, God spends a lot of time sleeping while you and I spin our schemes, lay our plans, devise our futures to serve our own advantage and arrange for ourselves as much of the Big Three as we can manage, and snores when we sing our hymns and make our offerings and pray “Oh, save us, save us!” from the great mess we make of things trying to make things good for us and those like us, never minding what’s truly good.
Which gets us rather nicely back to the beginning of this little homily. “Where IS that ‘very present help in time of trouble’?” Snoring away, I’m afraid. Sleeping us off. Hoping we prove to be just a really bad dream upon awakening. If you want to wake God up, and merge God with your life, and be as God is, and become one with God, so that when people see you they see God, it’s easy. Open yourself imaginatively and creatively, with compassion and grace, to the possibilities of the good. And, brace yourself for the whack in your Idea Haver. That’s all there is to it. Oh, and you have to enlist yourself in the service of the idea, and go where it takes you, and do what it asks of you, without any thought of your own gain or advantage. God cares naught for God, you know.
The only thing, and you’ve heard me say it before, you know what’s coming, you can say it with me, here it comes, the only thing standing between us and God is us. Don’t you like it, though, when I cut through all the bureaucratic fandangle and get to the heart of the matter? Throw out the doctrines, and the dogma, and the catechisms, and the creeds, and the confessions of faith. It comes down to you and God. And, your idea of God is not God. You know that God you don’t believe in? That’s your idea of God you don’t believe in. Listen to how stupid this sounds: “I don’t believe in my idea of God!” The same thing goes for the God you DO believe in. Get rid of your ideas and there is nothing left but you and God. And you are just along for the ride.
God cares naught for God, you know, or for you, when you get down to it. What do you think the cross is all about? Do you want to be loved the way God loved Jesus? If so, good. That’s exactly how God loves us. That’s exactly how God loves God.
We have business to do together with God, a great work to perform. Our place is to get out of the way so that the work might be done. We can’t be saying, “Oh, there’s a cross! Oh, there’s a burden! Oh, there’s a dark place!”, and waiting for God to clear our path and ply us with the Big Three so that our way might be easy and our joy might be complete. If that’s our game, we have the wrong idea of us and of God.
“Oh,” you say, “but God loves us, the Bible says so!” God loves us the way God loves Jesus, the way God loves God. Don’t think God is in this with us for our benefit, and pleasure, and prosperity, and happiness. There is only one thing with God: The passionate will to good. “Let justice roll down like waters,” says the prophet. “And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” “What does the Lord require?”, asks the prophet, “But to do justice, love righteousness, and walk humbly with God?”
The context and circumstances of our lives cry out for those who would serve a good beyond our own good. But, there is no recipe for doing that. There are no black foot prints to The Good. We find our own way to the good of our choosing. The good you serve might not look anything like the good I serve. But, there will be commonalities. Compassion and grace, justice and peace, and all the other old values will come alive in our presence and we will come alive, and be a blessing to all who come our way, becoming, so to speak, that “very present help in time of trouble,” for one another.
We are on our own, and we cannot do it alone. And, we are not alone. We are within easy reach of the passionate will to the good in every moment. We are with each other for our own good, and the other’s good, and a good beyond our good. We don’t have to have a plan for effecting it, or think about how to achieve it. We only have to be open to the possibilities of the good with imagination, grace and compassion, and the good will show itself to us, and ask us to come along for the ride.
And, if this sounds Polly-Anna-ish to you, you only have to give it a shot to see if it is so. But, when God whacks you in your Idea Haver, and you are jolted awake with a vision of the good that needs doing, you have to do it. That’s the deal.
We are very much on our own. It all depends on us. It is up to us. The future is resting squarely on our shoulders, life is in our hands. And. We can’t do it alone.
We like to think we have the division of labor figured out. It works one of two ways. Either we hatch an idea, incubate a plan, cook up a scheme, organize a work crew, buy the materials, pick a day to have a ground breaking ceremony at which time we ask God to bless our endeavor, over-see construction, and bring our dreams happily into being. Or, we pray for God’s will to be revealed to us which generally always means showing us the way to bringing our dreams happily into being. Either way, it’s all about us, and our dreams, and our good fortune, and our future.
As we see it, God is here to help us do our will, or show us God’s will which will be even better for us than our will. But, we don’t have any sense of God’s will for us being different in kind or degree from our will for us, and we don’t have any sense of God needing help in achieving God’s will. It’s all about us needing God’s help in achieving our will. After all, what does Almighty God need from us? As much, it seems, as we need from God.
Think of God as the creative urge for the good. I’m not saying God IS the creative urge for the good. I’m saying think of God AS the creative urge for the good. Just pretend. Just imagine. With compassion and grace. When we put ourselves in the frame of mind, in the mindset, of imagining the possibilities with compassion and grace, God begins to stir within us and we become as God is.
Think of God as the creative will to the good. What is good? Grace is good. Compassion is good. Peace and Justice are good. Democracy for Iraq? Probably not good. A personal annual income in the six figure range? Not even on the table. A new car and cheap gas? Not even in the room.
We pray for the Big Three. Oh, sometimes something of a lesser number slips in, but, mainly our prayers are for one or more of the Big Three for ourselves or someone else. We pray for money, or its equivalent (a job, for instance, a well-paying job, or a career, perhaps, or acceptance into grad school, etc.). We pray for health (or safety and security). And we pray for time. We figure with money, health, and time we will have it made. But, that is not necessarily good. If George Bush, and Dick Chaney, and Carl Rove had more time, well, don’t even think about it.
My point is that we rarely pray for grace and compassion, peace and justice, or any of the other wonderful old values that have characterized the good through time. We think of the good in terms of material goods and services, money (or the things money can buy), health, and time. That’s what we pray for. And, we miss the boat. God is not the dispenser of material goods and services. God is the creative will to the good at work in our lives and in our world and all of creation.
God is the spark that comes to life in us, wakes us up, and gets us going. If you sit imaginatively open to the possibilities of the good with a mindset, a spirit, of compassion and grace, God will begin to stir and whack you a good one in your Idea Haver as if to say, “There you are, now get going!”
But, if we begin to balk, and object, and complain, and say, “Well, what does that have to do with money, health and time? And what’s in it for us? And what are we getting out of it? And why should we do that?”, God will roll over and go back to sleep, and we’ll be no closer to God than we ever were.
And, at this point, you have to remember all you have ever heard me say about ambition, and the profit motive, and striving to gain-have-and-maintain the advantage in all of our undertakings, endeavors, and relationships. You’ll save us a lot of time if I don’t have to cover that ground again. Let’s just say that we will never be as God is with the least hint of personal gain in mind, or the slightest interest in our best interest, or the briefest concern for our advantage.
Do you begin to see how difficult is my task of getting you together with God? Or, of getting me together with God, for that matter? God cares not for God, don’t you see? Only for the good. But, with me and you, the good is somewhat farther down on our list of priorities. First me, then you, or those of you I like best, and then those who are most like us, then, maybe, if we don’t have a better idea, the good. So, God spends a lot of time sleeping while you and I spin our schemes, lay our plans, devise our futures to serve our own advantage and arrange for ourselves as much of the Big Three as we can manage, and snores when we sing our hymns and make our offerings and pray “Oh, save us, save us!” from the great mess we make of things trying to make things good for us and those like us, never minding what’s truly good.
Which gets us rather nicely back to the beginning of this little homily. “Where IS that ‘very present help in time of trouble’?” Snoring away, I’m afraid. Sleeping us off. Hoping we prove to be just a really bad dream upon awakening. If you want to wake God up, and merge God with your life, and be as God is, and become one with God, so that when people see you they see God, it’s easy. Open yourself imaginatively and creatively, with compassion and grace, to the possibilities of the good. And, brace yourself for the whack in your Idea Haver. That’s all there is to it. Oh, and you have to enlist yourself in the service of the idea, and go where it takes you, and do what it asks of you, without any thought of your own gain or advantage. God cares naught for God, you know.
The only thing, and you’ve heard me say it before, you know what’s coming, you can say it with me, here it comes, the only thing standing between us and God is us. Don’t you like it, though, when I cut through all the bureaucratic fandangle and get to the heart of the matter? Throw out the doctrines, and the dogma, and the catechisms, and the creeds, and the confessions of faith. It comes down to you and God. And, your idea of God is not God. You know that God you don’t believe in? That’s your idea of God you don’t believe in. Listen to how stupid this sounds: “I don’t believe in my idea of God!” The same thing goes for the God you DO believe in. Get rid of your ideas and there is nothing left but you and God. And you are just along for the ride.
God cares naught for God, you know, or for you, when you get down to it. What do you think the cross is all about? Do you want to be loved the way God loved Jesus? If so, good. That’s exactly how God loves us. That’s exactly how God loves God.
We have business to do together with God, a great work to perform. Our place is to get out of the way so that the work might be done. We can’t be saying, “Oh, there’s a cross! Oh, there’s a burden! Oh, there’s a dark place!”, and waiting for God to clear our path and ply us with the Big Three so that our way might be easy and our joy might be complete. If that’s our game, we have the wrong idea of us and of God.
“Oh,” you say, “but God loves us, the Bible says so!” God loves us the way God loves Jesus, the way God loves God. Don’t think God is in this with us for our benefit, and pleasure, and prosperity, and happiness. There is only one thing with God: The passionate will to good. “Let justice roll down like waters,” says the prophet. “And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” “What does the Lord require?”, asks the prophet, “But to do justice, love righteousness, and walk humbly with God?”
The context and circumstances of our lives cry out for those who would serve a good beyond our own good. But, there is no recipe for doing that. There are no black foot prints to The Good. We find our own way to the good of our choosing. The good you serve might not look anything like the good I serve. But, there will be commonalities. Compassion and grace, justice and peace, and all the other old values will come alive in our presence and we will come alive, and be a blessing to all who come our way, becoming, so to speak, that “very present help in time of trouble,” for one another.
We are on our own, and we cannot do it alone. And, we are not alone. We are within easy reach of the passionate will to the good in every moment. We are with each other for our own good, and the other’s good, and a good beyond our good. We don’t have to have a plan for effecting it, or think about how to achieve it. We only have to be open to the possibilities of the good with imagination, grace and compassion, and the good will show itself to us, and ask us to come along for the ride.
And, if this sounds Polly-Anna-ish to you, you only have to give it a shot to see if it is so. But, when God whacks you in your Idea Haver, and you are jolted awake with a vision of the good that needs doing, you have to do it. That’s the deal.
Sunday, July 08, 2007
07/08/07, Sermon
Silence is a general directive, not an actual destination. You can’t actually “Be Silent!” You can’t experience silence. There is always something making noise. I have a pair of hearing protectors guaranteed to seal out sound. I hear my heart beat. And my breathing. And the crickets—there is a term for it—that are to the ears as floaters are to the eyes. Which is to say that you can’t take “Be silent!” as a literal command. You can’t “Be silent!” You can only “Quieten down in there!” That’s the best you can hope for.
We’re all Southern Baptists at heart. We look for a literal world. We yearn for truth to be actual, tangible, concrete, constant, consistent, and dependable. We call ourselves “open-minded” and “inclusive,” and like to say that “All questions are welcome and everything is always on the table,” and we are continually coming up with examples of our closed-minded-ness and exclusive-ness, times when some questions are not allowed and some things are not put up on the table for discussion. Well. Yeah.
We aren’t going to talk about a lot of things. Like turning the clock back to a time when women were not allowed to hold office in the church. Or treating black people and gay people like they aren’t people at all. Or holding old time tent revivals on one of the parking lots. There are tons of subjects we aren’t going to waste our time discussing. But the literal-minded among us go “Hrumph!” and scowl.
The literalization of religion, and of the spiritual quest, is their end. When we try to do it like the saints and the gurus did it, or do it, or tell us to do it, we substitute form for essence. But, we want to know if we are doing it right. If we are being mindful correctly. Once we become mindful of Correct Mindfulness we lose the way. Willful mindfulness is exertion where there can only be grace. Once you begin trying, you’re trying. And, any variety of trying is “trying too hard.” “Easy does it,” you know.
We’re just along for the ride. That realization is religion at its best. The meaning of life is to be alive. What is the meaning of “to be alive”? That’s the question. That’s YOUR question, and MINE. We answer it for ourselves. You can’t tell me what it means for me to be alive. I can’t tell you. If you are going to be mindful of anything, be mindful of what it means for you to “be alive”! And, spend as much time as you can arrange with it, doing it, being it. Don’t worry that someone thinks you aren’t praying enough, or meditating enough, or reading the Bible enough, or walking the labyrinth enough. If those things bring you to life, if doing them overwhelms you with the goodness of being alive, fine. If not, well. Go with the life. Sniff out life. Spend your life being alive, and let those who come alive reading the Bible or walking the labyrinth read the Bible and walk the labyrinth. But, don’t let them tell you how to be alive. You have to sniff that out on your own!
Where do you go to be fully alive? How long has it been since you’ve been there? Don’t think you are going to find something here that will replace what you find there. Don’t think you are going to find a substitute here, or anywhere, for there. Don’t think sitting zazen is going to do it for you, unless that does it for you. Or praying. Or doing good.
You can’t take direction from someone else about where to go to be alive. You can’t be instructed in the matter of living fully. You have to figure that out yourself. By living. With your eyes open. Being mindful. Aware. Of where the life is, and what you are doing when you are most alive. And, doing it often, because that’s it.
Too many people don’t have a life because they are living someone else’s life. Living as someone else thinks they ought to live. They have never done anything they have enjoyed doing, or wanted to do, or liked to do all their lives long. They spend their lives doing it like it’s supposed to be done according to somebody else’s idea of what is supposed to be. They have followed orders, done their duty, been responsible, endeavored to please their mothers and make their fathers proud. But, they had the wrong kind of mother and father. They didn’t have the kind of mother or father who knew about life, and living, and being alive.
Many of us, perhaps most of us, did not, and have had to learn as we live the basic skills of life. We grow up thinking it’s about money, but learn, if we are lucky, that it’s about passion. We grow up thinking it’s about approval, but learn, if we are lucky, that it is about awareness, and attentiveness, and being awake. We grow up thinking that it’s about getting our ducks in a row, and our duties all done, before we allow ourselves a break, but learn, if we are lucky, that it is about the care and feeding of our own souls before we get lost in making production and meeting quotas.
We think it’s about taking care of business and putting first things first, and learn, if we are lucky, that the business is nurturing our spirits, and the first things are the things that bring us to life and nourish us spiritually, psychically, emotionally. Ah, but. Here is the dilemma of the embodied soul: How do we nourish our spirits without making production and meeting quotas? What comes first, body or soul?
We would not think of giving hungry people art lessons, or handing those suffering from the ravages of poverty and oppression a guitar, and telling them to feed their souls. In the hovels and the ghettos of the world, the opportunity to make production and meet quotas would be seen as a gift from God. It takes a certain standard of living, a certain arrogance of opulence and wealth, to scorn the struggle for money and the things money can buy. And, yet, and yet…
Robert Johnson’s guitar in Itta Bena, Mississippi, and Cleveland, Mississippi, and the juke joints of Highway 61, gave soulful sustenance to those languishing in the absence of money and the things money can buy. The Blues and Jazz and the mournful, spiritual, acknowledgment that “nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,” kept generations of people going, through a destitution and hopeless we cannot imagine. And yet, and yet…
We would never think that a guitar could be a substitute for employment, or that soulful singing could compensate for living hand to mouth and being unable to make ends meet or come up with the balance due the company store at the end of the month, every month. Living in the midst of a spiritual wonderland, the Grand Tetons, say, or in the shadow of Chartres Cathedral, means nothing if you have no means of meeting your physical needs, or those of your family. That is the rock solid truth of life in this world. First the body, then the soul. And yet, and yet…
It is in the exact face of the assertion, “First the body, then the soul,” that Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor,” and “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst,” and “People do not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God,” and “Do not be afraid of those who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” Do you feel the tension here, the tug of opposites? Do you see the impossibility of taking things literally in the sphere of body-soul connection?
There are no black footprints here! No “one size fits all” explanations, directives, instructions. We find our own way to life as embodied souls. We take care of business and put first things first, and sometimes the “business” is feeding the body, and sometimes the “business” is feeding the soul, and “first things” shift and move as particles in suspension do, and nothing is etched in stone, nailed down, unalterably and inevitably fixed in time and space forever and ever, world without end, amen.
The spiritual journey is a life-long quest for the proper relationship, the harmony, the balance, the interplay, between body and soul. We have to follow our bliss and pay the bills. That is the task of life. Work that out without neglecting one for the sake of the other, and you have it made. Ah, but. It is the hardest thing in the entire book of things. The Cosmic Jokester put one over on us. We live well on one level only at the expense of living well, or, even, at all, on the other level. And so, the challenge: To live on the border between yin and yang, on the cusp between despair and denial, laughing at the impossibility of being so finely tuned and refusing to take seriously our ineptitude at getting it right for long.
We’re all Southern Baptists at heart. We look for a literal world. We yearn for truth to be actual, tangible, concrete, constant, consistent, and dependable. We call ourselves “open-minded” and “inclusive,” and like to say that “All questions are welcome and everything is always on the table,” and we are continually coming up with examples of our closed-minded-ness and exclusive-ness, times when some questions are not allowed and some things are not put up on the table for discussion. Well. Yeah.
We aren’t going to talk about a lot of things. Like turning the clock back to a time when women were not allowed to hold office in the church. Or treating black people and gay people like they aren’t people at all. Or holding old time tent revivals on one of the parking lots. There are tons of subjects we aren’t going to waste our time discussing. But the literal-minded among us go “Hrumph!” and scowl.
The literalization of religion, and of the spiritual quest, is their end. When we try to do it like the saints and the gurus did it, or do it, or tell us to do it, we substitute form for essence. But, we want to know if we are doing it right. If we are being mindful correctly. Once we become mindful of Correct Mindfulness we lose the way. Willful mindfulness is exertion where there can only be grace. Once you begin trying, you’re trying. And, any variety of trying is “trying too hard.” “Easy does it,” you know.
We’re just along for the ride. That realization is religion at its best. The meaning of life is to be alive. What is the meaning of “to be alive”? That’s the question. That’s YOUR question, and MINE. We answer it for ourselves. You can’t tell me what it means for me to be alive. I can’t tell you. If you are going to be mindful of anything, be mindful of what it means for you to “be alive”! And, spend as much time as you can arrange with it, doing it, being it. Don’t worry that someone thinks you aren’t praying enough, or meditating enough, or reading the Bible enough, or walking the labyrinth enough. If those things bring you to life, if doing them overwhelms you with the goodness of being alive, fine. If not, well. Go with the life. Sniff out life. Spend your life being alive, and let those who come alive reading the Bible or walking the labyrinth read the Bible and walk the labyrinth. But, don’t let them tell you how to be alive. You have to sniff that out on your own!
Where do you go to be fully alive? How long has it been since you’ve been there? Don’t think you are going to find something here that will replace what you find there. Don’t think you are going to find a substitute here, or anywhere, for there. Don’t think sitting zazen is going to do it for you, unless that does it for you. Or praying. Or doing good.
You can’t take direction from someone else about where to go to be alive. You can’t be instructed in the matter of living fully. You have to figure that out yourself. By living. With your eyes open. Being mindful. Aware. Of where the life is, and what you are doing when you are most alive. And, doing it often, because that’s it.
Too many people don’t have a life because they are living someone else’s life. Living as someone else thinks they ought to live. They have never done anything they have enjoyed doing, or wanted to do, or liked to do all their lives long. They spend their lives doing it like it’s supposed to be done according to somebody else’s idea of what is supposed to be. They have followed orders, done their duty, been responsible, endeavored to please their mothers and make their fathers proud. But, they had the wrong kind of mother and father. They didn’t have the kind of mother or father who knew about life, and living, and being alive.
Many of us, perhaps most of us, did not, and have had to learn as we live the basic skills of life. We grow up thinking it’s about money, but learn, if we are lucky, that it’s about passion. We grow up thinking it’s about approval, but learn, if we are lucky, that it is about awareness, and attentiveness, and being awake. We grow up thinking that it’s about getting our ducks in a row, and our duties all done, before we allow ourselves a break, but learn, if we are lucky, that it is about the care and feeding of our own souls before we get lost in making production and meeting quotas.
We think it’s about taking care of business and putting first things first, and learn, if we are lucky, that the business is nurturing our spirits, and the first things are the things that bring us to life and nourish us spiritually, psychically, emotionally. Ah, but. Here is the dilemma of the embodied soul: How do we nourish our spirits without making production and meeting quotas? What comes first, body or soul?
We would not think of giving hungry people art lessons, or handing those suffering from the ravages of poverty and oppression a guitar, and telling them to feed their souls. In the hovels and the ghettos of the world, the opportunity to make production and meet quotas would be seen as a gift from God. It takes a certain standard of living, a certain arrogance of opulence and wealth, to scorn the struggle for money and the things money can buy. And, yet, and yet…
Robert Johnson’s guitar in Itta Bena, Mississippi, and Cleveland, Mississippi, and the juke joints of Highway 61, gave soulful sustenance to those languishing in the absence of money and the things money can buy. The Blues and Jazz and the mournful, spiritual, acknowledgment that “nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,” kept generations of people going, through a destitution and hopeless we cannot imagine. And yet, and yet…
We would never think that a guitar could be a substitute for employment, or that soulful singing could compensate for living hand to mouth and being unable to make ends meet or come up with the balance due the company store at the end of the month, every month. Living in the midst of a spiritual wonderland, the Grand Tetons, say, or in the shadow of Chartres Cathedral, means nothing if you have no means of meeting your physical needs, or those of your family. That is the rock solid truth of life in this world. First the body, then the soul. And yet, and yet…
It is in the exact face of the assertion, “First the body, then the soul,” that Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor,” and “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst,” and “People do not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God,” and “Do not be afraid of those who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” Do you feel the tension here, the tug of opposites? Do you see the impossibility of taking things literally in the sphere of body-soul connection?
There are no black footprints here! No “one size fits all” explanations, directives, instructions. We find our own way to life as embodied souls. We take care of business and put first things first, and sometimes the “business” is feeding the body, and sometimes the “business” is feeding the soul, and “first things” shift and move as particles in suspension do, and nothing is etched in stone, nailed down, unalterably and inevitably fixed in time and space forever and ever, world without end, amen.
The spiritual journey is a life-long quest for the proper relationship, the harmony, the balance, the interplay, between body and soul. We have to follow our bliss and pay the bills. That is the task of life. Work that out without neglecting one for the sake of the other, and you have it made. Ah, but. It is the hardest thing in the entire book of things. The Cosmic Jokester put one over on us. We live well on one level only at the expense of living well, or, even, at all, on the other level. And so, the challenge: To live on the border between yin and yang, on the cusp between despair and denial, laughing at the impossibility of being so finely tuned and refusing to take seriously our ineptitude at getting it right for long.
Monday, July 02, 2007
07/01/07, Sermon
There is an element of truth in everything. Everything is true up to a point. Every statement we hold to be true, IS true, as far as it goes. And, no statement is without it’s stopping place. This is to say that there is merit in every position, and that all positions are enlarged and improved by all other positions. No one point of view can see everything. Every point of view is limited to, and by, its particular perspective, and we have to be able to walk among the various view points if we hope to be able to see.
Let’s take something completely absurd to give you an idea of what I’m talking about. “You are a dinner fork.” How’s that for a sentence with not a shred of truth in it? Well. Grant me the benefit of the doubt here, and play along. It all depends, you know, on your playing along. If you hold yourself back, you’ll never get to the heart of the matter. Any matter. You actually have to ride a horse to know what horse riding is like. So, saddle up. Here we go. Heidi-ho!
Imagine, if you will, a dinner fork. Allow it to take clear shape in your mind, so that you see a very particular dinner fork. Zoom in. Get to know it personally. Are there any dishwasher dings on it? Any bent parts? Is it shiny sterling? Picnic plastic? Camp fire aluminum? Everyday stainless steel? Is it brand new right out of the box? Does it come with a history of working experience? Perhaps from your grandmother’s dory? Has it survived fires? Being lost? Being sold to an antique dealer? A flea market rounder? Was it a yard sale find? What kind of background does this fork have? Where has it been? What does it know? Let’s find out.
Take a deep breath, and settle into the saddle. The ride takes an interesting turn at this point. Imagine, now, that you ARE the fork. From this point on, I am going to ask you questions that I want you to answer AS the fork. Forget for the moment that you once were a human being. Become the fork. Be the fork. I am now talking to you, the fork.
As the fork, now, what is your name? Let it be the first name that comes to mind. Sit with the name for a second. Get a feel for you as a fork with this name.
As this fork with this name, what do you like best about yourself? Of what are you most proud? Don’t try to think something up, just let it come to mind, and accept what comes. Suspend judgment for the duration of this experience, and allow the horse to take you where it will. Just go along for the ride.
As this fork, with this name, what do you enjoy doing? Where do you like to spend your time? What do you look forward to? What thrills you most? What are some of your happiest memories?
What would you list as particular advantages to being a fork? What are the gifts? The joys? For what are you most thankful?
What are the disadvantages? What handicaps have you had to deal with, adjust to, work to overcome? What hurtles, or barriers, exist for you as a dinner fork?
What has happened to you that has been most helpful? What sadness do you carry?
What do you aspire to? Dream of? Wish to have, or do, or become, or accomplish and achieve? What are your hopes for the future?
What threatens you? Troubles you? What do you worry about? What are you afraid of? What concerns you most?
As this dinner fork with this name, where do you seek your consolation? Where do you find your peace? Where do you go to regroup, recover? To be nourished and nurtured? To be grounded and centered, and, well, fed?
Who are your friends? What do you think they would like to tell you? What would you like to tell them?
What motto do you live by?
In what do you trust?
What strengths do you have as a fork that your human side could use? What insights or experience do you have as a fork that your human side might find to be helpful? What would you like to tell your human side?
Take a moment to appreciate fully your fork-ness. Now, begin the process of dissociation. Imagine yourself as the particular human being that you also are parting from yourself as the fork. If you would like, you may promise yourself as this fork with this name, that you will make meditative visits from time to time to view your life from a fork’s point of view, enlarge your perspective, deepen your understanding, and become more of who you need to be, which is also who you are. But, for now, prepare to leave that place and come back to this place, as I count to three. One. Two. Three. Here you are, now, you as you have always known you to be, except somewhat better for your contact with you as a fork. If you have not already done so, open your eyes, and be well.
So, now what to you have to say? What similarities did you find between your life as a flesh-and-blood human being and your life as a fork? What can you use from this experience with your fork-ness in your life as a human being?
The fork exercise is a projective technique that is useful for getting past our normal ego-defenses in order to get at the heart of how it is with us. We can see things as a fork, say things as a fork, that we might not allow ourselves to see, or say, as the self we know ourselves to be. Our mind can show us ourselves if we don’t try to take it by force, pry it open, and see ourselves “as we really are.”
We can only see what we are capable of seeing at any moment in our lives. That’s how dreams work. They show us a little of ourselves at particular points in our lives. Dreams don’t “mean” anything, and they never show us all there is to see. The meaning of a dream is like the meaning of the fork. The power of a dream is the power of the fork. We get into the dream when we awaken, and begin to consciously make associations, “seeing,” so to speak, how we are like a flying refrigerator with camp stove inside with eggs frying in a skillet.
The power of projection as perspective expander is how horoscopes work, and palm reading, and bone casting, and Ouija boards, and religion. We find the patterns, make the associations, “see” the truth, and “know” the way. But, the “truth” of the “way” is as much about us as it is about anything, “out there.” When we see, we see ourselves, don’t you see?
Let’s take something completely absurd to give you an idea of what I’m talking about. “You are a dinner fork.” How’s that for a sentence with not a shred of truth in it? Well. Grant me the benefit of the doubt here, and play along. It all depends, you know, on your playing along. If you hold yourself back, you’ll never get to the heart of the matter. Any matter. You actually have to ride a horse to know what horse riding is like. So, saddle up. Here we go. Heidi-ho!
Imagine, if you will, a dinner fork. Allow it to take clear shape in your mind, so that you see a very particular dinner fork. Zoom in. Get to know it personally. Are there any dishwasher dings on it? Any bent parts? Is it shiny sterling? Picnic plastic? Camp fire aluminum? Everyday stainless steel? Is it brand new right out of the box? Does it come with a history of working experience? Perhaps from your grandmother’s dory? Has it survived fires? Being lost? Being sold to an antique dealer? A flea market rounder? Was it a yard sale find? What kind of background does this fork have? Where has it been? What does it know? Let’s find out.
Take a deep breath, and settle into the saddle. The ride takes an interesting turn at this point. Imagine, now, that you ARE the fork. From this point on, I am going to ask you questions that I want you to answer AS the fork. Forget for the moment that you once were a human being. Become the fork. Be the fork. I am now talking to you, the fork.
As the fork, now, what is your name? Let it be the first name that comes to mind. Sit with the name for a second. Get a feel for you as a fork with this name.
As this fork with this name, what do you like best about yourself? Of what are you most proud? Don’t try to think something up, just let it come to mind, and accept what comes. Suspend judgment for the duration of this experience, and allow the horse to take you where it will. Just go along for the ride.
As this fork, with this name, what do you enjoy doing? Where do you like to spend your time? What do you look forward to? What thrills you most? What are some of your happiest memories?
What would you list as particular advantages to being a fork? What are the gifts? The joys? For what are you most thankful?
What are the disadvantages? What handicaps have you had to deal with, adjust to, work to overcome? What hurtles, or barriers, exist for you as a dinner fork?
What has happened to you that has been most helpful? What sadness do you carry?
What do you aspire to? Dream of? Wish to have, or do, or become, or accomplish and achieve? What are your hopes for the future?
What threatens you? Troubles you? What do you worry about? What are you afraid of? What concerns you most?
As this dinner fork with this name, where do you seek your consolation? Where do you find your peace? Where do you go to regroup, recover? To be nourished and nurtured? To be grounded and centered, and, well, fed?
Who are your friends? What do you think they would like to tell you? What would you like to tell them?
What motto do you live by?
In what do you trust?
What strengths do you have as a fork that your human side could use? What insights or experience do you have as a fork that your human side might find to be helpful? What would you like to tell your human side?
Take a moment to appreciate fully your fork-ness. Now, begin the process of dissociation. Imagine yourself as the particular human being that you also are parting from yourself as the fork. If you would like, you may promise yourself as this fork with this name, that you will make meditative visits from time to time to view your life from a fork’s point of view, enlarge your perspective, deepen your understanding, and become more of who you need to be, which is also who you are. But, for now, prepare to leave that place and come back to this place, as I count to three. One. Two. Three. Here you are, now, you as you have always known you to be, except somewhat better for your contact with you as a fork. If you have not already done so, open your eyes, and be well.
So, now what to you have to say? What similarities did you find between your life as a flesh-and-blood human being and your life as a fork? What can you use from this experience with your fork-ness in your life as a human being?
The fork exercise is a projective technique that is useful for getting past our normal ego-defenses in order to get at the heart of how it is with us. We can see things as a fork, say things as a fork, that we might not allow ourselves to see, or say, as the self we know ourselves to be. Our mind can show us ourselves if we don’t try to take it by force, pry it open, and see ourselves “as we really are.”
We can only see what we are capable of seeing at any moment in our lives. That’s how dreams work. They show us a little of ourselves at particular points in our lives. Dreams don’t “mean” anything, and they never show us all there is to see. The meaning of a dream is like the meaning of the fork. The power of a dream is the power of the fork. We get into the dream when we awaken, and begin to consciously make associations, “seeing,” so to speak, how we are like a flying refrigerator with camp stove inside with eggs frying in a skillet.
The power of projection as perspective expander is how horoscopes work, and palm reading, and bone casting, and Ouija boards, and religion. We find the patterns, make the associations, “see” the truth, and “know” the way. But, the “truth” of the “way” is as much about us as it is about anything, “out there.” When we see, we see ourselves, don’t you see?
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