Sunday, March 27, 2005
“The Resurrected Flesh ” - March 27, 2005
Let us worship with our eyes and ears and fingertips;
Let us love the world through heart and mind and body.
We feed our eyes upon the mystery and revelation in the faces of our brothers and sisters.
We seek to know the wistfulness of the very young and the very old, the wistfulness of people in all times of life.
We seek to understand the shyness behind arrogance, the fear behind pride, the tenderness behind clumsy strength, the anguish behind cruelty.
All life flows into a great common life, if we will only open our eyes to our companions.
Let us worship, not in bowing down, not with closed eyes and stopped ears.
Let us worship with the opening of all the windows of our beings, with the full outstretching of our spirits.
Life comes with singing and laughing, with tears and confiding, with a rising wave too great to be held in the mind and heart and body, to those who have fallen in love with life.
Let us worship, and let us learn to love.
Do you think that personality types have anything to do with Easter? Is it important to know if Jesus was an introvert or an extrovert? It seems like he needed those disciples in order to have suppers and discuss strategy, and he just may have drawn his energy from being around other people. Theologians and church historians these days seem to want to play up the role of women in his ministry with emphasis on Mary, his mother and Mary Magdalene. On the other hand, he went off by himself, too, contemplating and praying on serious matters. I am not sure an extrovert could stand 40 days alone. They’d go a little stir crazy. We could continue along with this line of questioning by asking if he was sensing or intuitive, feeling or thinking, judging or perceiving. Of course everyone is a little bit of each of these, and the idea is to try to balance them in our lives. Personality tests have become a popular management tool in our culture to predict what kinds of behaviors to expect from prospective employees. Critics say they are about as accurate as using astrology as a predictor of behavior. It is like taking a zodiac sign, such as Gemini, and assigning all the people who were born under that sign to the sales department since this is what they naturally do best. While they may not be entirely fair or accurate in judging what kind of people we are or where our skills may lie, personality tests are interesting and we certainly relate. I wrote a newsletter column a couple of years ago about my introverted revulsion at going into a Christmas party where I didn't know anybody. It seemed like all the other introverts in the congregation came up to me afterward and said how much they related to that anxiety producing situation for introverts of being in a room full of people and having to talk to them, sort of like social hour.
Society can present challenges for introverts as 75% of the population are extroverts. Each of us has to figure out a way to fit into an extroverted world. Personality tests do help us learn a little more about ourselves, and give some insight into areas of strength and weakness, but there are too many other factors to make them entirely accurate predictors of our abilities or leadership qualities. There is one aspect of personality tests though that I find relevant to Easter, Unitarian Universalism and myself. This is in the perceiving function that is categorized as Sensing or Intuition. The vast majority of the general population are sensing, but very few Unitarian Universalists are. I am one of those few. Sensing people rely primarily on the senses or the body’s ability to see, hear, touch, taste and smell to perceive the world. We live in our bodies more than we live in our heads. This makes perfect sense to me when you think of Unitarian Universalism as a rational, thinking person’s religion. People who tend to perceive through intuition are more detached from the direct experience, and tend to use abstraction and metaphor, and they need language to capture something in memory. One needs action, and the other needs words.
One obvious question for Unitarian Universalists might be would we appeal to a broader spectrum of the population if we had more bodily experiences in our worship services, instead of primarily words. Historically, we have lacked the bells and whistles of Catholicism with its candles, incense, wafers and wine, and perhaps today the lighting of candles for joys and sorrows, the greeting and talking in church are ways for us to have more sensual experiences of each other or our surroundings. We need more bodily experiences of spiritual knowledge besides talking and speculating about truth. This is where the importance of the idea of the resurrected flesh on Easter comes into play.
In some Unitarian Universalist churches Easter is a time to explain away the idea of resurrection. We view it as a biological absurdity (dead men do not come back to life), and usually say his life and influence was so powerful in the disciples minds that they came to believe that he continued to live on, and would always do so. End of story. The other part of the story is that we liberals have always affirmed his bodily existence over his spiritual essence. In fact this was an important argument in the early Christian church. Spirit or flesh? There were some Christians who came to worship a spiritual Christ, who was an other worldly figure who only assumed flesh. This became the abstract theology of Christianity, or the Gospel of John’s word made flesh, where the flesh is secondary. This abstraction denied the more sensual Jesus who not only shared meals and wine with his followers, but was also a person of action more than abstraction. This is the Jesus who was descended from the warrior king David, and was here to lead his people out of their oppression.
It is interesting in Christian history that as the man Jesus became more and more the spiritual Christ, the body became more and more denigrated. Augustine, one of the great teachers in Christianity used the creation story of Adam and Eve to prove that sexual desire for another’s body is sinful, and that infants all have the infected trait called original sin, which also corrupts all of nature. In her book, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, Elaine Pagels says the church made the choice of the forbidden fruit the major sin in this story rather than the disobedience of God. Every measure was taken to control the desires of the body, so that nothing was suppose to be done from desire, ie. you were not allowed to have any. The expectation was that the good Christian would control the will, and thus sexual behavior was only allowed for procreation. In that context women could have only two roles in Christianity - whore or virgin mother. Eve represented the first and Mary the second. Augustine denied any possibility of free will. He says the serpent beguiled Adam with the lure of liberty. The forbidden fruit is to symbolize control over the will, and thus represents the primary virtue, which is obedience. What Augustine said was that humans are not capable of being trusted to govern themselves. Teaching that all of nature is corrupt was a way to have social control over the people, because you as the church had the only tool available to save themselves from this corruption. Perhaps the creation of the sensual experiences in worship was to make up for the belief that sensual experiences of living were evil.
Two things are destroyed in this framework. We only experience life through our bodily experiences, and yet we are told that the body and its sensual desires are sinful. This sets up a situation where everything we do or want is bad. Therefore the choices we make about our own lives must be wrong unless we deny ourselves those individual choices, and let the church or the state or if you are a woman, your husband, control those desires through our obedience. Here’s where we return to the story of Jesus, and its implications for us. The body plays a crucial role in the story of Jesus. All through his years of development and ministry, he defies attempts to control him, and what he believes his mission in life to be. He is someone who is disobedient to the established norms of the acceptable rules of society. In his final days he risks death rather than be silenced. Finally, the story depicts him as raised in the body rather than merely as spirit to tell us that he triumphs in the end over the attempts of the religious hierarchy and the state to control him. The truth of his life as he lived it in his body will not be defiled by the authorities, even though they abuse his body in the worst possible ways.
Our Unitarian forebear Emerson never quite understood a relationship between the physical self and the spiritual. The scholar Lawrence Buell says that Emerson would not have understood identifying the real you with your feeble carcass. While he did suggest walking in nature and physical labor, they were only tools to improve the mind. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a younger Transcendentalist suggested that they had neglected physical culture while only cultivating the mind. Emerson believed that even though we are 99.5% mud and 0.5 per cent god, the little bit of divine trumps all. Aging was difficult for him, and its effect on the body made him equate experience with fatalism. The real Emerson was not his body. Yet the central doctrine of all of Emerson’s thought was on Self-reliance. While he may not have been comfortable in his body, no one was going to control what it did. For him self-reliance, that transformation to living by the integrity of the self came from a veil of mediocrity that shrouds most people most of the time. There is a power of resurgence within each of us. For Emerson the body becomes heroic when it lives into this pure integrity of the self. In his essay on heroism he speaks of Elijah Lovejoy, the abolitionist, “who gave his breast to the bullets of a mob, for the rights of free speech and opinion, and died when it was better not to live.”
Like Emerson, most of us have body issues of one kind or another throughout our lives. As young people there is cultural pressure to be attractive and trim, and women especially, often feel trapped by the enforcement of strict standards to meet the societal idea of beauty. What is ironic about this is that statistically we are now a society struggling more and more with obesity. We don’t move enough, walk enough, swim, run or bike enough, and we find our kids may be out of shape and flabby. Body continues to be an issue as we age and confront greater difficulties in losing weight, or in the pains of joints and muscles as time begins to catch up to us. What kind of control will we have as we continue to age, and eventually become infirm. Can we make decision now to help others know what we want done or not done to our bodies. Do we want terribly invasive procedures merely to remain alive, and when there is no quality to our life, and the person who was once us is no longer there?
As Jesus was led to the cross, as the abolitionist Lovejoy stood before the mob, as Emerson struggled with aging, all are wondering in different ways, how do I keep my integrity of self, my true beliefs alive until the end when powerful others or when fate of dwindling years or disease confront my body with its final days or years. The integrity of the self , and the struggle with maintaining a sense of control over one’s own body seem to make the front page news item over the life of Terri Schaivo relevant to the Easter story. In the last two weeks we have seen politicians grandstanding, and others battling to try to capture control of a woman’s body who has been in a persistent vegetative state for fifteen years. What is perhaps relevant is that the heart attack that brought on this condition came about because she was bulemic. It is often said that young women who have that condition come to it as a result of trying to wrest control back over their own life. This is not to minimize the parent’s pain at her condition, but to reiterate that we must do all we can to maintain the sanctity of each person’s control over their own body as opposed to the state, the church or a family member trying to control another. When someone says preserve life at all costs, we must ask at what cost, is this preservation necessary? Jesus said my body will not live to be a slave to your oppressive system. Lovejoy said I will die so that you cannot enslave one more man or woman or child. We must stand up for the sanctity of the body of any person who is being made the slave of another - of those who will keep a life alive when the personality is gone, of those who exploit others with pornography, of those who insist on opposing a woman’s choice to end an unwanted pregnancy - any and all attempts to violate the sanctity of the body.
These lives tell us how hard it is to be true to your bodily and spiritual self when so many forces are trying to control who or what you are. I think Easter can be a call to revel in the bodies that we have. It is a call to use those bodies as spiritual embodiments of the self. To come to see and understand the world through mind and heart and yes, body. It often seems like we have lost the sensual world in our liberal experience of religion. Yet if we look at religious practices we can see that they can call us to find our faith through the senses. In Isalm the faithful believe in the Five Pillars: with prayer, they roll out their rugs and prostrate themselves on the ground; with charity they give of the self to work to help others welcoming and giving to the stranger; with fasting you give up food from sunrise to set, and feel the effects on your body, physically knowing discipline and dependence on others; with pilgrimage you make the journey to a holy place, like walking to Walden for us; and finally with your sense of the divine, you understand the goodness of the creation, and how we are created as free moral beings to make choices in the world that bring freedom and equality in society. Think of the sensual experience of living a faith. How can you find the sensual center of our faith? Can we discipline our bodies with food, pilgrimage and compassion for others? Can we make our bodies dance with joy for the wonders of the creation?
I lived my younger days out as an athlete. I still live to feel the water on my body as I swim, or to throw a bowling ball down a lane or shoot a basketball with my boys, or walk in the wilderness. I love to eat. I love to look. The body and its senses tell us in such glory that we are alive, and this is the great Easter message. Love the body, use the body, celebrate the body with all your heart. The other day in the wake of a childrens theatre performance, Andrea was telling me about beau geste. This is when an actor uses his/her whole body and sounds as props. You become your surroundings - live into them. In her poem “God send easter,” Lucille Clifton would have us dance toward Jesus in the sun, glorifying in our skin. Our skin that we must take care of and use for as long as we can, and then when its is old or weary, keep the body sanctified by letting it go to die in peace. Sometimes fate or circumstance means that body must go too soon, but the sanctity is upheld when integrity of the self is maintained and followed. This truthfulness about body and spirit integrated and whole is Clifton’s ”spring song” of the world turning in the body of Jesus giving us a possible future. For the body of Jesus was true, ever following the truth he found in his heart - he lived this truth until he died, he respected the dignity and equality of others, he walked in their shoes, he welcomed them at his table. He said we should hold no slaves, be no slave. The Easter message is let us find ways, body and spirit, to be free.
We welcome Easter morning as a festival of the living body.
May its story remind us never to separate ourselves from our life in the body.
May we feel that the body and spirit are one; that flesh is good.
May we be in touch with our hands and feet; every living, breathing part of ourselves.
May we love the body; as regenerating earth, as reproducing seed, as the stuff of stars - growing, changing and becoming the incarnated breath of all life; each one of us the word made flesh.
Praise the body!.
Sunday, March 13, 2005
“Sharing the Journey” - March 13, 2005
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean --
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down --
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
- ”Where I’m From” by George Ella Lyon
- from Remembering the Bone House by Nancy Mairs
One hundred and seventy-one years ago, William Ellery Channing, the
leader of the Unitarians met with his colleague George Ripley, who would
later quit the ministry and become the founder of the utopian community at Brook Farm. Channing, according to a later report made by Emerson, was looking for a way
to bring thoughtful people together in conversation. According to Emerson,
Channing had “large thoughts which he wished to open.” Do you have large
thoughts you would like to open in conversation with others? Today I want
to suggest to you that your ideas and concerns about spiritual and ethical
issues can be shared with others in a warm, supportive environment in a
covenant group; a small, regular gathering of fellow members who are
interested in exploring important topics and growing spiritually as a result
of those discussions.
Two years after his initial meeting with Ripley, Channing met with a
group of invited guests to inaugurate what became known as The
Transcendental Club. We usually don’t think of Unitarians having spiritual
disciplines. We associate that kind of activity with more orthodox faiths,
and we usually label it prayer. Yet this gathering of mostly current or
former Unitarian ministers plus Margaret Fuller specialized in another kind
of discipline that Fuller herself also helped perfect. While this
discipline may have grown out of the participants private reading or
meditating or walking, it was purely a group activity. It was the discipline
of conversation. Participants were able to share their large thoughts with
others. One of the regular participants was the moderator of the group, our
own minister Convers Francis, and when the group met in Watertown, it was at
his house, now the funeral home in Watertown Square. Francis wrote in his
journal, “We want congenial spirits to talk without fear or reserve on all
topics.” When they met respectful sharing took place, and a couple of
things happened. The talk was deep, and so Emerson reported that
occasionally these fine conversations were incomprehensible to others. Yet
the larger focus on sharing personal thoughts on God, men and women,
education, and peace made one participant say about the sessions: “It seemed
to him like going to heaven in a swing.” The second thing that occurred
was the building of strong friendships. Those who were once marginally
acquainted found fellow travelers and companions for the journey.
The Transcendental Club is a spiritual legacy of ours, as were
Margaret Fullers’ meetings of women that were simply referred to as
Conversations. Fuller’s Conversations were important historically, as
Charles Capper has written, because it contributed to the growth of
organized feminism, and showed women a way to intellectual autonomy and
emancipation. What was so revolutionary about these conversations was that
culture became more than a means of earning wealth or status, for when
Fuller engaged women in conversation on arts and mythology, it was affirmed
for perhaps the first time that women are capable of creating meaning
through concepts and symbols. One of Fuller’s participants wrote: “I found
myself in a new world of thought; a flood of light irradiated all that I had
seen in nature, observed in life, read in books. Whatever she spoke of
revealed a hidden meaning, and everything seemed to be put into true
relation. Perhaps I could best express it by saying that I was no longer the
limitation of myself, but I felt the whole wealth of the universe was open
to me.”
What was it like for these women to share such a high level of
understanding for the first time? I think there are some similarities
between what these forebears of ours experienced in conversation, and the
opportunities we can find for spiritual growth when we meet in small groups.
Sunday morning worship, as stimulating as I know you think it is, is not the
best place to share with each other about what is important to you or what
you can learn from each other. We greet. We know we share a common faith.
Many of us have rejected a former faith. We may exchange some words over
coffee. Yet there are only a few times when we can say to each other in
church what moves us or what concerns us, and this is, I believe what church
should be about. If we can share the stories of our lives, and offer
support and understanding to each other as we explore themes of importance
then we have created a church where interpersonal spiritual growth and
connection is truly possible.
In the past we have referred to these spiritual discussion groups as
covenant groups. Why? Our congregation was founded upon a covenant, which
is simply a word for an important agreement between us. We promise to
support and look out for each other. Covenant groups promise understanding
and affirmation for their members, and through their discussions move their
members to live their faith more fully in the community and the world.
During the rest of my time, I would like to consider the importance of
sharing the story of your life, and discovering its inherent meaning through
your focused attention on where you have come from, where your journeys have
taken you and the lessons learned therein, and finally, how you come home to
wisdom and understanding.
More than a half century ago, Joseph Campbell wrote about the common
mythic journey that humans have explored and found meaning in with his
famous work The Hero with A Thousand Faces. That heroic journey writ large
is the story of each one of us as we try to discern what our lives mean in
the context of all of life. Each person, each hero must have a beginning, a
point of origin. In the poem “Where I’m From,” George Ella Lyon recalls
clothespins and fudge and snapped off from a family tree before she budded
into flower. This is the you that is planted in the garden. This is the
place you are from. And so I may speak of woods and brooks and baseball, of
big gardens and blueberries and male anger, of England and Scotland, of
homemade bread and clam chowder. These are what I am from. What are you
from?
Our place and family of origin is where we begin. It is the place we
take hold, and the place we leave from on our journey. When the writers of
the Gospels sat down, they knew of a great healing story teller, but he was
a wanderer. He needed a place to come from, and a family to call his own.
And so the Gospel writers, like the person who composed Matthew, gave Jesus
a place and a story that fit a larger picture of Jewish redemption. He was
the new Moses. He had a lineage and a home town, even though the story also
says he came from God, whose hometown and background is hard to trace. Each
human story takes place in the context of having this sense of seed. There
is a wide range of memories. Jesus’ story reminds us of the dispossessed,
and many of us come from backgrounds that include harrowing immigrant
stories. How did they survive? At this year’s Martin Luther King breakfast
I was moved to tears in a brief conversation I had with Julie
Leavitt-Kutsen, the local rabbi-in-training, who told me of returning to
Austria to her grandmother’s city and finding her community, her old home,
were all gone. African-Americans, who have been torn from their roots,
mostly cannot draw in any sustained way on origins to help gauge a sense of
identity and place. From these diverse backgrounds, think what happens when
we share stories of our families and places of origin with each other. She
once lived in Atlanta, or I worked in San Francisco. I remember there is a
parishioner who comes from Ware, Massachusetts, near the Quabbin, where I
come from. We are searching for connections to each other all the time.
And we find them in our sharing, I invite you to turn to your neighbor now,
and share a brief thought about your place of origin. Where are you from,
and what are you rooted in? (Sharing)
Then we go on a journey, and the journey takes us down many roads.
After the seed is planted there are seasons of growing and flowering, and
seasons of pain and loss. Each of us, as Dan Wakefield says, could write
many different versions of our life story. We have all those lessons
learned, taught by so many teachers and mentors. If we heard the word,
“love,” we could recount great moments and disasters galore. If I said
“money, we could each recount how the family spent or saved, and perhaps who
we became because of that. We could hear winning and losing and see once
again the wrenching loss, or the terrible fall. How did it affect us to
always lose? What if I said the word “mistake?” How many times have we
made mistakes, and what did we do to correct them? Perhaps some mistakes
led us down wonderful roads, new places of adventure. What does work mean
to you. Did that depression era parent teach you that the only good things
came through hard work. And now you wonder when someone doesn’t understand
how you feel? And what does it mean to teach. Who inspired you, gave you
the tools of magical learning. Did you have a Margaret Fuller? Each of us
has a story of how we were educated, and what education means to us as a
result. Thoreau refused to punish his students. It got him fired. He said
learning should be fun. Did you have fun?
So there were many stories on these days of journeying. Over the years
I have had a recurring dream. In the dream I am usually in a forest, so it
is dark and a little scary. I always encounter an owl, who for me seems to
symbolize wisdom. The owl is always guarding the entrance to something
where there is a door. This may be a passage into a tree or to a house I
am always afraid to open that door, and yet probably the dream is telling me
each time that I must do so. Each life is filled with so many times when we
feel lost in the forest of making life choices and encountering risks. In
her memoir, Remembering the Bone House, Nancy Mairs tells us the child is
going to get lost or not. In fact, there are many times of getting lost.
Here in the reading the girls told all about themselves, even about their “21
year old mother.” Do you sometimes feel, like Mairs, that in your life when
you have dared to risk, or to let your secrets out that you have been
scolded anyway by the rules of self-control and independence and never
sharing feelings with others. Perhaps your sense of integrity and honesty
has helped you be faithful to yourself in some of those circumstances. We
have all felt lost at times, and yet we found ways to learn lessons from
those experiences, and perhaps some teacher or mentor or loved one has
helped us to open a new door in our life after a loss or betrayal or
failure. The Buddha has a journey where he encounters all the pain life
brings him, but seeing that pain leads to enlightenment. Did you have a
teacher or mentor, a parent who opened a wider world to you. Was there a
John the Baptist who brought gifts of the spirit to your life? Turn to your
neighbor now, and share a few words about what you received. (Sharing)
Frederick Buechner says that in the same way that the Genesis passage in
scripture where God speaks the creative word of light and the darkness is
dispelled, so by “speaking and listening to each other that out of the
darkness of our separate mysteries is brought to light the truth of who we
are.” So we are here in this religious community to try to learn to trust
others so that we may speak the truths of our lives. From the seed that was
first sown in our lives, there have been many harvests. There have been
bountiful years, and years of famine. As we age, and contemplate our final
stages of life, is there a way for us to see our story as redemptive or
healing? The story of each of our lives is many stories. Sometimes we are
blown around by forces of wind and chance, and other times we have exhibited
great skill and known deep felt love. Here in community we offer that to
each other, an affirmation mostly that we are not alone in these journeys of
risk and difficulty, but also of great reward.
A religious quest ultimately is finding a way to come home to a faith
that can at first change the shape of our interior life, and then be a faith
we can rest in, but also reach out with, to others. Here in church you
sharing your life with others will help you construct a spiritual story,
your testimony to what consists of right living, where you find the holy.
The book group on Tuesday will discuss Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief. The
initial discussion question might be, why is this book called Beyond Belief?
Coming from a Christian tradition Pagels was struggling with a context for
the fatal illness her young son had. She could not find consolation in her
traditional faith. She was able to go back to early Christian writings which
were ultimately labeled heretical. Christianity had told her and countless
others that she could only find God through Jesus. She discovered in these
ancient texts an alternative key to understanding truth. The Gospel of
Thomas, for instance, says that each ones of us comes from the light; each
one of us can find the divine light within ourselves. Pagels finds solace in
going beyond belief; going beyond the traditional pathways to truth to a
much more personal recognition of what we are capable of bringing forth from
within ourselves. You can find spiritual resources with yourself, from each
other, because their source is within you. The texts don’t speak of what
you believe in. They speak of what you experience. Where is truth found in
your life?
Beyond Belief may tell us that the truths of our lives are hidden from
us, or even disguised from us in formulas of religion, or in the privacy of
our hearts where there is unresolved pain or grief. Standard beliefs have
not worked for us in helping us become whole. I think we discover
spiritual power in our lives or in a congregation by sharing what’s in our
hearts with each other. Each one of us through our lives has gleaned much
wisdom and understanding. As our final exercise in sharing, please turn to
your neighbor and share in a word or two where or with whom you find
spiritual sustenance. (Share) Thanks for risking a few truths from your
life. We all want to connect. We all want to find community. We are all
seeking to touch the mystery of life. Let us create and partake of
opportunities for meaningful conversation, where in the words of Channing,
we bring large thoughts which we wish to open.
Page by page, chapter by chapter the story unfolds. Day by day, year by
year, your own story unfolds, your life’s story. Things happen. People come
and go. The scene shifts. Time runs by, runs out. Maybe its all utterly
meaningless. Maybe its all unutterably meaningful. If you want to know which
, pay attention. What it means to be truly human in a world that half the
time we are in love with and half the time scares the hell out of us - comes
from the telling of the stories, in facing insoluble problems, in bearing
unbearable realities, in the glory of the sunlight, in the laughter of the
child, in the common quest for love and companionship, we find solace, we
find salvation in the stories, of our lives, of each others lives, of the
community we make in the stories we share.
Monday, March 07, 2005
“The Natural Lifel” - March 6, 2005
After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what - how - when - where? But here was dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips. I awoke to an answered question, to Nature and daylight. The snow lying deep on the earth dotted with young pines, and the very slope of the hill on which my house is placed, seemed to say, Forward! Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution, “O Prince, our eyes contemplate with admiration and transmit to the soul the wonderful and varied spectacle of this universe. The night veils without a doubt a part of this glorious creation; but day comes to reveal to us this great work, which extends from earth even into the plains of the ether.
I was at the post office the other day. I had just dropped a couple of letters through the mail slot, and began to walk toward the door. All of a sudden a man walked into me. It was only a slight brush against my side, and a quick “excuse me” ended the incident. But let’s ask the question, why did the man walk into you? (Congregation REPEAT). He walked into me because he was talking on a cell phone, and not paying attention to where he was walking. You have probably experienced this in another context. It is the driver who invariably runs the red light because they are telling their loved one the vital information that they are driving down Church St., and about to turn onto Summer. It is the person who is standing ahead of you in line at the supermarket, who is calling his loved one to ask if they want the orange juice with pulp or not, except the line has moved fifteen feet ahead, is about to be shut down because it appears to the clerk that no one is in the line, and the person in front of you has forgotten what he is doing or even where he is, and all you wanted was a gallon of milk.
Many of you have told me how wonderful cell phones are for keeping track of errant teenagers, or helping people find you in case of emergency. I know. I can also see how contractors find them useful for running businesses out of their trucks, but I also find a few draw backs to these communication devices. In this world where an increasing number of people find it difficult to pay attention to one thing for any period of time, we should take note of those devices which prevent us from concentrating. The other concern I have about cell phones often surfaces when I am riding the 71 bus over to Harvard Square. Sometimes the person sitting behind me on the bus seems to believe they are sitting in their own private auxiliary living room. The cell phone rings and soon the conversation drifts to the catastrophic relationship problems the young women is having with her obtuse boyfriend. Within fifteen minutes I hear more personal details of her life, than I knew about my mother. Don’t these people realize they are in public, and sitting next to a perfect stranger? The private details of our relationships seem to have lost their meaning, and so I must suffer through listening to someone else’s intimate life. There is no context for our behaviors, and so people just seem to do what is right in front of them and provides immediate gratification. These are the questions cell phone use present us with. Can I truly pay attention to the person, the responsibility, the task that is right in front of me, or do I submit to the myriad number of things which prevent me from concentrating? Second, do I have a context for what I am doing, or does a deeper meaning to my relationships pale beside the need to ventilate my feelings or act impulsively simply to feel good or accepted in the moment.?
Now, before you jump to the conclusion that this is the diatribe of a spoil sport man who is incapable of multi-tasking or is uptight about sharing with others, I would like to place these concerns in the context of a couple of local news events. As a former resident and minister in Milton, I have followed the recent events at Milton Academy with interest. Briefly, it seems that a fifteen year girl on several occasions has performed oral sex on five male hockey players and others. The hockey players were expelled because of the group nature of the actions and their implicit coerciveness. One aspect of the case that has disturbed me is the lack of context for these kinds of behaviors. Among many teenagers there seems to be a belief that one simply behaves like this in order to please others, or be accepted, and while sexual behavior when I was a teenager certainly carried some of those ramifications, it also pointed to an ideal larger meaning. The girls actions may have expressed her desire to belong to the group, fueled by her not seeing her worth, and the boys not realizing their power. Individual sexual acts such as these are not separated out from a person’s sexual behavior, and that behavior should be connected to relationships and intimacy and shared love, and sex in whatever form it takes is the expression of that love. We thus begin to fail to see how important things are connected to each other. Everything can become an individual act that is unrelated to anything else. It may give pleasure in the moment, or it may be a way to express ourselves, but it ends up being unconnected to anything - so you are engaged in the most intimate of acts, but you don’t feel anything for the other.
The other local news item that caught my eye on the same page, on the same day as Milton Academy was a story about some Little League parents who became involved in some kind of altercation between players. Whether it is hockey games where spectators are barred due to previous incidents of fighting, or professional games where fans taunt players and then engage in altercations in the stands, or even worse acts of violence, people don’t seem to have a broad perspective on what is appropriate behavior for a parent or a citizen in a community. In their passion to protect their child or make them a winner, a parent may forget that they have a responsibility to model for their children, to settle differences without violence, to behave in public in a civil manner that is respectful of the people around you, to build a stronger community, and not humiliate others so you can win. These guidelines for behavior are often lost in the culture that affirms the freedom to get what you want now. Everything is a commodity. The implication of the sex acts at Milton academy is that sex can be unconnected to anything or anybody. You just do what you want to do right now, or get what you can. This is often the way we think about freedom. The boys are going to go for it, while the girls attempt to be connected will make her become despised in the boys eyes. These failed attempts at connecting by these kinds of behaviors: glued to the phone but with no content, “sex” without meaning, are symptom of our discomfort, our longing for more. In last Sunday’s paper, Parade Magazine asked in its cover story whether we should feel some shame over how gross and lewd our culture has become with each reality show trying to be more coarse than the last, reflecting people’s willingness to do anything for a thrill or fame. Rather than reflecting any meaning it reflects back on itself like its own mirror that can’t go beyond the reflection. It is Narcissus saying, look at me!
Reflecting feelings without meaning, and carrying out actions without context are serious concerns. How can we find a more spiritual way of being in the world? I have chosen my title The Natural Life to follow the avowed intention of Henry David Thoreau to achieve an integrated life. At a cursory glance some might even blame free thinkers like Thoreau for our cultural obsession with each of us feeling free to walk to the beat of our own drum. For many being free of outside rules or coercion is what the natural life is. We are free to do what we want to do right now, and not think of the implications beyond freedom. This would I think be a misreading of Thoreau, and a tragic misunderstanding of what might give each of us a more meaningful existence. I don’t think the girl in Milton found much meaning in being used for gratification, nor do we in seeking oral or visual gratification. I don’t think we find much meaning when we are trying to multi task all those things that we might do more leisurely if we didn’t work all the time. I don’t think we find much meaning when we buy, read, watch things to fill up our time, but we never stop and focus in the moment with our surroundings or our loved ones.
In last week’s sermon I told a story of a time when my family home lost power one winter, and my brother and I had to go chop a hole in an ice covered brook to procure water for the family. I had forgotten that Thoreau wrote about this same experience in Walden. His words from “The Pond in Winter” began our service today. He says we awake to answered questions of what, how, when and where. It is all before us. After the passage I read, he goes directly to the work of cutting through the ice. When he breaks through he sees, as is true in summer, the parlor of the fishes. He concludes Heaven is under our feet, as well as over our heads. The natural life for Thoreau is a union of the material and the spiritual. Here he begins to help us see that our inner life is tied to all life in nature.
There are several misconceptions about the natural life that we have made in addition to the idea of expressing yourself in wanton freedom. We think of Thoreau leaving the world, of running away to nature to be escape the world’s corruption in an ideal state called Walden. We also think of the the Transcendentalists as thinkers who sat around cozy parlors and dreamed up visions of pure worlds, but never soiled their hands. The natural life as Thoreau conceived it was none of these. What it means for us in the context of cell phones, and Milton Academy is this. We are living the natural life when we reconcile the material and the spiritual. We do this in many ways. We focus on what is before us, by paying attention to what we are doing right now. This brings us into the present and into your and my presence. In sharp contrast to the cell phone talking drivers, Annie Dillard brings us into the world of the muskrat stalkers. What does she find when she focuses on one thing. There is calm and centering. There is complete and utter devotion to one particular event. All energy and focus is delivered to one moment.
This reminds me of what it was once like to hit a baseball, to which Dillard compares this stalking experience. There is the balance of the stance, the waiting, the breathing to balance all the muscles contemplating the one true moment of explosion when the bat whisks through the strike zone, and if the eyes and coordination and stroke are perfectly in synch then the ball strikes the stick, and is propelled into the field. When do we take the moments to focus such as this? Thoreau provides the perfect example is complete contemplation of details in nature - every petal, every leaf is examined. He knows them in an intimate way. What do we have in our lives that evokes such contemplation?
Sounding like the self-reflecting mirror, Dillard says we waste so much energy just saying hello to ourselves. Giving herself time to observe or center down, the sparks of all that is around, she says, “become a holy fire in you.” Recall that contemplation of each thing. This is the first path to follow down the road to the natural life.
In recent weeks there has been a storm over at Harvard about the comments President Summers made in the context of women’s abilities to succeed in the sciences and engineering. Most of the controversy has swirled around the inferred idea that women are somehow genetically inferior. What was missed in this discussion is the reference to how many hours of labor it takes to succeed in these fields. It has been men who set up this insane system that provide our models of work success. Many women and men have sacrificed precious leisure time with their families, vacation time, time to develop other interests because that is what it took to respond to the demands of the work world. When I was a single parent years ago, and worked for the UUA, I had a pretty flexible schedule, but nevertheless I still worked 9 to 5 and my 7 year old son spent that time every day at school. After school he walked the streets to reach the Boys and Girls Club, and I remember feeling terrible anxiety and fear that I would go and pick him up one day, and not find him there. If President Summers wants to make amends perhaps he could affirm women and set a standard to say no to these insane sacrifices.
This points to the second path down the road to the natural life that Thoreau guides us toward. In Walden Thoreau depicts the farmer who is broken down and consumed by the farm he owns. He writes that material ownership or possession is often inverted in modern society. We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” The things own us, and not vice versa. And so he writes that the laborer “has no time but to be anything but a machine.” There is no purpose to success other than success. We labor, Thoreau said, under a mistake, through the ownership and possession of goods. Thoreau mocked the accepted standards of responsible hard work by giving himself such jobs as the self-appointed inspector of snow-storms. But we would be wrong to think he repudiated the value of work. He wanted us to have an awareness of the spirit in which work is conducted. He said there must be a larger pattern of spiritual work. Recall the famous quotation, “To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.” Extending the railroad metaphor, Thoreau advises us to keep on our own track. This is to use our freedom to work in a positive way - to explore new experiences, to fully develop the self. Thoreau wanted to take the time to focus on the natural world, to take the time to work on the formation of the self. ”Do what you love,” he said. To not pay attention, to spend all your time consumed in labor toward no spiritual end or fulfillment meant you would lose touch with the natural life.
Many years ago when my parents were still alive I would go out to the Quabbin area where I am from more frequently to see friends and family. People who visit there are often struck at how beautiful and natural the area is- trees and more trees. Yet one thing that always disturbed me was how nearly everyone I knew in this rural enclave near the New Hampshire border would shop for soda and beer over the state line where they could purchase bottles and cans that did not need to be returned. They depicted returnables as a hassle they could avoid by skipping over to the live free or die state. They could then take all their perfectly recyclable glass and aluminum and continue to fill a land fill, either theirs, or some far away one they did not have to see. They could not seem to integrate their own consumption and the waste they generated. They did not see the larger context of where their waste was going or how it effected the earth. It was what was pleasurable right in front of them, what gratified their needs. What they did not see was how everything was integrated, everything was connected.
It could be that the Lenten season has motivated me to contemplate the achievement of the natural life. Thoreau, as he is depicted in David Robinson’s book Natural Life, the inspiration for this sermon, was constantly concerned that he was gaining the particulars of this world, but losing his soul. What he learned in his trip up the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and at Walden, and in his others sojourns and walks is that the utter and complete contemplation of nature, and the taking of serious time away from our consumptive and machine like lives and labors means that we give ourselves the opportunity to awake, and see that everything in our ordinary experience is related to everything else. To see one fact, is to see the world, to see it in relation, in time with respect to a higher, holistic law that governs all. See what the refuse does to the river. See that river pure and clean. Thoreau pursuit of the natural life was about freedom, but a very different kind then the do what you want freedom. His was a moral freedom that was always responsible and never self-indulgent. He said our primary responsibility in this world is to live out lives well. Integrity was crucial.
Ancient tradition tells us that a 2nd century Christian bishop named Polycarp was sent before a Roman judge who ordered him to bow down before Caesar, and renounce his foreign religious notions. Polycarp refused. The judge didn’t really want to throw this old man to the lions or commit him to the flames. So he railed at the saint, Don’t you realize I have the power to kill you?” But the old man looked back with fiery eyes and responded, “Don’t you realize I have the power to let you?” Polycarp refused to let the judge force him to recant. The threatened punishment was not going to make him give up his principles. He had the power to hold onto his integrity. He had the power to face the beasts or the flames, and die knowing that he never could be made to renounce what he believed was true. He had the power, and his power was in fact greater than the judge’s, for it was a power that gave meaning to his life, and meaning to his death, and none one could take that away. This was crucial for Thoreau. The word desperate often comes up in his writing. Remember the famous line about the mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation? Desperation for him meant loss of control. He would have said, be like Polycarp. Always believe in the integration of your life with all of life, and never let go of your integrity. Your obligation, your greatest obligation in life is to be true to the eternities, read the eternities in your life, and live by them. Walk the paths, pay utter attention to what you see, take concentrated time to walk those paths, see how all the paths are reflections of the great eternal laws of nature, and know that moral freedom is the great gift of your life. Thoreau’s example reminds us that everything we do, everything we see is holy. And, as Unitarian Universalists, we are called to live and teach those connections. It may not be an easy faith, but in times of joy and sorrow, it will help us live a meaningful, connected, even holy, natural life.
I like to walk alone on country paths, rice plants and wild grasses on both sides, putting each foot down on the earth in mindfulness, knowing that I walk on the wondrous earth. In such moments, existence is a miraculous and mysterious reality. People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black curious eyes of a child - our own two eyes. All is a miracle.
“The Resurrected Flesh ” - March 27, 2005
Mark W. Harris
Opening Words
- “Let Us Worship” by Kenneth Patton (#437 in hymnal)Let us worship with our eyes and ears and fingertips;
Let us love the world through heart and mind and body.
We feed our eyes upon the mystery and revelation in the faces of our brothers and sisters.
We seek to know the wistfulness of the very young and the very old, the wistfulness of people in all times of life.
We seek to understand the shyness behind arrogance, the fear behind pride, the tenderness behind clumsy strength, the anguish behind cruelty.
All life flows into a great common life, if we will only open our eyes to our companions.
Let us worship, not in bowing down, not with closed eyes and stopped ears.
Let us worship with the opening of all the windows of our beings, with the full outstretching of our spirits.
Life comes with singing and laughing, with tears and confiding, with a rising wave too great to be held in the mind and heart and body, to those who have fallen in love with life.
Let us worship, and let us learn to love.
Sermon
Do you think that personality types have anything to do with Easter? Is it important to know if Jesus was an introvert or an extrovert? It seems like he needed those disciples in order to have suppers and discuss strategy, and he just may have drawn his energy from being around other people. Theologians and church historians these days seem to want to play up the role of women in his ministry with emphasis on Mary, his mother and Mary Magdalene. On the other hand, he went off by himself, too, contemplating and praying on serious matters. I am not sure an extrovert could stand 40 days alone. They’d go a little stir crazy. We could continue along with this line of questioning by asking if he was sensing or intuitive, feeling or thinking, judging or perceiving. Of course everyone is a little bit of each of these, and the idea is to try to balance them in our lives. Personality tests have become a popular management tool in our culture to predict what kinds of behaviors to expect from prospective employees. Critics say they are about as accurate as using astrology as a predictor of behavior. It is like taking a zodiac sign, such as Gemini, and assigning all the people who were born under that sign to the sales department since this is what they naturally do best. While they may not be entirely fair or accurate in judging what kind of people we are or where our skills may lie, personality tests are interesting and we certainly relate. I wrote a newsletter column a couple of years ago about my introverted revulsion at going into a Christmas party where I didn't know anybody. It seemed like all the other introverts in the congregation came up to me afterward and said how much they related to that anxiety producing situation for introverts of being in a room full of people and having to talk to them, sort of like social hour.
Society can present challenges for introverts as 75% of the population are extroverts. Each of us has to figure out a way to fit into an extroverted world. Personality tests do help us learn a little more about ourselves, and give some insight into areas of strength and weakness, but there are too many other factors to make them entirely accurate predictors of our abilities or leadership qualities. There is one aspect of personality tests though that I find relevant to Easter, Unitarian Universalism and myself. This is in the perceiving function that is categorized as Sensing or Intuition. The vast majority of the general population are sensing, but very few Unitarian Universalists are. I am one of those few. Sensing people rely primarily on the senses or the body’s ability to see, hear, touch, taste and smell to perceive the world. We live in our bodies more than we live in our heads. This makes perfect sense to me when you think of Unitarian Universalism as a rational, thinking person’s religion. People who tend to perceive through intuition are more detached from the direct experience, and tend to use abstraction and metaphor, and they need language to capture something in memory. One needs action, and the other needs words.
One obvious question for Unitarian Universalists might be would we appeal to a broader spectrum of the population if we had more bodily experiences in our worship services, instead of primarily words. Historically, we have lacked the bells and whistles of Catholicism with its candles, incense, wafers and wine, and perhaps today the lighting of candles for joys and sorrows, the greeting and talking in church are ways for us to have more sensual experiences of each other or our surroundings. We need more bodily experiences of spiritual knowledge besides talking and speculating about truth. This is where the importance of the idea of the resurrected flesh on Easter comes into play.
In some Unitarian Universalist churches Easter is a time to explain away the idea of resurrection. We view it as a biological absurdity (dead men do not come back to life), and usually say his life and influence was so powerful in the disciples minds that they came to believe that he continued to live on, and would always do so. End of story. The other part of the story is that we liberals have always affirmed his bodily existence over his spiritual essence. In fact this was an important argument in the early Christian church. Spirit or flesh? There were some Christians who came to worship a spiritual Christ, who was an other worldly figure who only assumed flesh. This became the abstract theology of Christianity, or the Gospel of John’s word made flesh, where the flesh is secondary. This abstraction denied the more sensual Jesus who not only shared meals and wine with his followers, but was also a person of action more than abstraction. This is the Jesus who was descended from the warrior king David, and was here to lead his people out of their oppression.
It is interesting in Christian history that as the man Jesus became more and more the spiritual Christ, the body became more and more denigrated. Augustine, one of the great teachers in Christianity used the creation story of Adam and Eve to prove that sexual desire for another’s body is sinful, and that infants all have the infected trait called original sin, which also corrupts all of nature. In her book, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, Elaine Pagels says the church made the choice of the forbidden fruit the major sin in this story rather than the disobedience of God. Every measure was taken to control the desires of the body, so that nothing was suppose to be done from desire, ie. you were not allowed to have any. The expectation was that the good Christian would control the will, and thus sexual behavior was only allowed for procreation. In that context women could have only two roles in Christianity - whore or virgin mother. Eve represented the first and Mary the second. Augustine denied any possibility of free will. He says the serpent beguiled Adam with the lure of liberty. The forbidden fruit is to symbolize control over the will, and thus represents the primary virtue, which is obedience. What Augustine said was that humans are not capable of being trusted to govern themselves. Teaching that all of nature is corrupt was a way to have social control over the people, because you as the church had the only tool available to save themselves from this corruption. Perhaps the creation of the sensual experiences in worship was to make up for the belief that sensual experiences of living were evil.
Two things are destroyed in this framework. We only experience life through our bodily experiences, and yet we are told that the body and its sensual desires are sinful. This sets up a situation where everything we do or want is bad. Therefore the choices we make about our own lives must be wrong unless we deny ourselves those individual choices, and let the church or the state or if you are a woman, your husband, control those desires through our obedience. Here’s where we return to the story of Jesus, and its implications for us. The body plays a crucial role in the story of Jesus. All through his years of development and ministry, he defies attempts to control him, and what he believes his mission in life to be. He is someone who is disobedient to the established norms of the acceptable rules of society. In his final days he risks death rather than be silenced. Finally, the story depicts him as raised in the body rather than merely as spirit to tell us that he triumphs in the end over the attempts of the religious hierarchy and the state to control him. The truth of his life as he lived it in his body will not be defiled by the authorities, even though they abuse his body in the worst possible ways.
Our Unitarian forebear Emerson never quite understood a relationship between the physical self and the spiritual. The scholar Lawrence Buell says that Emerson would not have understood identifying the real you with your feeble carcass. While he did suggest walking in nature and physical labor, they were only tools to improve the mind. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a younger Transcendentalist suggested that they had neglected physical culture while only cultivating the mind. Emerson believed that even though we are 99.5% mud and 0.5 per cent god, the little bit of divine trumps all. Aging was difficult for him, and its effect on the body made him equate experience with fatalism. The real Emerson was not his body. Yet the central doctrine of all of Emerson’s thought was on Self-reliance. While he may not have been comfortable in his body, no one was going to control what it did. For him self-reliance, that transformation to living by the integrity of the self came from a veil of mediocrity that shrouds most people most of the time. There is a power of resurgence within each of us. For Emerson the body becomes heroic when it lives into this pure integrity of the self. In his essay on heroism he speaks of Elijah Lovejoy, the abolitionist, “who gave his breast to the bullets of a mob, for the rights of free speech and opinion, and died when it was better not to live.”
Like Emerson, most of us have body issues of one kind or another throughout our lives. As young people there is cultural pressure to be attractive and trim, and women especially, often feel trapped by the enforcement of strict standards to meet the societal idea of beauty. What is ironic about this is that statistically we are now a society struggling more and more with obesity. We don’t move enough, walk enough, swim, run or bike enough, and we find our kids may be out of shape and flabby. Body continues to be an issue as we age and confront greater difficulties in losing weight, or in the pains of joints and muscles as time begins to catch up to us. What kind of control will we have as we continue to age, and eventually become infirm. Can we make decision now to help others know what we want done or not done to our bodies. Do we want terribly invasive procedures merely to remain alive, and when there is no quality to our life, and the person who was once us is no longer there?
As Jesus was led to the cross, as the abolitionist Lovejoy stood before the mob, as Emerson struggled with aging, all are wondering in different ways, how do I keep my integrity of self, my true beliefs alive until the end when powerful others or when fate of dwindling years or disease confront my body with its final days or years. The integrity of the self , and the struggle with maintaining a sense of control over one’s own body seem to make the front page news item over the life of Terri Schaivo relevant to the Easter story. In the last two weeks we have seen politicians grandstanding, and others battling to try to capture control of a woman’s body who has been in a persistent vegetative state for fifteen years. What is perhaps relevant is that the heart attack that brought on this condition came about because she was bulemic. It is often said that young women who have that condition come to it as a result of trying to wrest control back over their own life. This is not to minimize the parent’s pain at her condition, but to reiterate that we must do all we can to maintain the sanctity of each person’s control over their own body as opposed to the state, the church or a family member trying to control another. When someone says preserve life at all costs, we must ask at what cost, is this preservation necessary? Jesus said my body will not live to be a slave to your oppressive system. Lovejoy said I will die so that you cannot enslave one more man or woman or child. We must stand up for the sanctity of the body of any person who is being made the slave of another - of those who will keep a life alive when the personality is gone, of those who exploit others with pornography, of those who insist on opposing a woman’s choice to end an unwanted pregnancy - any and all attempts to violate the sanctity of the body.
These lives tell us how hard it is to be true to your bodily and spiritual self when so many forces are trying to control who or what you are. I think Easter can be a call to revel in the bodies that we have. It is a call to use those bodies as spiritual embodiments of the self. To come to see and understand the world through mind and heart and yes, body. It often seems like we have lost the sensual world in our liberal experience of religion. Yet if we look at religious practices we can see that they can call us to find our faith through the senses. In Isalm the faithful believe in the Five Pillars: with prayer, they roll out their rugs and prostrate themselves on the ground; with charity they give of the self to work to help others welcoming and giving to the stranger; with fasting you give up food from sunrise to set, and feel the effects on your body, physically knowing discipline and dependence on others; with pilgrimage you make the journey to a holy place, like walking to Walden for us; and finally with your sense of the divine, you understand the goodness of the creation, and how we are created as free moral beings to make choices in the world that bring freedom and equality in society. Think of the sensual experience of living a faith. How can you find the sensual center of our faith? Can we discipline our bodies with food, pilgrimage and compassion for others? Can we make our bodies dance with joy for the wonders of the creation?
I lived my younger days out as an athlete. I still live to feel the water on my body as I swim, or to throw a bowling ball down a lane or shoot a basketball with my boys, or walk in the wilderness. I love to eat. I love to look. The body and its senses tell us in such glory that we are alive, and this is the great Easter message. Love the body, use the body, celebrate the body with all your heart. The other day in the wake of a childrens theatre performance, Andrea was telling me about beau geste. This is when an actor uses his/her whole body and sounds as props. You become your surroundings - live into them. In her poem “God send easter,” Lucille Clifton would have us dance toward Jesus in the sun, glorifying in our skin. Our skin that we must take care of and use for as long as we can, and then when its is old or weary, keep the body sanctified by letting it go to die in peace. Sometimes fate or circumstance means that body must go too soon, but the sanctity is upheld when integrity of the self is maintained and followed. This truthfulness about body and spirit integrated and whole is Clifton’s ”spring song” of the world turning in the body of Jesus giving us a possible future. For the body of Jesus was true, ever following the truth he found in his heart - he lived this truth until he died, he respected the dignity and equality of others, he walked in their shoes, he welcomed them at his table. He said we should hold no slaves, be no slave. The Easter message is let us find ways, body and spirit, to be free.
Closing Words
from Mark HarrisWe welcome Easter morning as a festival of the living body.
May its story remind us never to separate ourselves from our life in the body.
May we feel that the body and spirit are one; that flesh is good.
May we be in touch with our hands and feet; every living, breathing part of ourselves.
May we love the body; as regenerating earth, as reproducing seed, as the stuff of stars - growing, changing and becoming the incarnated breath of all life; each one of us the word made flesh.
Praise the body!.
“Sharing the Journey” - March 13, 2005
Mark W. Harris
Opening Words
- ”The Summer Day” by Mary OliverWho made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean --
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down --
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Readings
- ”Where I’m From” by George Ella Lyon
- from Remembering the Bone House by Nancy Mairs
Sermon
- ”Sharing the Journey” by Mark W. HarrisOne hundred and seventy-one years ago, William Ellery Channing, the
leader of the Unitarians met with his colleague George Ripley, who would
later quit the ministry and become the founder of the utopian community at Brook Farm. Channing, according to a later report made by Emerson, was looking for a way
to bring thoughtful people together in conversation. According to Emerson,
Channing had “large thoughts which he wished to open.” Do you have large
thoughts you would like to open in conversation with others? Today I want
to suggest to you that your ideas and concerns about spiritual and ethical
issues can be shared with others in a warm, supportive environment in a
covenant group; a small, regular gathering of fellow members who are
interested in exploring important topics and growing spiritually as a result
of those discussions.
Two years after his initial meeting with Ripley, Channing met with a
group of invited guests to inaugurate what became known as The
Transcendental Club. We usually don’t think of Unitarians having spiritual
disciplines. We associate that kind of activity with more orthodox faiths,
and we usually label it prayer. Yet this gathering of mostly current or
former Unitarian ministers plus Margaret Fuller specialized in another kind
of discipline that Fuller herself also helped perfect. While this
discipline may have grown out of the participants private reading or
meditating or walking, it was purely a group activity. It was the discipline
of conversation. Participants were able to share their large thoughts with
others. One of the regular participants was the moderator of the group, our
own minister Convers Francis, and when the group met in Watertown, it was at
his house, now the funeral home in Watertown Square. Francis wrote in his
journal, “We want congenial spirits to talk without fear or reserve on all
topics.” When they met respectful sharing took place, and a couple of
things happened. The talk was deep, and so Emerson reported that
occasionally these fine conversations were incomprehensible to others. Yet
the larger focus on sharing personal thoughts on God, men and women,
education, and peace made one participant say about the sessions: “It seemed
to him like going to heaven in a swing.” The second thing that occurred
was the building of strong friendships. Those who were once marginally
acquainted found fellow travelers and companions for the journey.
The Transcendental Club is a spiritual legacy of ours, as were
Margaret Fullers’ meetings of women that were simply referred to as
Conversations. Fuller’s Conversations were important historically, as
Charles Capper has written, because it contributed to the growth of
organized feminism, and showed women a way to intellectual autonomy and
emancipation. What was so revolutionary about these conversations was that
culture became more than a means of earning wealth or status, for when
Fuller engaged women in conversation on arts and mythology, it was affirmed
for perhaps the first time that women are capable of creating meaning
through concepts and symbols. One of Fuller’s participants wrote: “I found
myself in a new world of thought; a flood of light irradiated all that I had
seen in nature, observed in life, read in books. Whatever she spoke of
revealed a hidden meaning, and everything seemed to be put into true
relation. Perhaps I could best express it by saying that I was no longer the
limitation of myself, but I felt the whole wealth of the universe was open
to me.”
What was it like for these women to share such a high level of
understanding for the first time? I think there are some similarities
between what these forebears of ours experienced in conversation, and the
opportunities we can find for spiritual growth when we meet in small groups.
Sunday morning worship, as stimulating as I know you think it is, is not the
best place to share with each other about what is important to you or what
you can learn from each other. We greet. We know we share a common faith.
Many of us have rejected a former faith. We may exchange some words over
coffee. Yet there are only a few times when we can say to each other in
church what moves us or what concerns us, and this is, I believe what church
should be about. If we can share the stories of our lives, and offer
support and understanding to each other as we explore themes of importance
then we have created a church where interpersonal spiritual growth and
connection is truly possible.
In the past we have referred to these spiritual discussion groups as
covenant groups. Why? Our congregation was founded upon a covenant, which
is simply a word for an important agreement between us. We promise to
support and look out for each other. Covenant groups promise understanding
and affirmation for their members, and through their discussions move their
members to live their faith more fully in the community and the world.
During the rest of my time, I would like to consider the importance of
sharing the story of your life, and discovering its inherent meaning through
your focused attention on where you have come from, where your journeys have
taken you and the lessons learned therein, and finally, how you come home to
wisdom and understanding.
More than a half century ago, Joseph Campbell wrote about the common
mythic journey that humans have explored and found meaning in with his
famous work The Hero with A Thousand Faces. That heroic journey writ large
is the story of each one of us as we try to discern what our lives mean in
the context of all of life. Each person, each hero must have a beginning, a
point of origin. In the poem “Where I’m From,” George Ella Lyon recalls
clothespins and fudge and snapped off from a family tree before she budded
into flower. This is the you that is planted in the garden. This is the
place you are from. And so I may speak of woods and brooks and baseball, of
big gardens and blueberries and male anger, of England and Scotland, of
homemade bread and clam chowder. These are what I am from. What are you
from?
Our place and family of origin is where we begin. It is the place we
take hold, and the place we leave from on our journey. When the writers of
the Gospels sat down, they knew of a great healing story teller, but he was
a wanderer. He needed a place to come from, and a family to call his own.
And so the Gospel writers, like the person who composed Matthew, gave Jesus
a place and a story that fit a larger picture of Jewish redemption. He was
the new Moses. He had a lineage and a home town, even though the story also
says he came from God, whose hometown and background is hard to trace. Each
human story takes place in the context of having this sense of seed. There
is a wide range of memories. Jesus’ story reminds us of the dispossessed,
and many of us come from backgrounds that include harrowing immigrant
stories. How did they survive? At this year’s Martin Luther King breakfast
I was moved to tears in a brief conversation I had with Julie
Leavitt-Kutsen, the local rabbi-in-training, who told me of returning to
Austria to her grandmother’s city and finding her community, her old home,
were all gone. African-Americans, who have been torn from their roots,
mostly cannot draw in any sustained way on origins to help gauge a sense of
identity and place. From these diverse backgrounds, think what happens when
we share stories of our families and places of origin with each other. She
once lived in Atlanta, or I worked in San Francisco. I remember there is a
parishioner who comes from Ware, Massachusetts, near the Quabbin, where I
come from. We are searching for connections to each other all the time.
And we find them in our sharing, I invite you to turn to your neighbor now,
and share a brief thought about your place of origin. Where are you from,
and what are you rooted in? (Sharing)
Then we go on a journey, and the journey takes us down many roads.
After the seed is planted there are seasons of growing and flowering, and
seasons of pain and loss. Each of us, as Dan Wakefield says, could write
many different versions of our life story. We have all those lessons
learned, taught by so many teachers and mentors. If we heard the word,
“love,” we could recount great moments and disasters galore. If I said
“money, we could each recount how the family spent or saved, and perhaps who
we became because of that. We could hear winning and losing and see once
again the wrenching loss, or the terrible fall. How did it affect us to
always lose? What if I said the word “mistake?” How many times have we
made mistakes, and what did we do to correct them? Perhaps some mistakes
led us down wonderful roads, new places of adventure. What does work mean
to you. Did that depression era parent teach you that the only good things
came through hard work. And now you wonder when someone doesn’t understand
how you feel? And what does it mean to teach. Who inspired you, gave you
the tools of magical learning. Did you have a Margaret Fuller? Each of us
has a story of how we were educated, and what education means to us as a
result. Thoreau refused to punish his students. It got him fired. He said
learning should be fun. Did you have fun?
So there were many stories on these days of journeying. Over the years
I have had a recurring dream. In the dream I am usually in a forest, so it
is dark and a little scary. I always encounter an owl, who for me seems to
symbolize wisdom. The owl is always guarding the entrance to something
where there is a door. This may be a passage into a tree or to a house I
am always afraid to open that door, and yet probably the dream is telling me
each time that I must do so. Each life is filled with so many times when we
feel lost in the forest of making life choices and encountering risks. In
her memoir, Remembering the Bone House, Nancy Mairs tells us the child is
going to get lost or not. In fact, there are many times of getting lost.
Here in the reading the girls told all about themselves, even about their “21
year old mother.” Do you sometimes feel, like Mairs, that in your life when
you have dared to risk, or to let your secrets out that you have been
scolded anyway by the rules of self-control and independence and never
sharing feelings with others. Perhaps your sense of integrity and honesty
has helped you be faithful to yourself in some of those circumstances. We
have all felt lost at times, and yet we found ways to learn lessons from
those experiences, and perhaps some teacher or mentor or loved one has
helped us to open a new door in our life after a loss or betrayal or
failure. The Buddha has a journey where he encounters all the pain life
brings him, but seeing that pain leads to enlightenment. Did you have a
teacher or mentor, a parent who opened a wider world to you. Was there a
John the Baptist who brought gifts of the spirit to your life? Turn to your
neighbor now, and share a few words about what you received. (Sharing)
Frederick Buechner says that in the same way that the Genesis passage in
scripture where God speaks the creative word of light and the darkness is
dispelled, so by “speaking and listening to each other that out of the
darkness of our separate mysteries is brought to light the truth of who we
are.” So we are here in this religious community to try to learn to trust
others so that we may speak the truths of our lives. From the seed that was
first sown in our lives, there have been many harvests. There have been
bountiful years, and years of famine. As we age, and contemplate our final
stages of life, is there a way for us to see our story as redemptive or
healing? The story of each of our lives is many stories. Sometimes we are
blown around by forces of wind and chance, and other times we have exhibited
great skill and known deep felt love. Here in community we offer that to
each other, an affirmation mostly that we are not alone in these journeys of
risk and difficulty, but also of great reward.
A religious quest ultimately is finding a way to come home to a faith
that can at first change the shape of our interior life, and then be a faith
we can rest in, but also reach out with, to others. Here in church you
sharing your life with others will help you construct a spiritual story,
your testimony to what consists of right living, where you find the holy.
The book group on Tuesday will discuss Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief. The
initial discussion question might be, why is this book called Beyond Belief?
Coming from a Christian tradition Pagels was struggling with a context for
the fatal illness her young son had. She could not find consolation in her
traditional faith. She was able to go back to early Christian writings which
were ultimately labeled heretical. Christianity had told her and countless
others that she could only find God through Jesus. She discovered in these
ancient texts an alternative key to understanding truth. The Gospel of
Thomas, for instance, says that each ones of us comes from the light; each
one of us can find the divine light within ourselves. Pagels finds solace in
going beyond belief; going beyond the traditional pathways to truth to a
much more personal recognition of what we are capable of bringing forth from
within ourselves. You can find spiritual resources with yourself, from each
other, because their source is within you. The texts don’t speak of what
you believe in. They speak of what you experience. Where is truth found in
your life?
Beyond Belief may tell us that the truths of our lives are hidden from
us, or even disguised from us in formulas of religion, or in the privacy of
our hearts where there is unresolved pain or grief. Standard beliefs have
not worked for us in helping us become whole. I think we discover
spiritual power in our lives or in a congregation by sharing what’s in our
hearts with each other. Each one of us through our lives has gleaned much
wisdom and understanding. As our final exercise in sharing, please turn to
your neighbor and share in a word or two where or with whom you find
spiritual sustenance. (Share) Thanks for risking a few truths from your
life. We all want to connect. We all want to find community. We are all
seeking to touch the mystery of life. Let us create and partake of
opportunities for meaningful conversation, where in the words of Channing,
we bring large thoughts which we wish to open.
Closing Words
- from Frederick Buechner (adapted, with additions by Harris)Page by page, chapter by chapter the story unfolds. Day by day, year by
year, your own story unfolds, your life’s story. Things happen. People come
and go. The scene shifts. Time runs by, runs out. Maybe its all utterly
meaningless. Maybe its all unutterably meaningful. If you want to know which
, pay attention. What it means to be truly human in a world that half the
time we are in love with and half the time scares the hell out of us - comes
from the telling of the stories, in facing insoluble problems, in bearing
unbearable realities, in the glory of the sunlight, in the laughter of the
child, in the common quest for love and companionship, we find solace, we
find salvation in the stories, of our lives, of each others lives, of the
community we make in the stories we share.
“The Natural Lifel” - March 6, 2005
Mark W. Harris
Opening Words
- from Walden by Henry David ThoreauAfter a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what - how - when - where? But here was dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips. I awoke to an answered question, to Nature and daylight. The snow lying deep on the earth dotted with young pines, and the very slope of the hill on which my house is placed, seemed to say, Forward! Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution, “O Prince, our eyes contemplate with admiration and transmit to the soul the wonderful and varied spectacle of this universe. The night veils without a doubt a part of this glorious creation; but day comes to reveal to us this great work, which extends from earth even into the plains of the ether.
Sermon
I was at the post office the other day. I had just dropped a couple of letters through the mail slot, and began to walk toward the door. All of a sudden a man walked into me. It was only a slight brush against my side, and a quick “excuse me” ended the incident. But let’s ask the question, why did the man walk into you? (Congregation REPEAT). He walked into me because he was talking on a cell phone, and not paying attention to where he was walking. You have probably experienced this in another context. It is the driver who invariably runs the red light because they are telling their loved one the vital information that they are driving down Church St., and about to turn onto Summer. It is the person who is standing ahead of you in line at the supermarket, who is calling his loved one to ask if they want the orange juice with pulp or not, except the line has moved fifteen feet ahead, is about to be shut down because it appears to the clerk that no one is in the line, and the person in front of you has forgotten what he is doing or even where he is, and all you wanted was a gallon of milk.
Many of you have told me how wonderful cell phones are for keeping track of errant teenagers, or helping people find you in case of emergency. I know. I can also see how contractors find them useful for running businesses out of their trucks, but I also find a few draw backs to these communication devices. In this world where an increasing number of people find it difficult to pay attention to one thing for any period of time, we should take note of those devices which prevent us from concentrating. The other concern I have about cell phones often surfaces when I am riding the 71 bus over to Harvard Square. Sometimes the person sitting behind me on the bus seems to believe they are sitting in their own private auxiliary living room. The cell phone rings and soon the conversation drifts to the catastrophic relationship problems the young women is having with her obtuse boyfriend. Within fifteen minutes I hear more personal details of her life, than I knew about my mother. Don’t these people realize they are in public, and sitting next to a perfect stranger? The private details of our relationships seem to have lost their meaning, and so I must suffer through listening to someone else’s intimate life. There is no context for our behaviors, and so people just seem to do what is right in front of them and provides immediate gratification. These are the questions cell phone use present us with. Can I truly pay attention to the person, the responsibility, the task that is right in front of me, or do I submit to the myriad number of things which prevent me from concentrating? Second, do I have a context for what I am doing, or does a deeper meaning to my relationships pale beside the need to ventilate my feelings or act impulsively simply to feel good or accepted in the moment.?
Now, before you jump to the conclusion that this is the diatribe of a spoil sport man who is incapable of multi-tasking or is uptight about sharing with others, I would like to place these concerns in the context of a couple of local news events. As a former resident and minister in Milton, I have followed the recent events at Milton Academy with interest. Briefly, it seems that a fifteen year girl on several occasions has performed oral sex on five male hockey players and others. The hockey players were expelled because of the group nature of the actions and their implicit coerciveness. One aspect of the case that has disturbed me is the lack of context for these kinds of behaviors. Among many teenagers there seems to be a belief that one simply behaves like this in order to please others, or be accepted, and while sexual behavior when I was a teenager certainly carried some of those ramifications, it also pointed to an ideal larger meaning. The girls actions may have expressed her desire to belong to the group, fueled by her not seeing her worth, and the boys not realizing their power. Individual sexual acts such as these are not separated out from a person’s sexual behavior, and that behavior should be connected to relationships and intimacy and shared love, and sex in whatever form it takes is the expression of that love. We thus begin to fail to see how important things are connected to each other. Everything can become an individual act that is unrelated to anything else. It may give pleasure in the moment, or it may be a way to express ourselves, but it ends up being unconnected to anything - so you are engaged in the most intimate of acts, but you don’t feel anything for the other.
The other local news item that caught my eye on the same page, on the same day as Milton Academy was a story about some Little League parents who became involved in some kind of altercation between players. Whether it is hockey games where spectators are barred due to previous incidents of fighting, or professional games where fans taunt players and then engage in altercations in the stands, or even worse acts of violence, people don’t seem to have a broad perspective on what is appropriate behavior for a parent or a citizen in a community. In their passion to protect their child or make them a winner, a parent may forget that they have a responsibility to model for their children, to settle differences without violence, to behave in public in a civil manner that is respectful of the people around you, to build a stronger community, and not humiliate others so you can win. These guidelines for behavior are often lost in the culture that affirms the freedom to get what you want now. Everything is a commodity. The implication of the sex acts at Milton academy is that sex can be unconnected to anything or anybody. You just do what you want to do right now, or get what you can. This is often the way we think about freedom. The boys are going to go for it, while the girls attempt to be connected will make her become despised in the boys eyes. These failed attempts at connecting by these kinds of behaviors: glued to the phone but with no content, “sex” without meaning, are symptom of our discomfort, our longing for more. In last Sunday’s paper, Parade Magazine asked in its cover story whether we should feel some shame over how gross and lewd our culture has become with each reality show trying to be more coarse than the last, reflecting people’s willingness to do anything for a thrill or fame. Rather than reflecting any meaning it reflects back on itself like its own mirror that can’t go beyond the reflection. It is Narcissus saying, look at me!
Reflecting feelings without meaning, and carrying out actions without context are serious concerns. How can we find a more spiritual way of being in the world? I have chosen my title The Natural Life to follow the avowed intention of Henry David Thoreau to achieve an integrated life. At a cursory glance some might even blame free thinkers like Thoreau for our cultural obsession with each of us feeling free to walk to the beat of our own drum. For many being free of outside rules or coercion is what the natural life is. We are free to do what we want to do right now, and not think of the implications beyond freedom. This would I think be a misreading of Thoreau, and a tragic misunderstanding of what might give each of us a more meaningful existence. I don’t think the girl in Milton found much meaning in being used for gratification, nor do we in seeking oral or visual gratification. I don’t think we find much meaning when we are trying to multi task all those things that we might do more leisurely if we didn’t work all the time. I don’t think we find much meaning when we buy, read, watch things to fill up our time, but we never stop and focus in the moment with our surroundings or our loved ones.
In last week’s sermon I told a story of a time when my family home lost power one winter, and my brother and I had to go chop a hole in an ice covered brook to procure water for the family. I had forgotten that Thoreau wrote about this same experience in Walden. His words from “The Pond in Winter” began our service today. He says we awake to answered questions of what, how, when and where. It is all before us. After the passage I read, he goes directly to the work of cutting through the ice. When he breaks through he sees, as is true in summer, the parlor of the fishes. He concludes Heaven is under our feet, as well as over our heads. The natural life for Thoreau is a union of the material and the spiritual. Here he begins to help us see that our inner life is tied to all life in nature.
There are several misconceptions about the natural life that we have made in addition to the idea of expressing yourself in wanton freedom. We think of Thoreau leaving the world, of running away to nature to be escape the world’s corruption in an ideal state called Walden. We also think of the the Transcendentalists as thinkers who sat around cozy parlors and dreamed up visions of pure worlds, but never soiled their hands. The natural life as Thoreau conceived it was none of these. What it means for us in the context of cell phones, and Milton Academy is this. We are living the natural life when we reconcile the material and the spiritual. We do this in many ways. We focus on what is before us, by paying attention to what we are doing right now. This brings us into the present and into your and my presence. In sharp contrast to the cell phone talking drivers, Annie Dillard brings us into the world of the muskrat stalkers. What does she find when she focuses on one thing. There is calm and centering. There is complete and utter devotion to one particular event. All energy and focus is delivered to one moment.
This reminds me of what it was once like to hit a baseball, to which Dillard compares this stalking experience. There is the balance of the stance, the waiting, the breathing to balance all the muscles contemplating the one true moment of explosion when the bat whisks through the strike zone, and if the eyes and coordination and stroke are perfectly in synch then the ball strikes the stick, and is propelled into the field. When do we take the moments to focus such as this? Thoreau provides the perfect example is complete contemplation of details in nature - every petal, every leaf is examined. He knows them in an intimate way. What do we have in our lives that evokes such contemplation?
Sounding like the self-reflecting mirror, Dillard says we waste so much energy just saying hello to ourselves. Giving herself time to observe or center down, the sparks of all that is around, she says, “become a holy fire in you.” Recall that contemplation of each thing. This is the first path to follow down the road to the natural life.
In recent weeks there has been a storm over at Harvard about the comments President Summers made in the context of women’s abilities to succeed in the sciences and engineering. Most of the controversy has swirled around the inferred idea that women are somehow genetically inferior. What was missed in this discussion is the reference to how many hours of labor it takes to succeed in these fields. It has been men who set up this insane system that provide our models of work success. Many women and men have sacrificed precious leisure time with their families, vacation time, time to develop other interests because that is what it took to respond to the demands of the work world. When I was a single parent years ago, and worked for the UUA, I had a pretty flexible schedule, but nevertheless I still worked 9 to 5 and my 7 year old son spent that time every day at school. After school he walked the streets to reach the Boys and Girls Club, and I remember feeling terrible anxiety and fear that I would go and pick him up one day, and not find him there. If President Summers wants to make amends perhaps he could affirm women and set a standard to say no to these insane sacrifices.
This points to the second path down the road to the natural life that Thoreau guides us toward. In Walden Thoreau depicts the farmer who is broken down and consumed by the farm he owns. He writes that material ownership or possession is often inverted in modern society. We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” The things own us, and not vice versa. And so he writes that the laborer “has no time but to be anything but a machine.” There is no purpose to success other than success. We labor, Thoreau said, under a mistake, through the ownership and possession of goods. Thoreau mocked the accepted standards of responsible hard work by giving himself such jobs as the self-appointed inspector of snow-storms. But we would be wrong to think he repudiated the value of work. He wanted us to have an awareness of the spirit in which work is conducted. He said there must be a larger pattern of spiritual work. Recall the famous quotation, “To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.” Extending the railroad metaphor, Thoreau advises us to keep on our own track. This is to use our freedom to work in a positive way - to explore new experiences, to fully develop the self. Thoreau wanted to take the time to focus on the natural world, to take the time to work on the formation of the self. ”Do what you love,” he said. To not pay attention, to spend all your time consumed in labor toward no spiritual end or fulfillment meant you would lose touch with the natural life.
Many years ago when my parents were still alive I would go out to the Quabbin area where I am from more frequently to see friends and family. People who visit there are often struck at how beautiful and natural the area is- trees and more trees. Yet one thing that always disturbed me was how nearly everyone I knew in this rural enclave near the New Hampshire border would shop for soda and beer over the state line where they could purchase bottles and cans that did not need to be returned. They depicted returnables as a hassle they could avoid by skipping over to the live free or die state. They could then take all their perfectly recyclable glass and aluminum and continue to fill a land fill, either theirs, or some far away one they did not have to see. They could not seem to integrate their own consumption and the waste they generated. They did not see the larger context of where their waste was going or how it effected the earth. It was what was pleasurable right in front of them, what gratified their needs. What they did not see was how everything was integrated, everything was connected.
It could be that the Lenten season has motivated me to contemplate the achievement of the natural life. Thoreau, as he is depicted in David Robinson’s book Natural Life, the inspiration for this sermon, was constantly concerned that he was gaining the particulars of this world, but losing his soul. What he learned in his trip up the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and at Walden, and in his others sojourns and walks is that the utter and complete contemplation of nature, and the taking of serious time away from our consumptive and machine like lives and labors means that we give ourselves the opportunity to awake, and see that everything in our ordinary experience is related to everything else. To see one fact, is to see the world, to see it in relation, in time with respect to a higher, holistic law that governs all. See what the refuse does to the river. See that river pure and clean. Thoreau pursuit of the natural life was about freedom, but a very different kind then the do what you want freedom. His was a moral freedom that was always responsible and never self-indulgent. He said our primary responsibility in this world is to live out lives well. Integrity was crucial.
Ancient tradition tells us that a 2nd century Christian bishop named Polycarp was sent before a Roman judge who ordered him to bow down before Caesar, and renounce his foreign religious notions. Polycarp refused. The judge didn’t really want to throw this old man to the lions or commit him to the flames. So he railed at the saint, Don’t you realize I have the power to kill you?” But the old man looked back with fiery eyes and responded, “Don’t you realize I have the power to let you?” Polycarp refused to let the judge force him to recant. The threatened punishment was not going to make him give up his principles. He had the power to hold onto his integrity. He had the power to face the beasts or the flames, and die knowing that he never could be made to renounce what he believed was true. He had the power, and his power was in fact greater than the judge’s, for it was a power that gave meaning to his life, and meaning to his death, and none one could take that away. This was crucial for Thoreau. The word desperate often comes up in his writing. Remember the famous line about the mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation? Desperation for him meant loss of control. He would have said, be like Polycarp. Always believe in the integration of your life with all of life, and never let go of your integrity. Your obligation, your greatest obligation in life is to be true to the eternities, read the eternities in your life, and live by them. Walk the paths, pay utter attention to what you see, take concentrated time to walk those paths, see how all the paths are reflections of the great eternal laws of nature, and know that moral freedom is the great gift of your life. Thoreau’s example reminds us that everything we do, everything we see is holy. And, as Unitarian Universalists, we are called to live and teach those connections. It may not be an easy faith, but in times of joy and sorrow, it will help us live a meaningful, connected, even holy, natural life.
Closing Words
- from Thich Nhat HanhI like to walk alone on country paths, rice plants and wild grasses on both sides, putting each foot down on the earth in mindfulness, knowing that I walk on the wondrous earth. In such moments, existence is a miraculous and mysterious reality. People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black curious eyes of a child - our own two eyes. All is a miracle.