First Parish of Watertown

“Extraordinary Knowings” Mark W. Harris

First Parish of Watertown - February 24, 2008

Call to Worship - from Rumi

In generosity and helping others be like a river
In compassion and grace be like the sun
In concealing other’s faults be like a night
In anger and fury be like the dead
In modesty and humility be like the earth
In tolerance be like a sea
Either exist as you are or be as you look

Reading - “The Fruits of Victory” A Zen Buddhist Story
(as retold in Bill Houff’s Infinity In Your Hand)

In some Zen Buddhist orders, it is part of the discipline to engage in aggressive and often loud arguments about the finer points of practice. Usually the admission of wandering monks to a temple depends upon the stranger’s winning such a dispute.
Two brother monks dwelt together in a temple in Northern Japan. The elder brother was learned, but the younger one was dull and had but one eye. One day a wandering monk came to the door and asked for lodging. Being tired the elder brother sent the other to meet the visitor and engage him in argument. Knowing that his brother was not quick with words, the elder directed; “Request the dialogue in silence.”
The young monk and the stranger went to the shrine and began their silent disputation. But it was not long before the stranger rushed up to the elder brother and exclaimed: “Your younger brother has defeated me utterly. I shall go.”
The elder monk was astonished: “Tell me the dialogue.”
“Well,” explained the visitor, “first I held up one finger, representing the Buddha. So he held up two fingers signifying the Buddha and his teaching. I replied with three fingers, representing the Buddha, his teaching, and his disciples living the harmonious life. Then he shook his fist in my face, signifying that all three come from a single revelation. Thus, he won, and I must go.” And he walked out the door.
Suddenly the younger monk ran up. “Where is that fellow?”
“He said you won the dialogue and left.”
“Won nothing! He insulted me, and I’m going to beat him up.”
“Please tell me the subject of the dialogue,” asked the elder monk.
“Well, the very minute he saw me he held up one finger, insulting me for having one eye. Since he was a visitor, I tried to be polite and held up two fingers, congratulating him for having two eyes. But then he held up three fingers, indicating that between us we have only three eyes. So I got mad and challenged him to a fist fight. That’s when he ran out.”

Sermon

Last Sunday afternoon my family went to Newton North High School to see an illusionist. During the show she called a stranger forth from the audience, and said she had had a vision about meeting him. They both swore they had never met before this day, and he was chosen by the random means of being a person who happened to catch a ball that was being batted around a room of hundreds of people. She then asked the man named Mo to come on stage and replicate her vision of where they had met, and she did this by asking him a few simple questions. In the meantime her assistants had placed a blackboard on the stage with a sliding curtain covering some writing underneath. She proceeded to ask, In what city would we meet? What would you be wearing? What kind of vehicle would you pick me up in? Where would we go? He then made up a story of how they had met in Jerusalem; he was wearing jeans; she picked him up in a yellow cab, and finally, they went to a museum. In a few moments the curtains were pulled back on the blackboard, revealing all of his answers previously scribbled in chalk on the apparently undisturbed board. Did her assistants sneak in a substitute board after hearing the man’s answers? Or did she accurately have a vision of the man she would meet, predicting how he would answer these questions? Magic, miracle or merely illusion?

Naturally we all clapped, and the illusionist moved on to the next trick. We assume they are tricks because mostly we believe that our minds are not capable of reading others minds. We do not have visions of who we will meet in the future. Nor can we predict what they will say. Or do we? I can tell you quite honestly that I expect my wife Andrea to read my mind all the time. I feel as though I do not have to express my wishes, because she will know what I am planning in my mind for the day, when I expect to go out, and what I would like to eat for dinner. There is no need , I believe to communicate these to her, because she has these incredible capabilities of mind. Unfortunately, it might be somewhat more productive for our relationship if I did a better job of actually voicing my plans, my feelings and my wishes, but I, like many others in this very room, expect my spouse to read my mind and know what I am thinking or feeling without even having to ask.

While I am joking about my own failings as a non-communicative male, it is true that we often come to expect that those who are close to us will be able to read our minds. We sometimes witness that those couples who have been together for a long time are able to finish each other’s sentences and know exactly what the other wants, not because they are reading their minds, but because they have so much knowledge of each other, and realize what they are likely to want in a given situation or what they are likely to say, and can with a great degree of accuracy, predict what that is. Perhaps couples become bored with each other because they become more and more predictable to the other. Malcolm Gladwell in his best selling book Blink, reminds us how crucial it is to have knowledge of the other, or of the situation in order to make a split second decision or read another’s mind. He says those who do the best at reading minds are those who have practiced including stroke victims who have had to read the information they see on another’s face because they cannot speak, or those who have grown up having to read what kind of behavior they can expect of their parents. A child of an alcoholic parent, for instance often has his/her antennae out to detect whether there will be some kind of violent outburst or otherwise erratic behavior, and is ever ready to protect themselves and ensure their own well being. We come to know what that parent is likely to do or say. We can read their mind.

Reading minds or making quick judgments about things, as Gladwell points out, goes against the grain of what we are taught in life. Parents tell us to think things through and get all the information we can, and ask ourselves over and over, do we really want that item? What will be the consequences of what you are doing? So mostly we practice never leaping before we look. We look and look some more. If we are feeling ill we often get test after test, and then ask for second or third opinions to confirm a diagnosis. But these may lead to confusion if the diagnoses conflict. Information alone is not enough. In fact, sometimes we may have too much information and it only confuses us. The internet can be dangerous to us in this way, as everybody has their own opinion and experience, and we can end up feeling more lost than found. Gladwell tells the story of what appeared to be an ancient statue that was tested and presumed not to be a forgery because the data seemed so accurate, but ultimately turned out to be a fake. Tests alone were not sufficient, and then some experts with intimate knowledge of these statues made accurate snap judgments about authenticity just by looking. They could simply feel that it was right by seeing it. Sometimes we need to trust our intuition and other times not. But when?

I know I used to get frustrated with myself in school when I took multiple choice history tests. The frustration emanated from trying to think the answer through too much. Knowing me as you do you probably realize that I was pretty familiar with the subject matter for most history tests. The Civil War especially was a subject where I probably knew more than the teacher, but the problem was that I knew too much. Let’s say there was a question on why the North was able to win the war. I saw there was an obvious answer, such as superior fire power, letter C. And I often had a quick response, and would even pencil that in. I should have moved on to the next question, but invariably I would start thinking about the other optional answers. Oh, B talks about Lincoln’s reelection, and D mentions the ascendancy of Grant as a superior general. I’ll bet this is a trick question. And so, I would erase my quick response which was based on tremendous knowledge and hours of reading, and really outthink myself and ultimately choose the wrong answer.

Gladwell’s says we often we fail to read the signs and make the correct judgments. He talks about how we often make unconscious decisions based on what we see, while ignoring other senses or even the knowledge that would give us the more fair or correct response. He mentions how musicians are now often chosen for orchestras by playing behind a screen, and then the choice can be made purely based on what the conductor hears, rather than on prejudices perceived or otherwise, such as only men can play the trombone. How many of these truths do each one of us carry around? The conductors were listening with their eyes when they should have been listening with their ears, as that was the sense that was trained, and the one therefore, that would help them make the best choice. They could judge the female trombone player for what she truly was. She was the talent they wanted, and they could make a judgment in a blink because they had removed their prejudices, and had used their trained listening knowledge to respond.

So if I used my trained Civil War knowledge, and trusted myself I could have responded to the multiple choice tests more accurately. I had too much knowledge, and didn’t trust my quick response. I should have gone with my gut. Often today that is the tide we all swim against. Gladwell says we confuse our knowledge with understanding, and it is really understanding that we need to cultivate. He especially recommends this use of intuition for all the big decisions of our lives. We can pile up all the information we want on a prospective spouse who is our perfect online dating match for values and desires, but there needs to be some deeper inner need that feels fed in order for us to say, this is the right person for me. So, too, I don’t think many of us rationally choose our professions, and this is especially so for ministry. We may rationally say who wants to be at everyone’s beck and call and judgment 24/7 ?, but when we feel a call to serve a people or a community there is no feeling that is more right. We simply say, this is where I belong. I have never regretted this decision. Ministry then is how I believe I will discover the deepest truths about my life, and myself.

“This feels right” is perhaps what we say about our partner, our profession, or our choice of house to purchase. The implication in all of these decisions is that we come to know ourselves and our desires in a deeper way than simply what works best, or has the best resale value, or will bring me the highest income. Underlying this juxtaposition between knowledge and intuition is the understanding that there are different ways of seeing the world. Most of us grew up with a standard world map that is more European and North American centered. If you were like me then you probably presumed that this was the correct size of the continents; it mirrored reality. Only as an adult did I learn that Africa is much larger physically than it appears on the old standard maps. Our Zen story on the “Fruits of Victory” shows how easily we can misunderstand ways of communication. The visitor to their monastery comes to believe that he has lost a very intense debate about the meaning of life, while the young monk feels he has been insulted repeatedly because he only has one eye. He was unable to read the deeper intuitive meaning of this confrontation. Andrea often says that it is easy to read my mind, as all my feelings are readily apparent. Yet this is true for all of us. Our faces and our bodies are a reflection of what our feelings are, and what we are truly communicating when we pay attention to each other.

Deeper, intuitive ways of knowing things can be scary. I think I told this congregation my story of reading a mind, but I will reiterate it today. One Sunday morning when I was the student minister in Oakland, I conducted the liturgy portion of the service, much like Mark does here. At the end of the service I went to the rear of the sanctuary to shake hands with all those who attended church that day, much as you are now accustomed to going to the door and shaking my hand, right? During this process a small, older woman came up to me, and as she was about to shake my hand I said, Good morning, Mrs. Dietrich. She immediately said, How did you know my name? And I said, “I don’t know.” To this day, I don’t know how I knew. I do know that her deceased husband was one of the leading proponents of humanism in the early 20th century, and that I had chosen one of his prayers to read that very day. So I was on the Dietrich wavelength so to speak, but no one told me she lived in Berkeley, or that she was going to be in church that day. Somewhere out of the universe I plucked this knowledge. It was one of those odd ways of knowing something that we sometimes are afraid of sharing with others for fear of being called crazy. That I might have directly had some kind of spiritual or personal connection to her is not the usual way we liberals understand religious knowledge, and yet this extraordinary way of knowing had dropped on me out of the sky.

Marcel Proust once wrote, “Come now! . . . Were everything clear, all would seem to you vain. Your boredom would populate a shadowless universe with an impassive life made up of unleavened souls. But a measure of disquiet is a divine gift. The hope which, in your eyes, shines on a dark threshold does not have its basis in an overly certain world.” We have feelings that we can know seemingly irrational truths intuitively. We take a hunch that this seems right. We have a good feeling about something. We have learned that experience helps with this kind of knowledge. This was true for me when I recorded dreams. I have always found that dreams are a way for us to read the unconscious mind. They meant more to me when I was keeping a journal and evaluating them. The more I paid attention, the more I was in touch with my deepest feelings about myself and the world.

A few months back First Parish member Jeanne Cleary shared with me a book called Extraordinary Knowing by Elizabeth Mayer. Mayer talks about non rational ways of knowing things, but in a way that is respectful of science and its quest for truth. It reminded me of our 19th century Universalist ancestors who tried to use such events as seances to prove that there was life after death. Mayer cited examples of people who were familiar with the paranormal, or ESP, or thought transfers. I was struck by the example of one woman who was in a seminar where the professor gave out a very complicated problem. She wrote down the problem, and then just blurted out the answer. She was correct, but it seemed so incongruous that the professor accused her of stealing the answer from his notes. It was a crazy idea that she had cheated, but it seemed just as crazy that she had come up with the answer. How do we know things like this? Perhaps this is some of what Malcolm Gladwell was talking about. We come to know something so well, and see all the factors contributing to it, we can simply surmise the answer. Perhaps our brains see when we do not or senses alert us when we cannot rationally know the answer, like firefighters knowing there is a fire behind a wall when there is no apparent evidence. They know the signals. But sometimes the knowledge is more than that. We may feel like freaks if we can come up with people’s names or answers out of thin air.

One thing we need to know is that we are not insane for believing in intuitive ways of communicating or knowing the answers to things. Mayer says letting this kind of event be plausible admits two kinds of fear. There is not only the possibility that we may be crazy, but even more scary, that the world may not be stable. All that we have counted on for space and time and knowing seem, to have permeable boundaries that we once thought were sacrosanct. I remember speaking to a colleague to Berkeley some years ago, and having her tell me that she went to visit her ill father in Colorado, not by flying or driving there, but by astral body projection. She had actually gone there. What are we to think? This kind of projection certainly puts us outside of our heads. and perhaps with these ways of knowing the world we must get beyond more than our doubts. Doubts are second nature for Unitarian Universalists. We doubt most kinds of religious statements about God and resurrections and miracles, but other ways of knowing the world ask us to move beyond the beliefs we hold, a much more difficult task than doubts. Look at the evidence beyond your world view. Part of this is believing that other ways of knowing are possible, and not ruling them out as sheer nonsense. We dream of what’s possible. What that does is begin to break us from old habits of thinking, but it also asks us to begin to think of how deeply we may want to communicate with others. We will explore something more completely, we pay more attention, and finally achieve a greater intimacy as a result.

On Wednesday, Levi and I went down to New London, Connecticut to the Allyn Museum to see the landscape paintings of Christopher Cranch, the only Transcendentalist to depict his beliefs in artistic renditions. Cranch trained for the Unitarian ministry, but found he could not stay with the pulpit profession. He complained of limitations, which were that he “could not forget himself. I am not free enough.” Like his mentor Emerson, Cranch believed that deeper religious truths could be known directly by intuition, and not simply through the usual rational means of the senses. We can come to know God through the heart of nature, and that there are incessant revelations of God , and each of us are receivers of this knowledge through the immensity of the cosmos. There is something both terrifying and intriguing about knowledge that goes beyond the usual ways we perceive truth. Often we resist these ways of knowing because they are terrifying. I resist the idea that mind can control matter because then we begin to accept that I can control the illnesses that befall me, and if I thought right I could cure myself. I am no Christian Scientist. Yet I want my faith to be open to other ways of knowing things, and that we often know truth through intuition and feeling, as well as through data and information.

I think it is useful for us to share some of these experiences with each other. That way we do not feel alone or insane, but we also acknowledge that in faith there must be a myriad number of ways to perceive truth. We often hear about mothers of babies being more alert to their breathing and behavior at night, but this is true of fathers as well. In a way this is a kind of remote perception, and we begin to see that we may know what another sees or feels at even greater distances. We may know when our child is in pain. There is little in our faith history about admitting such non rational moments because it seems out of bounds or bizarre, and this is a boundary that our faith erects. Perhaps we need to be more open to making our boundaries more flexible, more open, at least to talk about them, and give them some credence. Years ago people used to talk about peak experiences. Often these kinds of religious experiences were related to sexual experiences, that is feelings of ecstasy or becoming one with another. Many young people when I came of age talked about drug experiences as ways to facilitate alternative experiences of knowing.

One of my colleagues spoke of his LSD trip as the greatest religious experience of his life. I took LSD on more than one occasion, and while it was not Lucy in the Sky with diamonds, there were swirling clouds in the shape of apes as I contemplated evolutionary consciousness. Perhaps of greater significance were the amazing colors and merging patterns that heightened awareness. I became one with my surroundings. It is sometimes said that these deepest religious experiences are ways of feeling a merging with the universe. Last year was the 800th anniversary of the birth of Rumi, the Sufi poet. Rumi would say turn more to your hearts, to your feelings so that we might have an expanded means of knowing. What this means is that the deepest truths we know in life are related to love. Data and knowledge alone are not enough, and are most useful when we feel a passion for them, such as in history or music. The intimacy of truly knowing has to do with love - that is why we can read a mind, or know if a statue is real, or visit a dying parent who is far away. Our religious ancestors realized that we perceive these great truths in loving those things, or those people that are all part of the physical universe. In that love you become more than you, in that love you merge with the universal love. That is the most extraordinary knowing of all. Your love becomes part of the greater love. And when you feel that love, you open yourself up to other ways of knowing. We let in truth in its many guises, and we can echo Rumi that we can cross the dividing lines to how or what we may know, to new ways of exploring, and the world of the possible opens up.
“Come!.. Whatever you may be, come no matter what…
Whether you are an infidel, a fire worshipper or an idolater…
Whether you have foresworn a hundred times,
Whether a hundred times you have broken your oath…
This door here is no door for despair;
Come as you are !”
Come and know love.

Closing words - from Carl Sandburg - The People, Yes

Between the finite limitations of the five senses
and the endless yearnings of man (and woman) for the beyond
the people hold to the humdrum bidding of work and food
while reaching out when it comes their way
for lights beyond the prisms of the five senses,
for keepsakes lasting beyond any hunger or death.
This reaching is alive.
The panderers and liars have violated and smutted it.
Yet this reaching is alive yet
for lights and keepsakes.

Switching Heads

February 10, 2008

The First Parish of Watertown

The Rev. Andrea Greenwood

Opening Words: Walter Dean Myers

Blues, blues, blues
what you mean to me?
Are you my pain and misery.
or my sweet, sweet company?
Going on a journey
looking for my supposed-to-be
I’m riding that blues highway,
and Lord, it’s riding me
I heard the top deck groaning, and heard the ocean roar
Heard my brother crying till I couldn’t hear no more
Ain’t it hard when your brother’s crying
and you don’t hear him anymore?
Blues, won’t you free me,
let all this suffering cease?
Give me a feather pillow, and let me rest in peace.
Blues, blues, blues
sliding through the night
If you’re looking for a soft bed,
I’ll leave on the light

Readings from Desirable Daughters, Bharati Mukherjee

The city was Calcutta in the late fifties and early sixties. My American friends in California say “God, Tara, Calcutta!” as though to suggest I have returned to earth after a journey to one of the outer planets. It’s one of those cities in the world with negative cachet, a city to escape, one of those hellholes made famous by Mother Teresa and mindless comparisons in the American press: Dirtier than Calcutta. Crueler than Calcutta. Poorer than Calcutta. I grew up in a city that never pitied itself, a city that deflected all the abuse. Insults were the badge of our superiority, proof of others’ ignorance. Someone in the family, deep in the gloom of East Bengal shortly after the first world war, long before independence and the partition riots, had the courage or the despair to announce, “Baba, I am going to Calcutta.” Or some desperate father hopped the train to Howrah station, his wife and children trailing behind him. Blessed be his memory.
The city I knew was (and remains) the magnet of hope for the world’s third largest population, the target of all their ambition. To be a native born Calcuttan was (and is) to be a Londoner, a Parisian, a New Yorker, at the zenith. To be a playwright, a movie maker, a painter, is (or was) to aspire to have one’s work on the North Calcutta stage, the Chowringhee screens, the South Calcutta galleries, and to be talked about by the only critics and audience in the world who matter. Businessmen aspired to join the Bengal Club. Matrons fought to be seen at the Turf Club during the racing season. To be Calcutta bhadra lok, as we Bhattacharjees were, was to share a tradition of leadership, sensitivity, achievement, refinement and beauty that was the envy of the world. That is the legacy of the last generation of Calcutta high society, a world into which we three sisters were born, and from which we have made our separate exits.

Reading: from Days and Nights in Calcutta Clark Blaise

Family, family, family. In India all is finally family. If we in the West suffer from the nausea of disconnnectedness, alienation, anomy; the Indian suffers the oppression of kinship. If our concept of the hero implies isolation, risk, and such “manly” virtues as bravery, silence, and fleshly mortification, the Indian concept of the hero is tied up with social duty and an almost feminine form of solicitousness and availability. We naturally link maturity with independence and self creation, the holiness of the quest for identity and self assertion. We consider a young man’s break with his family “an inevitable part of growing up.” Still at home? we might ask a 20 year old, implying “what’s wrong with you?” Parents of such a child might even feel guilty.
In India of course, identity never has to be sought; it is the lone certainty; and one’s identity determines nearly everything.

....the sidewalks are cracked and teeming: the old six story sandstone buildings of the last century accommodate themselves over the “footpath” resulting in endless arcades of one man shops that line both sides of the shaded sidewalk. Belts, socks, shirts, ties, appliances, mechanical toys, fried and roasted foods, sugar cane presses, watermelon vendors, and all the various products lifted from ships and offered to the foreign sailors; ten feet of faded Agatha Christie titles mixed with strays from law and stenographic libraries, druggists, sari shops, sandal makers, paan wallahs offering their succulent cold betel leaves, an art gallery, people of every age and every community and every social class, all in a hurry, and the din from a thousand taxis honking and a thousand vendors calling... Yet in that crowded avenue, people still sleep. Others sit and beg. No one moves them or complains. Life is flow in India; everything moves, though it moves at its own pace. Everything eventually proceeds at the rate of its slowest member. It is serene. If it went any faster, the whole system would break down somewhere else. In the true center of the city, the streets cannot be cleared.
This is where I begin to love it. It was because I learned quickly in India that commerce and community are the same thing, and both are of the street. India alerted me to the basic social value, buying and selling -- knowing goods and providing goods -- the original reason that people came together.

Sermon

Did you ever have one of those books in which the pages are cut in three sections, allowing you to switch out the body of a princess with the head of a deep sea diver, or give frog feet to some pompous looking guy in a suit? We had one, and a segmented cylindrical puzzle as well -- twisting the top changed the heads; human, animal, male, female, young, old. What goes with what? Why? Specific body parts find their way into the appropriate category -- top, middle, bottom -- and we absorb this structure and all its subsets, and the idea of completeness as well. While giving you the illusion that anything is possible, the process reinforces the idea of what things are supposed to be; that identity is fixed. If there are boots on the ground and a ten gallon hat sheltering a body from the sky, anything but the holstered middle would be absurd -- as some of the reactions to the movie Brokeback Mountain reminded us. How can identity be simultaneously that fragile, and iconic?

In a few weeks, it will be twenty years since an overly educated, multiply degreed 26 year old blue blooded Boston Brahmin flew out of JFK and landed in the capital of Bengal. Or, it will be two decades since a blue collar kid from north of Boston, who hadn’t lived anywhere, really, for eight years -- bouncing from dorm rooms to live-in nanny jobs, church basements and rooming houses on Chicago’s south side -- left New York City on tickets purchased from an ad in the back of the Times, and found herself 37 hours later, after a brief but memorable stop in Amman, at the wonderfully named Dum Dum airport in Calcutta.

Roger and Judy Kamm asked me to address this topic, of my trip to India. Revisiting your younger self in a time and a place that have vanished carries the pleasure and some of the risk of time travel.1 The Calcutta I spent time in is gone now, and really, so is the person who went wandering. The airport is named after Chandra Bose now; the cities have new non-colonial names. I am not entirely comfortable speaking about the experience, perhaps partially because it is a bit unmanageable, and each memory or event is connected to another, but more fundamentally because I am afraid (terrified, really) of being self-indulgent. There is some, maybe too much, allure in thinking about those months. India is about identity for me, in extremely complex ways; ways that encompass deeply personal events as well as historical cultural interchange. I have heard people describe India with the kaleidoscope image, and understand why -- and it is not just a visual jumble that we try to construct a pattern from. It is a complete sensory immersion of smells, temperatures, and sounds as well -- to say nothing of thoughts and feelings. I try to slide the pieces into place; but they resist my attempt to shape them.

When I was young my mother used to muse that perhaps I was reincarnated from someone who had lived in colonial or revolutionary Concord. She didn’t have anyone specific in mind; she just suggested that I had, at one point, lived in Concord, with a body different from the one I had in this life. The reason -- if there can be a reason for this kind of thinking -- was that I seemed to know my way around Concord. For whatever reason, I was at home there in several dimensions: I had an odd grasp of the geography, and of the changes in historical eras, and I was in love with the literature of the place -- all of it; from Margaret Sydney and the Five Little Peppers to Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott.

The meaning of all of this is (perhaps) subjective, but for those who are rooted in New England Unitarianism, there is the possibility that this personal narrative is really more of a testimonial; is the reflection of a belief system that was delivered to children who grew up in Unitarian Universalist congregations in the 60s and 70s. Those were the days when religion was “caught, not taught” and so there are no actual lessons about these things that I can recall -- just a pervasive sense that we UUs were on the side of right, but frequently misunderstood, and that what is in our minds is somehow more real than the world around us; that we know more and understand more than we can even begin to comprehend, so we just have to trust ourselves, and turn ourselves over to the world. We did not talk about Concord as Mecca, or liken the shores of Walden Pond to the steppes of the Ganges. Yet somehow, I absorbed the place anyway, so that when I went to college and heard about this town from non-church people -- from respectable, academic folks -- it was a revelation. I felt at home, understood, driven to learn more, comforted to know that this center of inexplicable meaning to me was also meaningful to others -- was objectively important. This little experience has carried me through every part of my life since, in ways that show academically and professionally, but also in complex personal ways. In the end, this was what took me to India -- the Sunday school messages I absorbed, the sense of dislocation I often felt, and the academic background I developed in history and philosophy.

Those of you who know me understand my essentially practical nature. I purchased my cheap tickets to Calcutta when the newly appointed dean of the theological school I attended decided that he was not going to let me graduate, even though I had enough credits. The reason, he said, was that even though I had fulfilled the residency requirements, I had not spent enough time on campus. There may have been some truth to that -- full time tuition allowed us to take as many courses as we wanted, so I had been taking extra classes in order to finish a four year degree in three. But his real reason was marketing. In order to attract potential students, more current students were needed. Particularly female students. I was the only one in my class, and for a time the only one in the school. It is easier for me to explain the financial reasoning than the more personal response, but I think money is part of the story. I did not have a family with financial resources. I had taken out loans and worked the entire time I was in school. This dean’s decision -- made for reasons that really had nothing to do with me and yet were fundamentally about my identity -- were going to have a profound effect on me financially. It meant that instead of graduating in six months and settling in a church, where I would get paid, I was going to have to pay tuition and housing expenses for another year and a half. At the time, I was living in New York City, doing my internship at the Community Church. I loved it. I did not want to go back to seminary for so long; back to a place where the pieces didn’t quite fall into place; where I didn’t quite fit in. The top of the robed clergy person was supposed to be male. I existed in the brochure in order to show other possibilities.

My boyfriend at the time was living in Bangladesh, writing his dissertation on a 19th century Hindu scholar with Unitarian connections. I had had a friend in seminary who was a Hindu Unitarian, and was back in Calcutta starting a ministry. I did the math, and even with the flight figured in, it was cheaper to go to India for six months than to rent a room in Chicago. It was an act of aggression -- You think I haven’t spent enough time on campus; well, I think I will go to the other side of the globe. But it was also a desperate act; made out of a sense of not being understood or valued by my own faith community, and of grappling with how deep that sense of dislocation was, and whether or not it could be repaired. Intended or not, the message I got was that real Unitarian Universalists did not have to bother thinking about money. I considered myself a real UU. Church school had been a very important source of community and development for me, and my family has been Unitarian for many generations. But in my immediate family, money concerns were not abstract. My parents married as teenagers and lived up to every ideal we profess. They stayed married. They provided for their children, and educated us. And they did it the only way available to them, which was manual labor. But here I was studying for the ministry in a religion that somehow was not getting that reality. A casual comment by a fellow student sums it up: My boyfriend had come home with me one vacation, and back in Chicago was telling folks about the experience, which I believe involved the use of the Armstrong Power Shovel, a piece of equipment powered solely by one’s strong arms. This man, who went on to head the Department of Ministry, said “Wow, Andrea. I never would have guessed. I thought you were one of us.”

Not many years before this trip, I read a book called Blue Highways. William Least Heat Moon documented his travel across the country using only the old roads; the ones that were main streets before interstate highways were developed in the 1950s and 60s. Blue Highways isn’t really about travel, though; it is about identity; about the possibility of finding some continuity between the self and one’s ancestors. In Heat Moon’s case, some of these ancestors were Native Americans, and he felt cut off from a part of himself because he had grown up with no knowledge of their traditions; their experiences On those old blue roads, the possibility of traveling back a generation or two existed, and so did the possibility of coming more fully to life. India was like this, too-- full of direct encounters among people who blended commerce and community; who never could imagine a person so removed from his family that he would have to go talk to strangers hoping to find himself. Those old highways are like veins; providing inroads to the past; making connections among us. It is a creation story of blood instead of breath; of coming to life in addition to being given life; and it happens over time and space; it happens out in the world as well as in our own hearts and minds. We are agents in our own creation, but we are tied to places; to people; to the past.

Last week I was talking to a psychologist who has worked with me over the years as we make sense of the needs of our children. Because of close to a decade of testing and developmental histories and plans and placements, Barbara literally knows more about me than does anyone else on earth -- but only as a parent; only as someone who is in relationship with school personnel and doctors and therapists. So I set aside practical concerns and tried to talk about myself, as someone whose head was once stuffed with a whole different skill set than what is in there now, and what that feels like. I am usually a pretty attentive person, but I was listening through layers and layers of internal noise. I have no idea how we got to this point in the conversation, but as Barbara began describing the work a friend of hers in Colorado does, rescuing people off the sides of mountains when they can go neither up nor down, I got lost in the image of a mountain, and how we had this poster that said “One mountain, many paths” in Sunday school, because a generation ago, we did not celebrate pluralism so much as we syncretized the world’s religions, to get to their essence. I was wondering what happens to Unitarian Universalists when we change the theology too frequently, and my mind wandered off to an awareness that Barbara had a vantage point that included options beyond up, down, or sitting there, and I did not. The reason is probably at least partially the kind of religion I grew up in, keeping in mind that I mean not only church itself, but the values of the faith that we lived at home as well. We are responsible for our own salvation. Approached from one angle, this is liberating -- we have free agency. It is a message of strength, and I have benefitted from it. But from another angle, this responsibility can be incredibly isolating and even punitive. Instead of relying on other people who are in a different position than we may be, the message is a variation of “you made your bed; now lie in it.” Emotionally, free will as a doctrine can bind us to our own minds unless we are clear that human drama is not intra-psychic. It is real, and often scary, painful, unmanageable; and the sorrows of the world really are just that -- of the world; of life. There is no burden that belongs legitimately to only one person.

Judy and Roger asked about courage; about getting up the nerve to live through decisions that require drastic change of us, but for me the drastic change was not about going or not going to Calcutta. It was about what part of my identity to embrace. I was part of a blue collar family for which I had tremendous respect; but which felt more than marginalized by the religious tradition I had allowed myself to be deeply shaped by. It wasn’t bravery that drove me to India; it was a need to explore the incredibly mixed message of destiny and free will, and how it is different for girls than boys; for people who are poor versus people who are not. Perhaps it was the final step for me towards ordination; choosing or being called to an identity that fundamentally alters my ties to everyone and everything. It was a way of isolating myself for a time; escaping the reach of all that was shaping me, so that I could become myself. In a way, it was the rescue Barbara described, but only partially: I could not move up or go back, or get off, so I made a move to the other side. And in the process I began an affiliation with a culture that I really only knew through ancient texts and current problems. My trip gave me a very human connection, which has changed my life.

There is a folk tale which reveals something that is true in Hinduism which is not true in other religious traditions. This story is used as a riddle to test those who would be king. A washer man marries the daughter of another washer man. One day the couple and the bride’s brother make a trip to a religious festival in honor of Parvati. The husband has no offering, and in a moment of religious fervor, he uses the sacrificial sword to behead himself and gives his head as a gift to the goddess. His brother-in-law enters the temple and sees the beheaded corpse, and in his grief, picks up the sword and beheads himself as well. Outside the temple, the wife and sister is growing anxious. Where is her husband? Where is her brother? Why don’t they return? Finally, she enters the temple and the sight is too horrific for her to bear. As she contemplates killing herself in despair, the goddess Parvati intervenes, and tells the woman she can bring the men back to life by reattaching their heads to their bodies. In the confusion of everything, however, the heads get put atop the wrong bodies. This story ends with a question: "Which of these two mixed up people is now her husband?"

Traditional Hinduism has an answer, but I am not sure that the answer is the issue. It is the fact that the question is raised. Identity is fixed in India; it is no mistake that the washer man marries the daughter of a washer man. And yet there is no other culture that has stories in which heads are removed and placed on other bodies. Perhaps the greatest example of this is Ganesh, the elephant god, whose existence so enraged the Muslim invaders that India has been shaped by religious warfare ever since. Not only did the Hindus worship idols, their gods were comprised of animal parts! Ganesh came to exist when Parvati, left home alone in the Himalayas while her husband Shiva was busy dancing on top of the world to keep it spinning, grew lonely. She fashioned herself a baby from some clay, and brought him to life. One day the boy was guarding a pool of water while Parvati bathed, and Shiva returned. As he approached the pool, the boy told Shiva to stop. Unused to taking orders, and not knowing the child, Shiva grew angry. Without warning, he drew his sword and cut off the boy’s head. Parvati heard the commotion, saw her headless child, and fell sobbing to the ground. Shiva realized that he had done something terrible but did not know what it was. He struggled to understand his grieving, angry wife, and learned that in his determination to reach her, he had killed his own child. Shiva begged Parvati to tell him what he could do to redeem himself, and she said, 'Go out into the forest and cut off the head of the first living creature you see and bring it back. Fit the head on our child and give it life. That is what I want.’ Shiva found an elephant; and thus Ganesh came to life.

Hinduism says that the head defines identity. The answer to the riddle is that the body with the head of the husband is, indeed, the husband. This is supposed to show that the intellect rules emotions and spirit, which rule the body. But the story of Ganesh complicates this lesson. Ganesh is the embodiment of imperfection; created by a woman from dirt, unrecognized by his own father, and pasted together with the first animal that wandered by. His existence alone would cause questions about the theology: if the head rules the body, wouldn’t Ganesh be like an elephant? But Ganesh is not only unlike an animal, he is the god of wisdom and intellect. He served as the scribe for the Mahabarata, the epic Sanskrit poem that explains the mythic origins of India. He is also a symbol of good luck, and is always the first idol placed in a new Hindu home.

A few years ago, an Indian playwright recast the riddle about the switched heads. In his version, things moved on from the moment of high drama. The woman purposefully placed the more handsome head on the more beautiful body, creating one man with all of the desirable physical attributes, and the other with none. But the two men do not remain as she created them. They erode each other’s advantages, and return to the regular, inadequate people they were, so the man with the better head soon is inhabiting his worn out body; and the man whose head was less attractive grows strong again. Who we are is stable; somewhat immutable, even if we switch heads; yet there is not really any such thing as an individual soul. We are all one another. It is a story that points us back to Ganesh, and the source of wholeness for humanity. It is not achieved through dualisms or trying to reconcile opposites, but through blending; including all things. This is why Ganesh is always shown with a big round belly; it contains the whole world; and it is also why he has one foot on the ground and one foot in the air -- he is of the earth, and of the heavens as well.

I left New York with no romantic notions about India, or wholeness. I was used to homelessness; I was trained to help only through institutions and never individually; and I didn’t have any illusions that I was going to help anyone. I was well-armed; prepared to see leprosy and children begging; aware that religion was incendiary and that the Salman Rushdie books I had just read were enough to get me arrested. I was ready to learn, and observe. What I was not prepared for was how at home I felt, how the little girl my mother recognized in Concord could resurface after having been submerged; attempting to document sources for springs that would remain hidden. The number one thing I felt in Calcutta was that this was a people or a culture which did not mix up intelligence and affluence, and which understood the role of luck in determining who we are. I am sure it is odd for a highly educated Western woman to talk about finding freedom in Calcutta, but there was something that spoke deeply to me there in a way which validated my existence. I certainly did not fit in; in fact, I literally did not ever see another Western woman in Calcutta. But in this culture which made no claims for autonomy at all, while we we propose an ability to shape our own identity that is extremely radical, there was a sense of being able to meet people without them expressing surprise at who I was. Calcutta granted me complexity and did not call it contradiction.

And so I do not talk so much about India, but the experience lives in me with a richness that strips away time and language, and leaves me feeling connected; gives me inroads to places that may not show. When I was twelve, my father got a job building the parking lot for Walden Pond. His heavy machinery scraped the earth and contoured the land so that a bunch of cars could park, but it would all look natural. Five years later, I worked at Walden Pond and so I know that the sand is trucked in. Pilgrims who pick up rocks in the belief that they have a piece of Henry’s foundation to bring home and support their own castles in the air are duped; their theft is planned for. Prisoners from MCI-Concord on work release ferry them across Route 126 and dump fresh buckets out at the site each day. My knowledge of this place is not romantic. Yet. The place persists; rises up in me. It is richer for this reality, not diminished by it. Like Calcutta, it reminds me that imagination still has power; that who we are and who we will be cannot change beyond our own capacity for recognition, but that what we do is full of possibility.

I know people who were devastated by witnessing some of what is true in the world; who really couldn’t recover from seeing reality; who could not handle what poverty looks like up close. I did not react that way. Calcutta is a city where thousands upon thousands of people live, breathe, sleep and die on the pavement, begging for food, and yet living there for a time was a way of saving money for me. How can that not mean I am lucky, as well as strong enough to accept my luck? Life in India is fundamentally about duty, not fulfillment. No one pretends that the tragedy of life is not real there, but it is human; it is a common bond among all people; not deserved or parsed for meaning or viewed as a crisis which alienates people from what they believe to be their “real” lives. There is no heroic triumph over adversity; no separation between the afflicted and the well. You can switch heads, but it does not matter; your life will be the same, and you must go live it.

It would be nice to stop there, but it would be dishonest. Six months exposure to this culture did not replace the messages of New England WASP-ishness I absorbed and stand for. And a very funny thing happened when I returned from India. My boyfriend and I left separately, and I was back in Chicago when friends began saying, “Andy’s back, Andy’s back.” None of them had seen him in more than a year. I looked at who they were pointing to, and said “That is not Andy!” Yes it is, I was told. And I said, “Look, I was just with him two weeks ago, and that is not him!” But it was. He had shaved his beard and cut his hair and got new glasses, and everybody else could tell it was still him, but I could not see it.

Perhaps that is the moral of this tale -- we are that vulnerable to being hidden from one another even if we are not lost to the world, and so we had best learn how to teach each other to see.

Closing Words from the Rig Veda, Michael Myers translation

The nonexistent was not; the existent was not at that time. The atmosphere was not nor the heavens which are beyond. What was concealed? Where? In whose protection? Was it water? An unfathomable abyss?

There was neither death nor immortality then. There was not distinction of day or night. That alone breathed windless by its own power. Other than that there was not anything else. Darkness was hidden by darkness in the beginning. All this was an indistinguishable sea. That which becomes, that which was enveloped by the void, that alone was born through the power of heat.

This was the first discharge of thought. Sages discovered this link of the existent to the nonexistent, having searched in the heart with wisdom. Their line [of vision] was extended across; what was below, what was above? There were impregnators, there were powers: inherent power below, impulses above.

Who knows truly? Who here will declare whence it arose, whence this creation? The gods are subsequent to the creation of this. Who, then, knows whence it has come into being?

Whence this creation has come into being; whether it was made or not; he in the highest heaven is its surveyor. Surely he knows, or perhaps he knows not.

“The Healing Community” by Mark W. Harris

First Parish of Watertown - February 3, 2008

Call to worship - Mark Harris

We have gathered again, a community of seekers who are recipients of the gift of life and all its wonders. We are here to celebrate these gifts of life - the relationships we have, the communities we build, the hope we have to hand on all that is entrusted to us, so that life might be renewed again and again.

We have gathered again because these gifts are never perfect. - relationships end, communities struggle, and what is given to us may become broken, and so we feel the burden of these gifts - to repair what is broken, to endure that which is painful, to mend that which is torn, to embrace that which must be accepted.

We have gathered again to be reminded that there is a greater love which holds us all, to feel that love as it is made manifest among us, and to give each other our blessings that our sorrows might be eased, our burdens lightened, and life itself made more beautiful by the opening of our hearts to each other.

Readings - “Parallel Play” by Tim Page from the New Yorker, 8/20/07 -
an article about the author’s Asperger’s Syndrome.

Anything related to the human body seemed to me bad news. In the fourth grade, when my affliction was most intense. I would be herded out to play kickball during our physical education classes. Teams were chosen, and I was embedded among the strongest kids, to provide some chance of even battle. In memory, it is forever bases loaded with two outs when my turn at the plate comes, and I am as well suited as a giraffe to meet the big red ball that rolls toward me with frightening speed.

Still, for a moment the same people who generally disdained or bullied me became my friends, cheering me on to hitherto unsuspected athletic glory. “You can do it, Tim!” If I could make the ball lose it gravity, as my best pal Annie, did so effortlessly with those balletic whomps from her long legs, I might redeem myself. Our gym teacher, Miss B--- scowling, beefy, and after four decades, the only person in the world I just might swerve to hit on a deserted road - had no such illusions and waited for the inevitable, with her festering contempt and ready whistle. Grinning stupidly, shirttail out and flapping, underwear pulled halfway up my back, I would lope toward the ball, which would eventually collide with my ankle or heel and the bounce off into the woods or into the waiting arms of the catcher. My chance was up, and I was a freak once more.

“So?” I wanted to scream. “There are things that I know; things that I can do. Can you name the duet from La Boheme that Antonio Scotti and Geraldine Farrar recorded in Camden, New Jersey on October 6, 1909? What was the New york address of D. W. Griffith’s first studio? How many books by David Graham Phillips have you read? Who was Adelaide Crapsey? I learned to play the entire Chopin Prelude in E Minor in a single night!” And then, tears, of course, and the taunts redoubled.

The class work, hardly less humiliating, was at least more private. If I wasn’t deeply interested in a subject, I couldn’t concentrate on it all - those dreadful algebra classes, those Bunsen burners, the mystifying and now deservedly extinct slide rule! Late in each semester, When it became obvious to me that I had no idea what I was supposed to have learned, I’d attend some makeup classes and try desperately to pay attention. As the teacher rattled on, I would grind my teeth, twirl the tops of my socks around my index finger - once I poked myself repeatedly through my pocket with a pin - anything to keep my mind engaged. But it was impossible; a leaf would fall outside the open window, or ‘d notice the pattern of the veins on a girl’s hand, or a shout form the playground would trigger a set of irresistible associations that carried me back to another day.

And then the dream was ruptured by the sound of a bell; the class was irrevocably over, and I knew no more about quadratic equations or beryllium than I did an hour before. Failure was now assured, and the countdown began to the Dies Irae, when my report card would land me in trouble again, for my father was incredulous that a boy who blithely recited the names and dates of the United states’ Presidents and their wives couldn’t manage to pass elementary math and science. I grew enormously fond of my father in later life, but he terrified me then. He lived until 2005, lng enough to recognize through my diagnosis, some of the problems that had vexed him throughout his own career and, better yet, to know and delight in my three children, to whom he showed a serene gentleness.

from Grief by Andrew Holleran

He’d had a terrible decade: having cared for, then buried, a lover, he’d nearly died after being diagnosed with cancer. Then, six months after the operation excising that, he had buried his mother - confined to a nursing home in Chicago the previous eight years; a fact I was reminded of when he suddenly said, in a strangely altered voice, as I sat down on the edge of the bed: “Could you just fluff my pillow first? And get the cold cream? I find cold cream so soothing on a day like this one!”
“I don’t see how you can joke like that.” I said.
“It’s easy,” he said. “She didn’t even recognize me the last two years. Besides, grief is useless after a certain point - don’t you agree?”
“I suppose so, I said, but everyone's point is different.”
“Of course,” he said, “but the sooner you get over it, the better. Because none of us has any time to waste, you know. I’m sure your mother didn't expect you to sit in that house down there for the rest of your life babysitting her figurines. You can’t sit shivah forever.”
“Yes, you can.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the only cure for grief is time, but some people need more than others - some people in fact may never have enough time. Not everyone can move on,” I said.
“Why not?” he said in a cool voice.
“Because grief is what you have after someone you love dies. It’s the only thing left of that person. Your love for, your missing, them. And as long as you have that, you’re not alone - you have them.”
“Not if you grieve,” I said. “Your grief is the substitute for their presence on earth. Your grief is their presence on earth.”


Sermon - “The Healing Community”

Hack Wilson stood about 5 feet, six inches tall, and weighed nearly two hundred pounds. He had an eighteen inch neck, and tiny little feet. It was once said that he was built along the lines of a beer keg, and not wholly unfamiliar with its contents. Has anyone here ever heard of Hack Wilson? I have a picture of Hack Wilson on the wall of our play room, along with other memorabilia from the Chicago Cubs. For those who love minutiae and facts, like me, Wilson holds the Major League record for Runs Batted In in a season, 190. Despite his girth, Wilson could swing a bat with the best of them. Wilson holds a special place on my walls most particularly because my mother’s brother Billy Verney, put together a scrapbook of pictures and newspaper articles in the summer of 1931. He was eleven. He died that year from peritonitis, after his appendix burst, and they could not save him. Years later his collection was given to me. My mother, and her father never talked very much about Billy, and this tragedy that had struck their family when my mother was thirteen. It was a tremendous sadness that they learned to live with. It ended his young life, but it also changed their lives forever. Henceforth my mother became an only child. And my grandfather had to put away his glove, never to play catch with his son again.

Hack Wilson calls to memory the uncle I never met who loved baseball, and my mother and grandfather most especially. They, like all of us, were acquainted with sorrow. Theirs came upon them suddenly, unexpectedly, as was also true for my grandfather years later, when his wife, the grandmother I never met died at age 53 from pancreatic cancer, the same disease that would eventually stalk and kill my mother. In the novel Grief, Andrew Holleran leaves his home after the death of his mother, a woman he has taken care of for some time. He seeks respite with a temporary teaching job in Washington, DC. Before he leaves his class for the final time he wants to tell them what he has learned about life, almost a warning “that whether your husband was assassinated beside you as sat watching a third rate play, or you tripped on a rug and broke your neck, or were infected in a moment of sexual passion (or boredom or loneliness) by a fatal virus, life had a way of flipping, and that something, sometime, somewhere. almost certainly would flip it for them, to one degree or another . . .” But he can’t bring himself to tell the class. It’s too morbid. He has learned from reading Mary Todd Lincoln’s letters that “you should go out every day and enjoy yourself , she wrote, “you are so very young and should be as gay as a lark. Trouble comes soon enough, my dear child, and you must enjoy life, whenever you can.”

While we could all learn from Mrs. Lincoln to enjoy the brief moments we have, it is those flips of life, that trouble we encounter, that tends to shape us. My colleague Mark Belletini writes that the word “theos”, which helps to make up theology, and we sometimes translate as God talk, has a certain meaning in Greek. The Greek word for God is the noun form of a verb which means “to come out of.” We might think of our theology as trying to give meaning to what we come out of, our biography if you will. In that context we may think of Jesus, growing up without a father, and then giving voice to that longing in his concept of having a loving daddy who would comfort and take care of him. What we come from reflects who we are. Those we encounter and love shape us. During this last month my former father-in-law died. I was divorced from his daughter 25 years ago, but my son Joel, who is now 28, was a bond that remained, even though I saw his grandfather rarely during that time. I saw Joel’s struggle with this grief, and remembered my own relationship with the man, lost in the rancor of a dissolving family. He was the high school athletic director, and after he died, I recalled that smiling, red faced man, clapping and cheering for me, as I ran for the goal line for one of the very few touchdowns I ever scored in competition. I enjoyed that brief moment before the trouble that followed.

This flipping of life almost marked the experience of one of the pillars of my congregations in Milton, who died last week. Her name was Barbara Stebbins, a descendant of several Unitarian ancestors on both sides of the Atlantic, one of whom is profiled in my dictionary. She was one who appreciated intellectual sermons, and always corrected any grammatical errors I made. If I said, Andrea and I, she would search me out after service to say, no, no, you meant to say, Andrea and me. Years before she had been on a cruise with her husband, and he had fallen overboard one night. Suddenly he was gone. His body was never recovered. I had never heard this about her life until one Sunday when I gave a sermon on grief, and talked not about getting over grief, but instead about how grief always remains with us. Sure, like her, most of us go on with our lives, we can enjoy ourselves, and find a satisfying existence, but there is still a part of our hearts that feels a certain sadness. It is what May Sarton calls, “our mourning without end.” This grief comes, of course from the relationships we weave together in our lives; it is the where we have come from. Andrew Holleran reminds us in his novel that part of love is seeing those we love suffer. We can’t save people from these illnesses or suffering or death. These are turnings that come to us all, but we can be cognizant of how we treat each other while we are still here.

This grief is not only about those who have died, it is about the many losses, the many turns that inform where we have come from. Perhaps the life we might have lived, but did not. The death of my former father-in-law reminded me of the unexpected changes in our lives where we lose relationships that were once important to us. There are these losses that we learn to live with, and while they remain in our hearts, we come to heal as best as we can from these turns of life. So we all become acquainted with sorrow, the lost relationship, the illness, the grief of each loss as they touch and reshape and change our lives. I think of this especially in the context of why we come to church. Often when we ask ourselves that question, we may respond that we want to give our children a faith to live by, or may say that we want to be called to be our best selves or to serve others, or even to think about important issues, but I think there is usually a deeper agenda that we hope our religious faith will help us with. When we come to church, we also lay our pain on the altar of the community. I believe how we respond to each other, in both word and deed can make a tremendous difference in the healing process, and whether we can be a healing community.

Each one of us makes a theological response to the ways we think about human nature. There is often a particular focus on wrong doing. Those of us who grew up Christians are given the impression that any suffering we undergo is endured for a reason, and that there is a larger purpose to it. I think this is a problem for both liberals and conservatives, but in different ways. I suppose emanating from the idea of original sin, is the concept that if we have something wrong with us, an illness perhaps, then we have done something wrong to have caused that. Some of us need to come to church just to hear that we are not evil, and that we are not the cause of our afflictions. We may find myriad ways to blame ourselves. There is no sense in beating ourselves up for the ways we behaved in the past. We can change those things if we choose to, but sometimes we even blame ourselves for not intuiting or sensing the onset of an illness or of a failing relationship. Christian theology teaches that suffering is redemptive, or that specifically Jesus’ dying on the cross takes care of sin, and everything will be healed or saved. We seem to feel a need to say that suffering has a purpose, when in many ways we need to accept that it is part of the natural process of life, and we simply feel its trials more severely when the suffering is our own or of someone we love. And this is even more difficult to accept if it seems untimely like my Mother’s brother, or Mrs. Stebbins. How do we reconcile this with what we wish was fair? But who said life was fair? Human communities create conflicts and accidents, and human bodies don’t conform to perfect laws of health and wholeness. Everything is born from context and timing, and even chance.

So generally speaking the liberal must say, don’t believe that what happens to you is planned or intended by any larger force. People become ill, and life takes painful turns that are unpredictable. Where we come from, our theos, may tend to make us respond to these turns with either it is my fault or their fault, or it just happened, as an accident or quirk of nature, or perhaps it was merely an inevitable consequence of aging. That being said, who must the liberal rely upon for affirmation and support as we confront these changes of life? The simple answer is: each other or the larger community.

The liberal response may be more complex than it seems. While I learned in my Christian background that my bad behavior needed redemption, and coming to a UU Church helped relieve me of that burden of self-loathing, my new theology needed a more balanced view of nature and human nature instead of simply moving from sinful to everything is good and beautiful, and will work out fine. Sue Twombly recently shared with me a book called, Compassion as a Subversive Activity by David Urion. He is especially concerned as a pediatrician with children who have neurological disorders, something I know a little bit about personally, and have struggled with in terms of understanding, acceptance, and finding possible, even temporary relief from complex problems and suffering. He prefers disorder over disabled, and his reasoning is that these children's lives are not ordered as creation would have them be. While we have to be wary of the concept of divine intent here, it is helpful to see that with the term disabled, we view the child individually as the sort of person they are. There is something wrong with them. With disorder, Urion says, the problem is not the child, but that there is a disruption in the relationship between the child and the community. Persons are disordered to the extent that they are not accepted into the community. If they are accepted into the community, whatever illness or condition they have will not cease. It persists and still needs to be treated, but the disorder will end because they are restored to fullness within the community.

This kind of healing acceptance is not as simple as it sounds though. We might think initially that liberals are known for their smart, bright, even perfect children. If we fail to have that kind of child, there is a kind of silence that pervades the conversation. How do we accept that we don’t have the kind of child we were “suppose “ to have who we can drive to academic excellence? Say for instance your child is Tim Page, who wrote the article in the New Yorker about his Asperger’s Syndrome. He talks about the herding, the pressure, the humiliating work, and the inability for anyone to embrace or affirm his skills despite his affliction. We see at the end of the reading how his father had suffered with many of these same problems, but could not cope until he had grandchildren whom he could embrace with a serene gentleness. Page recalls how he was afraid of his father’s judgments, but moreover that, despite how much he has achieved with his life, he is also fully aware of how isolated and miserable he has continued to feel with his affliction. His sadness does not go away, nor is it fixed.

Yet he does help us see different stages to a healing process. We can see with Page that despite the traumas of society, there must at least be some form of personal and relational acceptance. As with any illness, we do not exist within a vacuum. An illness affects not only the person who is suffering, but all those who are in relationship with that person. And it is not only the person who suffers, even though they must bear the direct burden. All of us feel the affliction. Parents must deal with anger and frustration on both the public and private ends of things. I learned a kind of stoic response to such illnesses. It is up to the individual or the family to bear their pain, and not talk about it with others, and certainly, as one of my members in Milton once said when I tried to institute joys and sorrows into the service, we do not talk of that kind of thing in church. We do not share our burdens or our trials. I am struck by the isolation a person or a family feels if they do not share what sort of illness they are dealing with. Acceptance means more than silence about this affliction, it means an acknowledgment of how much grieving is going on. Look at Page’s father.
Acceptance leads to the challenge of doing what is right. I suspect the stereotypical liberal response might be similar to what our pediatricians once said to Andrea and me, “Everybody’s got something.” While it was a way to affirm that we should not feel alone, and that nobody is perfect, it minimizes what needs to be done in order to restore order to a terribly disordered life. You are really saying, oh, everybody’s good. It’s ok. Our inclination is to think there is a solution to everything, and that if we get the right doctors, or the right medicine, or the right learning plan that everything will be all right. This fails to take into account possible human inability to come up with a workable solution. We are desperate to know if taking certain medications or education plans will be the silver bullet to cure my child of his/her affliction. But sometimes we simply do not know what is best. And this is where the community can really implement the healing we can find no where else. People want to be able to say, You have wonderful children. They want to put a positive spin on an affliction because it is so hard to sit with and endure suffering. So what may be truly healing in a liberal context is not simply to say yes, all children are wonderful, as important as that is. It is that in their disorder they continue to suffer, and there may not be an individual answer to make it better, but that we will do all we can to bring this affliction into the accepting order of this community. Some months back, Kathleen Bond wrote in the Globe about her son’s complex suffering with bipolar disorder. There is a desperateness for help that no language of how wonderful the child is, or the platitudes that someone will do something to relieve his suffering will help. She writes, “in all the noise of conflicting solutions, I can still celebrate my child in his incredible complexity, and remind myself that I am trying to do the best for him.”

We try to find all the best medical and educational and psychiatric help we can for those who suffer, but if the answers are not clear or are complex, then the healing comes within the community not to say they are wonderful, or that it will be all right, but to affirm us as we endure this suffering, and perhaps things will turn right, or not, but in that affirming we have witnessed the eternal and enduring witness of love and compassion. I think some of this feeling is portrayed in the movie, “Lars and the Real Girl.” This is a sort of oddball romantic comedy about a lonely young man in Wisconsin, who lives with his brother Gus and the brothers wife, Karin in their converted garage. Somehow he manages to keep an office job, but he is clearly unusual, and has difficulty with relationships, frequently resisting dinner with his family. They ask him at work, “Where’s the girl friend?” He shyly responds that he doesn’t have one. This changes when he orders a life size anatomically correct doll over the internet. Bianca comes to stay. This has all the makings of something bizarre, and indeed Lars is called crazy by his brother. Gus asks the psychiatrist how to fix him, but the wise therapist says that they should go along with it, and make Bianca feel at home. When the community questions the insanity of this, they are reminded of several other incidents of more than odd behavior among them, and Bianca is taken in as one of the community. She eats, parties, and befriends others, as everyone bends over to make her feel at home, all in the course of this therapeutic working out of Lar’s disorder. We hear the expected comments, “I wish I had a woman who didn’t talk.” But by truly accepting him, healing occurs. Perhaps it is his brother who informs us best of what has occurred in this context. He says you grow up when you decide what is right for everybody, and not just for you, even when it hurts.

Many years ago when my son Joel was born, we were told that he might have swallowed infected amniotic fluid, and would not survive. After days in the intensive care unit, we learned that he would be fine. It was probably my first wake up call that life can take terrible turns, and we can find ourselves in the valley of the shadow of death, or serious illness, or chronic condition. In the context of that great fear of the worst kind of turn in my life, it was the loving arms of my church community who said don’t be afraid, we will hold you up with our love whatever occurs. We do our caring in the context of the communities that affirm us. Too often our public institutions are not able to understand or offer the resources we need. It is a world where people want rigid answers, ending points, or fixes to suffering, and do not offer human compassion or love or a deeper understanding of complex disorders or illnesses, especially ones for which there are no answers. I want my church community to be that place of healing where we can welcome those who lives are disordered in some way by the world they live in. I want a community where we are gentle with one another, so that we might acknowledge the continuing pain that marks where we have all come from, and allows us to rest it here on the arms of, and in the hearts of the community. Remember how I said that theos represents where we come from. I came from a world where we didn’t talk about such things, and people like Lars or Tim Page were seen as disordered, to ever remain disordered. Theologically we must acknowledge suffering, and continue to do so, even when it continues to exist and there are no easy answers. Sometimes we sit in the valley of the shadow, and only know that love protects us, and it must be enough. Sometimes in grief, people have difficulty letting go, because the grief is, as Andrew Holleran says, the substitute for the person’s presence on earth. It is their presence. But that love that we hold on to, that picture from the past, continues to tell us that there is this deeper love, and we should not let it go, even as we start a new life after a loss, after recovering from an illness, even in the midst of a respite from an ever recurring chronic situation. Love is what you have come from, and what you will learn from. May our sufferings and our sorrows whatever form they take - in grief or loss, loneliness or desperation, be something we can lay on the altar of the community - to be accepted, not embarrassed - to be held, not pushed away - to be affirmed, not judged or rejected - then we will have created our own theos out of our own lives, for we shall be the community of love.

Closing Words from Wayne Arnason

Take courage friends.
The way is often hard, the path is never clear,
and the stakes are very high.
Take courage.
For deep down, there is another truth;
you are not alone.