MLK Jr.: Lessons in Leadership

Tomorrow is a special day in the life of the nation. We celebrate the man who said, when civil rights marchers were facing the dogs and clubs and fire hoses of Birmingham, “We must face the forces of hate with the power of love.” He said, “All people are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” He said, “I have a dream.”

Monday, we celebrate this great man, Martin Luther King, Jr. And then comes Tuesday. On Tuesday–not far from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, site of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech—Barack Obama will be inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States. “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible,” he said back in November, on the night of his historic election, “If there is anyone out there who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer. […] It’s the answer that led those who’ve been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.”

What celebrations are before us. What high points in our nation’s history. The dream of racial and social justice unfolding. Though much more remains to happen, still—how wonderful to be alive in this time, to witness the parts coming true!  

But the journey has in no way been easy, or straight. Messy all the way, in America’s larger social life, but also in the personal lives of the leaders we are celebrating. The man who now says “Yes we can” once, as a sophomore in college, ridiculed such idealism, disbelieving that he or anyone else could make a true difference. Long before his political opponents charged him as all flash and no substance, he said, “Pretty words don’t make it so.” “That’s the last time you will ever hear another speech out of me.”

Can you personally relate to this irony? See in your own leadership story a time when you believed something couldn’t be done—or it could be done but by anybody but you—but then it WAS done, and the person who had done it was YOU?

“We are made for community,” says liberal Quaker and activist Parker Palmer, and so “leadership is everyone’s vocation.” That’s our focus today—exploring what this means, and doing it with the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. in the room, drawing on a messy moment in his leadership story to help us understand our own.

Here’s the story. Has to do with the time he was invited to become a part of the Montgomery bus boycott. As you may know, first there was Rosa Parks—her refusal to obey the bus driver’s demand that she give up her seat. What followed, as King’s biographer Marshall Frady describes it, was this: “That ‘No,” and Mrs. Parks’ arrest, quickly set off a spontaneous combustion among Montgomery’s black citizenry to boycott the city’s segregated bus system. Almost immediately, mimeographed leaflets calling for the boycott were coursing through the city’s black neighborhoods. But when, the night of Mrs. Parks’ arrest, [a local social activist by the name of E. D. Nixon] phoned [the young Martin Luther King Jr.] to ask him to join in the boycott movement, King, out of some uneasiness beyond just his absorption in his multiple other duties, seemed curiously reluctant: ‘Brother Nixon, let me think on it awhile, and call me back.’” Marshall Frady goes on to say that, “Concerned at King’s hesitation, Nixon called Ralph Abernathy…. Abernathy then called King to exhort him about the elemental importance of cooperating in this boycott effort. King finally agreed to lend it his support if it would not entail his having to aid in any of the organizing.” And that’s the story, with three things of note to lift up: the initial call to leadership, King’s hesitation to accept, and Ralph Abernathy’s intervention.

Starting with the call. What might it look like? As it did for King, sometimes the call takes the form of widespread social crisis, like the spontaneous combustion of the Montgomery bus boycott, against the larger backdrop of the burgeoning civil rights movement. This crisis gripped our congregation as well; we too were swept up in the civil rights movement, and in 1954 we affirmed desegregation, becoming the very first multiracial religious community in all of Atlanta. It represents one of the high points in our collective leadership story, here at UUCA.  

And may more highs ever be before us. Tomorrow, megachurch pastor Rick Warren will be the keynote speaker at Ebenezer Baptist Church as part of the MLK Day festivities. No doubt this is connected to his being invited to deliver the invocation at Tuesday’s inauguration, and both decisions, frankly, have been enormously controversial. Warren doesn’t just oppose gay marriage, he’s compared it to incest and pedophilia. He doesn’t just want to ban abortion, he’s compared women who terminate pregnancies to Nazis and the pro-choice position to Holocaust denial. Now Obama strongly disagrees with Warren here—he’s clearly said so. He’s invited him to deliver the invocation as a way of symbolizing his commitment to building bridges to parts of America he may strongly disagree with on some things but yet, on other things, there’s plenty of common ground—and right now, emphasizing common ground is the way forward. This is classic community organization strategy. Yet I would hate to see, because of this high-level emphasis on common ground, a tendency at the grassroots level towards apathy. You and I to stop disagreeing with Warren’s point of view because we’re afraid of being disagreeable. You and I to stop speaking out and letting people know who we are, what kind of place this is. People, our commitment to civil rights here at UUCA cannot merely be historical. It must be ongoing, and I believe that protecting abortion rights, as well as working for full social rights of GLBTQ people, constitute a key part of the civil rights movement that is here and now. Consider yourself called. Monday at 12:30 in the afternoon, the official MLK march will begin. Join us as we demonstrate our commitment to civil rights for ALL.    

It’s the call. We can hear it in the various crises and issues that trouble the larger world; but we can also hear it closer to home, when there is a crisis is our congregation, or a crisis in our family. A crisis of personal health. Even a crisis of spirit. You can feel two wolves inside you, in your heart, circling round and round, snapping at each other; one represents hatred, the other represents healing, and the one that you feed is the one that prevails. Something happens or does not happen in our congregation, for example, and you have an instant negative reaction—right here is a call to leadership. So what do you do next? Do you indulge your suspicions, cultivate your disgruntlements, insist on “my way or the highway,” believe that the rules don’t apply to you, perhaps even divide people into US vs. THEM, spread a spirit of war around rather than of peace? If you do this, you did NOT answer the call. You fed the wolf that destroys, not the wolf that heals. The leadership moment was missed.

We’ve got to be there when the moment comes. So much is at stake in how we use our influence. And it’s not always a matter of responding to crisis. Parker Palmer puts it this way: “I lead by word and deed simply because I am here doing what I do. If you are here, doing what you do, then you also exercise leadership of some sort.” Even just to smile across the room at someone you know—just to acknowledge their existence—can be a kind of leadership, an exercise of influence that is truly important. Just by smiling across the room, you are living into a larger vision of a community that strengthens and encourages. Someone was talking about this just the other day—how horrible and withering it feels to notice someone looking at you but they don’t smile, they don’t acknowledge your existence…. Leadership is about making the vision real, in acts both big and small. You see a piece of trash on the floor, and you pick it up even if you aren’t the sexton, even if you aren’t part of the paid staff, even if you hear a voice in your head that says, “Ahh, this is a BIG congregation—surely someone else will do it.” No. YOU do it, and as you do it, your simple act of leadership is helping to create the Beloved Community vision that says, We are all in this together. It’s up to all of us. Pull together and not apart. Everyone chip in. The ministry here involves every friend, every member, because that’s what it takes to live out our mission of changing lives. That’s what it takes. 

Leadership is everyone’s vocation, expressed through acts both big and small. It’s about how we use our influence, towards the direction of some larger vision. It’s about how we respond to the call, when it comes.

Which takes us to the second thing of note in Martin Luther King’s story: his hesitation to accept. It represented a momentous crossroads in his life, although he could not have known it at the time. Ultimately he did accept the call, and in this way achieved great visibility and respect as leader of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which in turn led to his role in founding (with others) the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and then to his leadership in civil rights campaigns in Albany, then Birmingham, then Augustine and Selma, and then the March on Washington and his soaring “I have a dream” speech. It all got started with Montgomery, and King’s ultimate answer of yes. But what if he had said, instead, NO? What then? Without Montgomery, would there ever have been “I have a dream”?

Hindsight is 20-20. “We live forwards,” said philosopher Arthur Schopenhaur, “but we understand backwards.” With only the knowledge that is given us in the moment—already full of the pressures of existing responsibilities and anticipations of future work we already know of—it is truly understandable and fully human to hesitate when a call to something new comes before you.

King was only human, and this is something we need to be reminded of, so that we can be confident leaders in our own right. Here’s why I say this. We take a hero figure like Martin Luther King Jr. and we lose touch with his story. Soon enough, someone who had just as many flaws and complexities as the rest of us becomes transformed into a superperson, untouchable. A change agent who leapt from the womb holding a protest sign. He was fearless, but we feel fear. The work came naturally to him, without any effort or awkwardness, but as for us, we endure setbacks, mistakes, trial-and-error. He was bottled lightning, but we have to pinch ourselves to stay awake. The perfect snappy comeback was always on his lips, but as for us, it’s usually only 12-24 hours later when it pops into our minds.   

We lose touch with our heroes’ stories, and in this way we lose touch with our own powers and potentialities. We hear a call to leadership, but our response can be, Who, me? Yet the message of the life of every hero who has ever gone before us, or who may be in our midst right now, is that you don’t need to be perfect to have a dream. You don’t need to be perfect to make the world a better place. You don’t have to already know how to preach if it is your dream to preach. You don’t have to already have the right credentials or know everything there is to know to step up. And if you are feeling the need to do something in your life to make the dream real, you don’t have to wait to start until the circumstances are absolutely ideal, as in: I am the right age (not too young, not too old), the kids are grown, the job is secure, I have enough money, my relationships are all better, I even have all the big questions of life figured out, related to God, immortality, the meaning of life, the existence of extraterrestrial beings. Just do it. I am so grateful for a hero like Martin Luther King Jr., a man who, at a critical juncture in his life, hesitated. The world did not need a perfect person to do what he did. The world did not need that. The world needed him. And the world needs you and me.

Leadership is everyone’s destiny, in some form, big or small. And now we turn to the third and last part of King’s story: Ralph Abernathy, talking King into accepting the call. His intervention.

This represents another aspect of the hero story that is easily passed over. Often the message put out there (or the one received) is about rugged individualism. One person acting alone. Nothing or not much about family, the larger supportive community, the worship services, the committee work, the coalition building, the flurry of letters and emails and phone calls, and, in the midst all of it, above all, key sustaining friendships. People whose judgment you trust, so that even if all the world is criticizing you, if THEY believe in you, you believe. People who will lift you up when you need it; people who will bring you back down to earth, when you need that. Nothing about any of this. Just one person acting alone. Rugged individualism.

It’s just not true. You can’t get to Martin Luther King Jr. without his parents and family and teachers, the black church community, liberal communities like this one, all the committee meetings, all the worship and prayer and hymn singing, all his friends and colleagues. You just can’t get to him without Ralph Abernathy—the man who reconnected him to his sense of call and purpose when he hesitated. The man who was with him throughout, until the very end and beyond.

I’m asking you this morning: Who is your Ralph Abernathy? Who believes in you, so you can believe?

This place—this community—can itself be a support to you. But you’ll get out of it only as much as you put in. So, how much are you putting in?

We need our communities of support. We need our Ralph Abernathys, to grow into the leadership that is naturally ours.

On Tuesday, when Barack Obama is up there with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, being sworn in as the 44^th President of the United States, using Abraham Lincoln’s Inaugural Bible, I want you to think of a person named Regina, whom Obama knew in college. He had just delivered his very first political speech, about apartheid in South Africa and the need to stand up for social justice. He felt swept up in this; he was feeling the call. Yet at the same time, he was full of self-doubt, and cynicism. At a party that evening, Regina congratulated him, calling his speech wonderful, but he cut her off, said, “Listen, you are a very sweet lady. And I’m happy you enjoyed my little performance today. But I don’t believe we made any difference in what we did today. I don’t believe that what happens to a kid in Soweto makes much difference to the people we were talking to. Pretty words don’t make it so. That’s the last time you will ever hear another speech out of me.”

Barack Obama, hesitating….. But what happened next was this. He shares the story in his book Dreams from My Father: “Regina stuck a finger in my chest. ‘You wanna know what your real problem is? You always think everything’s about you. The rally is about you. The speech is about you. The hurt is always your hurt. Well, let me tell you something, Mr. Obama. It’s not just about you. It’s never just about you. It’s about people who need your help. Children who are depending on you. They’re not interested in your irony or your sophistication or your ego getting bruised. And neither am I.” That’s what Regina said. Right words at the right time.

“Strange,” says Obama, “how a single conversation can change you.” ‘What was she asking of me, then? Determination, mostly. The determination to push against whatever power kept [a person] stooped instead of standing straight. The determination to resist the easy and the expedient. You might be locked in a world not of your own making … but you still have a claim on how it is shaped. You still have responsibilities.”

Godspeed, Barack Obama. Keep on pushing. We too, in our own lives, whatever our situations happen to be, as we realize the leadership story that is uniquely ours, and our destiny to fulfill. Undaunted by obstacles both within and without. Determined. Always before us … the Dream.

READING BEFORE THE SERMON

Our reading for today comes from Barack Obama’s autobiography, Dreams from My Father. The time is 1981, and he’s a sophomore at Occidental College in Los Angeles, protesting the apartheid system in South Africa.

It had started as something of a lark, I suppose, part of the radical pose my friends and I sought to maintain, a subconscious end run around issues closer to home. But as the months passed and I found myself drawn into a larger role—contacting representatives of the African National Congress to speak on campus, drafting letters to the faculty, printing up flyers, arguing strategy—I noticed that people had begun to listen to my opinions. It was a discovery that made me hungry for words. Not words to hide behind but words that could carry a message, support an idea. When we started planning the rally for the trustees’ meeting, and somebody suggested that I open the thing, I quickly agreed. I figured I was ready, and could reach people where it counted. I thought my voice wouldn’t fail me.

Let’s see, now. What was it that I had been thinking in those days leading up to the rally? … I was only supposed to make a few opening remarks … [but] when I sat down to prepare a few notes for what I might say, something had happened. In my mind is somehow became more than just a two-minute speech, more than just a way to prove my political orthodoxy. [I thought of how powerful a speaker my father was.] If I could just find the right words, I had thought to myself. With the right words everything could change—South Africa, the lives of ghetto kids just a few miles away, my own tenuous place in the world.

[I spoke passionately that day, but after other speakers took my place on the stage, I found myself] on the outside again, watching, judging, skeptical. Through my eyes, we suddenly appeared like the sleek and well-fed amateurs we were, with our black chiffon armbands and hand-painted signs and earnest young faces. […] When the trustees began to arrive for their meeting, a few of them paused behind the glass walls of the administration building to watch us, and I noticed the old white men chuckling to themselves…. The whole thing was a farce, I thought to myself—the rally, the banners, everything. A pleasant afternoon diversion, a school play without the parents. And me and my one-minute oration—the biggest farce of all.

At the party that night, [my friend Regina] came up to me and offered her congratulations. I asked what for.

“For that wonderful speech you gave.”

I popped open a beer. “It was short, anyway.”

Regina ignored my sarcasm. “That’s what made it so effective,” she said. “You spoke from the heart, Barack. It made people want to hear more….”

“Listen, Regina,” I said, cutting her off, “you are a very sweet lady. And I’m happy you enjoyed my little performance today. But I don’t believe we made any difference in what we did today. I don’t believe that what happens to a kid in Soweto makes much difference to the people we were talking to. Pretty words don’t make it so. That’s the last time you will ever hear another speech out of me….”

Here ends our reading for today.

 

Four Spiritualities

Personality types. They’re like masks. They reveal and conceal at the same time. Products of nature in combination with nurture, they give us something to see the world through, and to be seen. They grant us a particular means of communicating; they incline us to care about certain things and not other things; they represent a vital avenue for experience and learning. Which leads to an irony. For to the degree that our personality masks settle on our faces and seem completely and utterly natural, we forget that we are, in fact, wearing a mask, or that others may be wearing different masks leading them to see the world in very different ways, to communicate differently, or to care differently. It gets us into trouble.

Consider the following incident, in which two people, Sheryl and Steve, are going to a meeting here at UUCA, and Sheryl asks Steve a very simple question, “What time is it?” What follows is like an episode of Abbot and Costello, a comedy of miscommunication. Steve replies, “It’s late,” but Sheryl has the kind of personality which prefers concreteness and exactitude of detail, so she responds, “No, I mean, what time is it?” Which confuses Steve, because he thinks he IS being to the point, although given his different personality, being to the point is a matter of clear imagery and intuitive vision. So he says back to Sheryl, “It’s time to go!” but with even greater insistence than before, thinking that will do the trick. It doesn’t, and now Sheryl is getting frustrated, and she says, “Hey, read my lips, what time is it?” When Steve replies, in a miffed tone, “It’s past three,” all heck breaks loose. “Listen,” says Sheryl, “I shouldn’t have to ask a simple question four times to get an adequate answer. How MUCH past three? What time is it EXACTLY?” To which Steve replies, “You are so picky. The time EXACTLY is 3:12pm, Eastern Standard Timezone, planet earth, solar system, outer arm of the Milky Way Galaxy!”

It’s a comedy of miscommunication. Two people hearing exactly the same question—“What time is it?”—but each approaching the answer differently. One prefers down-to-earth exactitude and specificity, the other prefers evocative imagery and future-oriented metaphors which can float above the ground. Personality types are real—vital avenues of expression and experience—but we can lose sight of this undeniable reality and fail to accommodate for the masks we wear in our relationships. The result is high drama. The stuff of soap opera.

It happens at home; it happens at work; and you better believe it happens in congregations like this one. Of course, when clashes and conflicts happen in congregations, we get extremely nervous. We think something has turned terribly wrong, since isn’t religious community the one place where we’re all supposed to be singing Kumbaya together, and all is spontaneous mutual understanding and peace and harmony?

It’s an unexamined expectation that so many of us bring to a place like this, and it can’t be farther from the truth. This is a home for the human spirit, and the human spirit brings with it variety and diversity, of all kinds. Meaning that, in the course of our taking this diversity and uniting it to serve common goals and common purposes, things heat up. That’s what happens, if a congregation is working right. If it’s NOT working right, things stay cold and clammy. Sluggish. People stuck in their usual sense of who they are, and what’s possible. No risks. No enthusiasms. No one united by a transforming cause. People entirely justified in saying “it’s not worth it” and walking away. But if a congregation IS working right, it heats us up. Takes us to difficult places. Takes us deeper. Causes us to care, to discern a higher calling. Gives us something worth fighting for. Charges us full with the electric charge of the soul. There is no better symbol of how congregations that work do this than our Flaming Chalice. The flame is the heat and the fire of our life together. Things are supposed to get hot, in a place like this. No wonder conflict can happen.

It’s just a natural consequence of being in a vital spiritual community. Natural, normal, necessary, and also this: neutral in value. What matters is not so much that we can disagree and feel frustrated by eachother as how we manage these disagreements and frustrations. How we respond.

Today I want to talk about personality types as they impact congregations. Different personality types give rise to different spiritual styles—so what are the different styles? How is each a valid way of connecting with the Sacred? And, when they clash, what can we do to respond in a manner that is creative and constructive? That’s my message today.

Beginning with the basic spiritual styles. Historically, there are many sources of insight about this we could look to—astrology being one of the oldest, together with the four classic temperaments (phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic, and sanguine). We could also look to the Enneagram, as well as to Carl Jung’s system of psychological types. Of the theories I’ve studied, one of my favorites continues to be Hinduism’s system of the four yogas—thousands of years old and yet still influential and credible. Very much worth a closer look.

Now when I say “yoga,” what might immediately come to mind is certain distinctive physical postures. But the word as I’m using it—its original sense—has a far larger meaning. Literally, it means, “to bring under disciplined training,” and right there we have an inkling of what we’re getting ourselves into. Each of the four yogas incorporates activities and practices that are uniquely effective for a particular personality type, in its quest for spiritual fulfillment. We’re not talking about a casual stroll along a garden path, in other words, and the thought of this is in itself significant, for there are times when life, completely without warning, challenges us to run a sprint, or a marathon. On the spur of the moment, it can require us to lift 300 pounds of deadweight. It can throw all sorts of stuff our way, and unless we are already actively developing our spiritual muscles, how can we expect to last or cope effectively? How are we gonna run our race, or lift that weight, if we aren’t actively training for it right now? 

“Yoga” means “spiritual workout,” and the first one to consider is the Yoga of the Rational Mind. Here, the central discipline is intellectual adventure. If you are a follower of this way—if you are a Rational Mind yogi—then you seek out all the wisdom you can find: in scripture, in science, in philosophy, in history, in literature, in the arts, and on and on. The marketplace of ideas must be free, for you; scholarship is your true love; study is your cup of tea; and your core spiritual practice may very well be … underlining. You are the kind of person who’s always asking questions, doubting, challenging conventional understandings, and always game for looking into a new idea or a new way. But with a main purpose. Not to parrot the wisdom of others, but to use conscience and reason to separate the good from the bad and fashion a worldview that rings true for you, makes sense of your experience. Gives order to the complexities of life. 

The Yoga of the Rational Mind. It stresses step-by-step logical reasoning as well as conceptual clarity and linguistic precision. Rational Mind yogis are the people who would rather stand outside of heaven and talk about it than step on in. In fact, that is their heaven. Realizing through critical discussion and thought the truth that sets us free. 

That’s the first Hindu yoga, and now here is the second: the Yoga of Transcending Mind. It’s very different. People on this path are generally active types, and they tend to be impatient with the theoretical and abstract. As far as they are concerned, head knowledge distorts rather than clarifies. Language does to the world what a funhouse mirror does to reflections. Others might pride themselves on their intellectual scholarship and be right at home with that, but not Transcending Mind yogis. They want something more body-centered, practical disciplines that calm “monkey mind” down and connect them to a peace that is above and beyond all words and theories. I’m talking about a capacity of awareness that is like a calm eye over the storm of our thoughts and feelings, an eye that’s always there, always, but we have to learn how to see through it, we have to calm “monkey mind” down to do that.

If this resonates with you, then more reading and more speculating are beside the point. No more talk. Action. So, as a Transcending Mind yogi, you will practice “asanas,” or physical postures that cleanse the body and develop the mind’s ability to concentrate. You will say a “mantra” or a sacred sound over and over again, throughout your day, to keep you centered and focused. You may meditate on your breathing or focus on a visual form like a candle flame, or a picture of a saint, or a mandala. Note, again, how all of this emphasizes a form of spirituality that is body-centered, image- and sound-centered, all to the end of experiencing first-hand the reality beyond all distinctions and difference, the bliss of no-thingness. You don’t want to just talk about heaven. You want to do heaven, be heaven!

That’s the Yoga of Transcending Mind. But now let us turn to yet another spiritual style: the Yoga of Service. If this is your preferred style, by now what you might be saying to yourself is this: something like, “Good Lord! What’s up with how Rational Mind yogis are constantly challenging the status quo or living in their heads? And as for Transcending Mind yogis—why would I ever want to twist up like a pretzel or chant all day OM? Seems totally beside the point. I mean, I just want a way of being at peace while I’m trying to be a good parent, or a good employee, or a good friend, or a good citizen. Nothing fancy. I want to work within the world, not outside of it. I want to work within the system, not buck it. I want to find the sacred right here, in the ordinary.”

That’s what Service yogis say. Stability and structure are their watchwords; they’re the ones paying attention to detail and rolling up their sleeves to make our communities happen. So naturally, for them, the central discipline is everyday work done with the right intention and without any expectation for certain results. Selflessness while paying the bills or commuting to the job or doing the laundry. One of the most popular scriptures of Hinduism, the Bhagavad Gita, says it like this: “He who does the task dictated by duty, caring nothing for the fruit of the action: he is a yogi.” This is how, in the midst of life’s wear and tear and busy-ness, the Service yogi attains peace.  

And now: the last of the four yogas: the Yoga of Love. Short and sweet: if this is your spiritual style, you are a people person. You are on a search for authenticity and uniqueness, and you want this for everyone else as well. You want to make everyone feel important and cared for, and you just want there to be harmony in the world, you peacemaker you.

People are so central to your path that, when you imagine the sacred, it must have a face. Your God is a personal God. And so your central spiritual practice is devotion. You will choose an image of God which is right for you. Perhaps an image of the Goddess like Kwan Yin, perhaps Jesus, perhaps Krishna. Some concrete image—and whatever it happens to be, you will open your total heart to him or to her. You want to fall in love. “Love the Lord Your God with all your heart and soul and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.” That is the discipline precisely. Out of this love, you will study, you will practice asanas, you will chant, you will care for the hurting, you will do the work of justice, you will fulfill your everyday duties selflessly. But the motivation is, first and last, love.

Same motivation goes, even if you don’t believe in a God per se. Fact is, the Yoga of Love, like all the yogas, cuts across theological categories like theism and atheism. If there is no such thing as a God for you, then the face of the sacred will be beloved family and friends, a hero like Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. who has inspired you, people who belong to your chosen spiritual community (like UUCA), or the living earth. Out of love for these, you live fully and freely.

And there they are, the four yogas. Rational Mind, Transcending Mind, Service, Love. Four spiritual styles, for four different kinds of personalities. Each equally valid, as a way of connecting with the Spirit of Life. Keep in mind that the idea here is not that one and only one yoga will appeal to you—just that you will feel most at home in one, and make the most progress working in one, even if at times you might borrow some ideas and practices from the others.

Let’s take an even closer look. Worship preferences are extremely concrete and practical, so let’s see what each yoga might bring to this. Beginning with Rational Mind yogis, who might say, “Boy, I love intellectual-type sermons with lots of vocab words that get me thinking and give me something to talk about over lunch! I love the purity and complexity of classical music. But what’s up all the rituals, or the prayer? I don’t get it when the music for the day is drumming, or folk, or rock. I don’t like it when things feel too fuzzy and gooey and emotional and ‘spiritual.’ Makes it harder for me to focus. Makes it harder to read the song lyrics ahead of time so that I can be sure to sing only the words that make sense to me…”

As for Transcending Mind yogis, this is what they might say: “It’s just not worship if I don’t feel immersed in something larger than me. Give me spirituality, give me ‘smells and bells.’ Give me more ritual—I love getting out of my head and into the flow of an experience. Love our annual Water Communion and Moravian Love Feast and Flower Communion. Loved the Breaking Bread Ritual from this past Thanksgiving. Even something as small as getting up and greeting each other feels good. More meditation, though—I wish it lasted a lot longer than it usually does. How about five minutes? Ten minutes? And, have we ever thought about doing some chanting? Sometimes I think we could learn a thing or two from the Episcopalians down the road….”

Service yogis, for their part, might say this: “I love all the rituals too. Classical music is beautiful, but I feel more moved by drumming, or jazz, or folk, or rock. I just feel more at home in worship when we play music that’s similar to what I already listen to. As for sermons: honestly, the artsy-fartsy intellectual ones just don’t turn my crank. I like the ones that focus on life skills instead, on how to be a better partner, or parent, or citizen. Show me how! Finally—have we ever thought about regularly incorporating multimedia in our worship? I was at another church that projected the hymn lyrics on big screens in the sanctuary—they even showed a film clip from a popular movie where we would do a straight-ahead reading. At first I was skeptical, but I walked away amazed at how powerful the effect was—even more amazed at how my kids loved it….”

And then there’s what Love yogis might say: “I need a worship experience that really gets my blood flowing. Give me inspiration. I can do a sermon that is intellectual, I can do a sermon that is practical, but don’t forget to elevate it into poetry, and use lots of stories. As for clapping: I know it bumps some people out of the flow of worship, and I totally respect that, but for me it works. It makes me feel warm and good, and gets me into the flow of things. Finally, I love it when we all stand up and hold hands to close out our service!”

This is just a bare sketch of the different preferences the four yogas bring—and you can already see the potential for disagreement and conflict. Things heating up into our Flaming Chalice. While a Love yogi, for example, is perfectly comfortable with language that is evocative and poetic, a Rational Mind yogi insists on clarity. “What does ‘spirituality’ mean, anyway? Define your terms! Stop being so fuzzy and vague! How can I wrap my mind around things when I’m having a hard time perceiving a hard core there?” To this, a yogi of the Transcending Mind will say, “Come on! You’re just stirring up a tempest in a tea pot! Ultimately the sacred is a more-than-what’s-before-the-eyes-Mystery—every word and name is just like a finger pointing at the moon. So let’s not argue about our fingers. Let’s focus on the moon!” To which the Love yogi replies, “I agree where you say that ultimately the sacred is a Mystery, and all words and names for it fall short. But when you suggest that it is OK to be casual with words and names—especially traditional words and names—I can’t go there. As imperfect and fuzzy a word like God might be, I still need it. I can’t grow spiritually without it.” To which a Service yogi will say, “Would you all just get your act together and make up your minds? How are we gonna fulfill our mission in the world if all our energy is tied up in fighting?”

And that IS the central question. It brings to mind a personal story from my seminary years, when my colleagues and I were studying worship—what it’s all about, how to craft it. I found myself admitting to my class that I’d always been a bit cranky about the worships I’d experienced. Rarely had I experienced a service that satisfied me completely in all ways and didn’t leave me grumbling on the way out. There was always some element or other that struck me as pointless or irritating or not as good as what some other church was doing. To this, my worship professor at the time—the saintly Rev. David Bumbaugh—said, “Anthony, nothing can live up to your kind of standard, if you feel entitled to being satisfied completely by everything that happens in a given service. Instead, I would have you define success like this: If a worship service has touched you in at least one deep way, that is enough to have made it a success. Be positive and look for the one thing that will feed your soul; let all else pass. And know that the parts which are unimportant to you—perhaps even offensive to you—may very likely be feeding the souls of others.”

I continue to think that this is a wonderful attitude to have—one constructive way of responding to the disagreements over worship that are inevitable and will never end, given the different spiritual styles in the room. Stepping back from a sense of entitlement and stepping up to a sense of generosity and a willingness to be OK with something you might not prefer exactly because you know that it could very well be beautiful and meaningful for the person sitting right beside you.

Besides this, another thing to keep in mind as we face disagreement and conflict together is this: the idea that personality differences, while deep, are not absolute. People with different styles can learn to understand and even to sympathize with each other; people on different yoga paths can learn tremendous things from each other. It’s just like being right-handed—you’ve been using your right hand all your life to write and wave and do so many other things. But with conscious effort and patience, you can learn to shift over to using your left. It’s awkward. It takes time. But it can happen, and the result is a good thing: you’ve just multiplied your power in the world. Now you can do things with both hands, not just one. Similarly, when a given personality type learns to walk in the shoes of another personality type, what happens is greater wholeness. We grow towards greater wholeness in our lives. We become less one-sided, more compassionate, more complete.

Conflict comes with the territory. In spiritual communities like this one, it’s natural, normal, necessary, and neutral in value. What matters is how we respond. “Do not teach your children never to be angry,” someone once said. “Teach them how to be angry.” That’s what our Congregational Covenant of Healthy Relationships is all about. That’s what the Healthy Relationships Team is all about. Helping us face down the challenge of life in community as it does its proper job of heating things up, charging us full with the electric charge of the soul. We need to learn how to stand in this fire. We need to assume a stance of curiosity towards both ourselves and the other person or the situation. Not self-righteous certainty. But curiosity. “I wonder what my spiritual style is, that I would have such a negative reaction to that?” “I wonder what spiritual style she is speaking out of?” Asking questions like this. Valuing questions like this, as a necessary part of what it means to be Unitarian Universalist.  

I’ll close with a story told by Anthony de Mello, Catholic priest and psychotherapist:

In ancient India, water used to be drawn out of wells by means of the Persian wheel, a convenient device whose only drawback was the great noise it made when in operation. One day, a horseman happened to pass by a farm and demanded water for his horse. The farmer gladly put the Persian wheel in motion, but the horse, unaccustomed as it was to the noise, wouldn’t come anywhere near the well. “Can’t you stop the noise so my horse can drink?” asked the horseman. “I’m afraid that isn’t possible, sir,” said the farmer. “If your horse wishes to drink, he will have to take the water with the noise, for here [HERE], water comes only with noise.”

 

Diligent Joy

I want to begin this morning by sharing a personal story that I am not particularly proud of. As with every personal story I share in this pulpit, it’s meant to invite you to reflect on similar stories that you may have in your own life, and to know that you are not alone, that we’re in this thing together.

The story has to do with graduate school. By sheer luck, I found myself in a program that specialized in classical American philosophers like William James, John Dewey, Charles Peirce, and George Santayana. I call it luck because it was not by any genuine forethought whatsoever that I went to Texas A&M University as an undergraduate, and it was desperation borne of restlessness that drove me to change my major time after time until, with philosophy, the restlessness became curiosity and even enthusiasm. But it was an enthusiasm for everything, and I really struggled with this—particularly after I was accepted into the graduate program and found myself facing the daunting task of writing a thesis. I needed to identify a specific topic to focus on, and quick. What was it going to be?

This is where I confess the part that I’m not proud of. I got way ahead of myself. I allowed ambition to solve the problem for me, rather than taking the more difficult route of listening to my life and discerning my genuine interests. I had aspirations of doing a Ph. D. at Vanderbilt University—I was told it was a prestigious department, and I had stars in my eyes about this—and it just so happened that the Head of the Texas A&M Philosophy Department at the time had strong links to Vanderbilt. The brilliant plan that unfolded in my prestige-addled brain was therefore this: I would choose a topic that would require me to work with the Head (which turned out to be George Santayana’s ethical theory), and this would be my ticket into the school of my dreams.

It did not work out. I ended up hating the topic I chose, and by the time I finished that thesis, I was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. As for my relationship with the Head of the Department: not good. We were just not temperamentally suited for each other. Rather than moving me forward into my career as a philosopher, it set me back. Worst of all is the 20/20 hindsight I have now, many years later, about the treasure that was right there before me, all along, which I did not claim. This treasure: the world-renowned William James scholar who also taught in my department. William James, who has turned out to be one of my absolutely favorite thinkers—and I could have done my thesis on him. The thought had actually crossed my mind, but among other things, I suspected that the world-renowned scholar was too busy for me. Yet I never even inquired to find out if this were so. I missed my chance.

How easily it can happen. Ambition can put stars in our eyes, and we lose touch with who we are. Fixation on some end goal can cause us to stop paying attention to the journey, never mind enjoying it. Fear of being turned down can keep us simply from asking. Treasure is within our grasp, but we don’t go ahead and grasp it.

Why is this?

One of the things I value about Jonathan Haidt’s book The Happiness Hypothesis is that, through its unique blend of science and spirituality, it’s helping me better understand my own human heart , as well as to become a better student of happiness. Three of its insights—all from chapter five—come to mind.

The first is this: how it’s natural to care about such things as prestige. Desire for Vanderbilts of every kind reflect a deep impulse shaped by millions of years of natural selection, directed towards winning at the game of life; and it involves impressing others, gaining their admiration, and rising in relative rank. We all feel tempted to do this even when greater authentic happiness can be found elsewhere. Political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli recognized this hundreds of years ago when he said, “the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.”

Conspicuous consumption is an obvious example of this—the zero-sum game of “keeping up with the Joneses” that anchors the very real phenomenon of middle-class poverty—but I am particularly struck by the results of a recent experiment a group of economists set up using a beverage called SoBe Adrenaline Rush—a beverage that claims to increase mental acuity. The story here is told by Ori and Rom Brafman in their recent book, Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior: “To test acuity, the researchers developed a thirty-minute word jumble challenge that was administered to three groups of students. The first group, a control group, took the test without drinking any SoBe. The second group was told about the intelligence-enhancing properties of SoBe, given the drink, and asked to watch a video while the tonic had time to take effect. These students also were required to sign an authorization form allowing the researchers to charge $2.89 to their university account…. We’ll call this second group of students the ‘fancy-schmancy SoBe’ drinkers. Finally, a third group of students was given the same spiel about SoBe but was told that the university had gotten a discount and that they would be charged eighty-nine cents for the drink. We’ll call them the ‘cheapo SoBe’ drinkers. Now, the results of the experiment were surprising. The group that drank the fancy-schmancy SoBe performed slightly better in the test than did the group that received no SoBe at all. But before we rush out to buy SoBe, with its acuity-enhancing powers, it’s important to note that the students who drank the cheapo SoBe performed significantly worse than either the fancy-schmancy group or the SoBe-free control group. Given that exactly the same SoBe beverage was served to both groups, we can only conclude that it was the value the students attributed to the SoBe that made the difference in their test scores. Strange as it may sound, fancy-schmancy SoBe made the students smarter, while cheapo SoBe hindered their performance.” And that’s the story that Ori and Rom Brafman tell. Humans are deeply susceptible to the power of prestige—so much so that we unconsciously, instinctively respond to fancy-shmancy SoBe by getting smarter and to cheapo SoBe by getting dumber. This is how vulnerable we are to the lure of prestige.

Again and again, we learn that the human heart is a complicated thing, and may we embrace this with compassion. We learn that each of us is many different selves all buzzing about like a committee—sometimes on the same page, and sometimes not. Where prestige is concerned, we can often find ourselves internally divided; and we can feel a great pull towards what is fancy-schmancy even though it may come at the expense of our true happiness.

But now, let’s turn to the second happiness insight: how people are generally inaccurate predictors of the ultimate impact of life changes, whether bad or good. In my own case, I anticipated going to Vanderbilt for my Ph.D. as a change that would bring about perfect happiness; but life would be over if I didn’t get in. This is what I predicted, and on this basis, I acted. All of us do something like this, as we face the future. Yet Jonathan Haidt asks us to consider the “adaptation principle,” which describes something we have all experienced—that people get used to conditions in their life that are constant. It becomes like wallpaper: taken for granted, just there. While people are extraordinarily sensitive to changes in conditions, after a time things settle down, and we are back to our usual state of happiness.

Jonathan Haidt explores this in an interesting way. He asks, “If I gave you ten seconds to name the very best and very worst things that could ever happen to you, you might well come up with these: winning a 20-million dollar lottery jackpot and becoming paralyzed from the neck down. Winning the lottery would bring freedom from so many cares and limitations; it would enable you to pursue your dreams, help others, and live in comfort…. Losing the use of your body, on the other hand, would bring more limitations than life in prison. You’d have to give up on nearly all your goals and dreams, forget about sex, and depend on other people for help with eating and bathroom functions. Many people think they would rather be dead than paraplegic. But they are mistaken.” They are mistaken, Jonathan Haidt says, because of the adaptation principle. “The [lottery] winner’s pleasure comes from rising in wealth, not from standing still at a high level, and after a few months the new comforts have become the new baseline of daily life. The winner takes them for granted and has no way to rise even further. Even worse: the money might damage her relationships. Friends, relatives, swindlers, and sobbing strangers swarm around lottery winners, suing them, sucking up to them, demanding a share of the wealth. […] At the other extreme, the quadriplegic takes a huge happiness loss up front. He thinks his life is over, and it hurts to give up everything he once hoped for. But like the lottery winner, his mind is sensitive more to changes than to absolute levels, so after a few months he has begun adapting to his new situation and is setting more modest goals. He discovers that physical therapy can expand his abilities. He has nowhere to go but up.”

This is the adaptation principle at work. Life changes can definitely bring pleasure or pain, but the pain or pleasure never lasts as long as you think it will, and we return to our natural and usual state of mind. I didn’t get in to Vanderbilt; OK, there was some weeping and gnashing of the teeth for a time; but then I got on with my life. My prediction about the impact of not getting in was way off base. I adapted, and moved on.

Which leads us to the next happiness insight to consider: that most environmental and demographic factors influence happiness very little. “Try to imagine yourself,” says Jonathan Haidt, “changing places with either Bob or Mary. Bob is thirty-five years old, single, white, attractive, and athletic. He earns $100,000 a year and lives in sunny California. He is highly intellectual, and he spends his free time reading and going to museums. Mary and her husband live in snowy Buffalo, New York, where they earn a combined income of $40,000. Mary is sixty-five years old, black, overweight, and plain in appearance. She is highly sociable, and she spends her free time mostly in activities related to her church. She is on dialysis for kidney problems.” Now, the question: who do you think is happier? Bob or Mary? On the surface of things, Bob, since he enjoys a string of what many would consider markers of power and privilege: he’s white, he’s male, he’s young, he lives in a beautiful climate, he’s attractive, and he’s wealthy. Yet it’s intriguing to get beneath the surface and take a look at what the research says. “White Americans are freed from many of the hassles and indignities that affect black Americans, yet, on the average, they are only very slightly happier.” “Men have more freedom and power than women, yet they are not on average any happier.” The old are generally happier than the young. “People who live in colder climates expect people who live in California to be happier, but they are wrong.” “People believe that attractive people are happier than unattractive people, but they, too, are wrong.” As for wealth—research shows that once people have sufficient money to pay for basic needs of food and shelter, the relationship between wealth and happiness grows smaller. At this point, more money definitely does not mean more happiness. Consider how it is that “as the level of wealth has doubled or tripled in the last fifty years in many industrialized nations, the levels of happiness and satisfaction in life that people report have not changed, and depression has actually become more common.” For all of this, chalk things up to the adaptation principle. All of these markers of power and privilege are life conditions that you either can’t change or which are constant for significant periods of time. And we get used to them. They become wallpaper in our lives. They disappear from our awareness. We take them for granted. 

And there they are: the three insights. (1) Natural selection attunes us to prestige even at the expense of genuine, long-lasting happiness; ( 2) people are inaccurate predictors of the impact of life changes to happiness; and (3) most environmental and demographic factors influence happiness very little. Happiness is not so simple a thing. The human heart is not so simple to figure out.

But now, putting these insights together: where does it take us, especially as we consider the new year ahead of us, with all its new possibilities?

One thing does stand out. Go back to Mary. We met her a moment ago; she and her husband live in snowy Buffalo, New York, where they earn a combined income of $40,000. By now, we know that all such factors are fairly equivalent to Bob’s, in terms of their power to influence happiness in life. This includes the fact of her being sixty-five years old, black, overweight, being plain in appearance, and being on dialysis for kidney problems. All such factors are constants in her life, and she has adapted to them.

Yet there are two advantages she has which Bob does not, which give her the clear  happiness edge, and here is the clue we are looking for. She is highly sociable, and she spends her free time mostly in activities related to her church. Research has shown both factors to have great impact on a person’s level of happiness, and part of the reason for this is that they are not so much constant conditions of life as voluntary activities that people choose to engage in. Because of this—because they take effort and attention—they aren’t susceptible to the adaptation effect.

One of the main things we can do, in other words, if we want to increase our happiness, is to invest time and energy in activities that lead to genuine gratification in some form or fashion. Sometimes, we are talking about activities which allow us to lose self-consciousness, connect with and express our strengths, and get into the flow of things. Other times, it can be activities that require some effort and yet the result is wonderful, as in exercise, or learning a new skill, or kindness and gratitude activities, or volunteer service. Such activities can make you feel vulnerable—you are putting yourself out there, after all—but once you do them, the good feelings last a long time.

In my case, what happened after the Vanderbilt disaster was this. Three kinds of activities that came together for me and ultimately helped me find myself again.

After I finished my thesis and defended it successfully, a week before I was to have graduated, I got a call from the community college across town, Blinn College. Would I like to teach a logic class? All my future plans were up in smoke, so why not? I took to that field, and like the sons in the Sufi wisdom story we heard earlier, I gave myself to daily labor, and to the round of the seasons. One class grew into three; three grew into five and a full-time permanent position; but most importantly, I discovered my passion for public speaking and teaching, and I realized that, for me, philosophy of religion was the bomb. 

I was discovering the treasure of the field, my happiness; and it was also happening at the Unitarian Universalist congregation I started going to, with Laura, once our daughter was born. I took to that field, and I gave myself to various opportunities that arose. I served as President of the Board of Trustees; I led some fundraising programs; I led some worship and taught a few religious education courses. Through volunteerism, I was discovering talents that I didn’t know I had. And, I was also making friends.

Which leads me to the third activity which helped me recover after the Vanderbilt disaster. Figure skating. Down in College Station, Texas, at the Unitarian Church, I met my future ice-dancing partner. It all came as quite a shock. Part of this has to do with the fact that, when I met Diane in 1996, I hadn’t skated since I was a boy of 13, and last I knew, serious figure skating was just for children and teenagers. Yet what I did not know was that, during my many years away from the sport, a significant adult skating program had developed, including regional, national, and international competitions. Diane knew all about it—and did I want to go skating with her? At first I resisted—one excuse after another came to mind—but Diane and then Laura kept on prodding me, and so, eventually, I went.

As it turns out, this was the final ingredient. I took to the field of teaching, I took to the field of church volunteerism, I took to the field of adult figure skating; and as I gave myself to all three activities, some kind of weird alchemy happened, and I found a clarity within me which I had never had before. I found a yearning to combine passion for public speaking and teaching and community building and leadership and artistry and spirituality all in one thing, and that thing was ministry. I would become a minister. That was the treasure in the field that I found, but only after giving myself to years of hard work, day to day and season to season.

“I prayed for twenty years,” Frederick Douglass once said, “but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.” The treasure is out there, in the field, and it’s not about prestige, it’s not about the things we can’t control, it’s not about the constant conditions to which we inevitably adapt. It’s about activity, action, praying with your legs.

And this time, I did not let fear stop me from talking to the people I needed to talk to, and doing the things I needed to do. I even turned down an offer to attend fancy-schmancy Harvard Divinity School—with funding—to go to one that was better suited to my family and me. 

When one of my friends heard this, he sent me a funny postcard featuring an orangutan wearing one of those square academic caps, with the tassel on the side. And this was the caption: WHAT? You haven’t been to HARVARD?” I laughed. OK by me.

 

Story Before the Sermon

There once was a farmer who lay on his deathbed in despair over the fate of his lazy sons. When he was almost gone, an inspiration came to him. He called his sons to his bedside and drew them in close. “I am soon to leave this world,” he whispered. “I want you to know that I have left a treasure of gold for you. I have hidden it out in the field. Dig carefully and well and you will find it. I ask only that you share it among yourselves evenly.”

The sons begged him to tell them exactly where he had buried it, but the father breathed his last and said no more.

As soon as their father was buried, the sons took up their shovels and began to turn over the soil in their father’s field. They dug and dug until they had turned over the whole field twice. Nothing–no treasure anywhere. But they decided that since the field was so well prepared, they might as well plant some grain just as their father had done. The crop grew well for them. After the harvest they decided to dig again in hopes of finally finding the hidden treasure. Again they found nothing, and once again prepared the field for sowing. That year’s crop was even better than the one before.

This went on for years until the sons had grown accustomed to the cycles of the seasons and the rewards of working together in daily labor. By that time their disciplined farming earned them enough money to live very comfortable lives. They grew very close and content. They had everything they could ever want or need. It was then and only then, that they realized what a great treasure their father had left for them out in that field.