A Religion of the Honeybee

Poet Robert Frost writes,

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

The other day I was thinking about how Unitarian Universalism is truly a religion of the honeybee. Like honeybees, which do not elevate one kind of flower or tree above all but go wherever there is nectar to be found, we Unitarian Universalists affirm a “many ways” spirituality. We go wherever truth is to be found, and out of this, we create a honey wisdom.

Life in covenantal community is also essential to who we are, and here again, honeybees are suggestive. They have hive and honeycomb, and we have church and congregation. Bees do the waggle dance and the tremble dance to communicate, and we do the complex, many-faceted dance of human community. They follow instinct, and we do our best to follow our Covenant of Healthy Relationships. 

Finally there is the often-made observation that honeybees are aerodynamically unsuited to fly. It seems incredible, given how they are shaped, that they should ever be able to take flight. Yet they do. And so do we. Some people may think that a religion has to define a detailed system of beliefs in order to work, but we know the power of the open spiritual journey. Says writer Doug Muder, “We give our members the freedom to doubt and encourage them to question their beliefs not so they will see all beliefs as whimsical and contingent, but quite the opposite: We find that hard-tested and hard-won beliefs are more likely to withstand the challenges of modern life. A marriage whose every assumption and duty has been freely negotiated is not a house of straw, but rather a house whose every brick has been carefully laid. The freedom of liberal religion is an invitation to engage with the most significant issues of human life and society, not an excuse to fall into a shiftless and vacant hedonism.”

Just something to ponder … Unitarian Universalism is a religion of the honeybee.

 

Feel-Good Evangelism: Faith-Sharing for Liberal Religionists

About the good news of our shared faith, the Rev. Clinton Lee Scott once wrote a “Parish Parable” which echoes the old “thee and thou” language of the King James Bible. It goes like this: “Now there was a certain man that for many years did frequent the Temple on the Sabbath day. Then did he cease to be found in the Great Congregation. And a neighbor inquireth of him, saying, “How is it that thou art no more seen in the Temple on the Sabbath day?” And the man did give answer, “I like not the words that the Master speaketh: for he putteth not an end to the questions that vex my mind, neither provideth me with a sure salvation for my soul: verily he leadeth us into deep waters, and leaveth us there without means of rescue.” Now when this conversation was told to the Master of the Temple, he answered, saying, “Go tell him that remaineth away from the Great Congregation that the Temple standeth not to provide life preservers, but is a place wherein one learneth how to swim.”

This is but a classic statement of the Unitarian side of our faith, which is fundamentally a faith in people. It says, to each and every one of us, You have abundant potential. You are not inherently perverse and fatally wrong-headed, doomed unless some higher authority gives you life preservers in the form of detailed answers to which you must submit and never question (at pain of hellfire). You are not fundamentally weak, incapable of rising up to meet that challenges of the day, best kept in the shallow waters of life, best kept self-centered and indifferent to what’s really going on. No! You have inherent worth and dignity. It is a priceless inner wealth, actualized by all the heroes and sheroes that have gone before you, and you can realize this for yourself in your own turn. It naturally attunes you to truth and to justice, if you would but learn to hear; and to this end do Great Congregations and Masters of the Temple exist: to help you learn. To help you nurture and develop the potential that life has given you. Not to give you the answers up front, but to give you space and room in which to follow the nose of your curiosity and conscience, help you come into the integrity of your own answers. Not to protect you from the realities of suffering and evil, but to move you to engage the deep waters of social problems and do your best to make a difference. That’s what classic Unitarianism says. It is faith in the abundance of human potentials to fashion lives of positive wisdom and leadership and citizenship. Don’t treat me like I’m stupid. Don’t say I can’t ask questions. Don’t tell me that there’s nothing I can do to make a difference in the larger world.

Unitarianism says, “Jump in! Swim! Yes you can!” But as for the Universalist side of our faith—the classic message is different. Thomas Starr King, who was a minister in both Unitarianism and Universalism, back in the 19^th century and long before the two movements officially came together, once had this to say about the difference: he said that Unitarians think people are too good for hell, whereas for the Universalists, what keeps people out of hell is not people, but God. God is too compassionate, too good. That’s the classic Universalist vision. We are held and supported by an eternal, all-conquering Love that’s far greater than who we are as individuals. And so, if at some point you find yourself thrown out into deep waters and you have been trying the best you can to solve the burning, difficult questions of life but, in the end, you feel that the complete answers will always evade you; or, you have been trying the best you can to make a difference but, in the end, you know economic injustice will still exist and war will still exist and hatred will still exist and, on top of all this, your marriage is in trouble and the recession is hitting you hard—when you find yourself out in deep waters, like this, Universalism will come to you. It will gently take your hand and, with consolation and encouragement, say to you words like those the poet Philip Booth once said to his daughter: 

Lie back daughter, let your head

be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man’s float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

Remember, whispers Universalism.  No matter what—when you and I are in deep waters, and our strength is seemingly gone—the sea will hold us. Failure is impossible. So lie back. That’s the Universalist message precisely. Let the abundant strength of the sea be our strength. There is nothing we need to do to earn it. We don’t need a Ph. D, we don’t need lots of money or class or beauty or personality. Just open up and let this abundance flow in us; let us dwell in it; and it will surprise us. Suddenly we will find ourselves healed and whole—and more courageous than ever. Bubbling up in our hearts and lives, this abundance will move us spontaneously into works of beauty and service and justice, and we will also find ourselves moved into faith-sharing. For how can we not share this good news? Only in giving to another the hope of abundant love, does our own joy become complete. It spoils if kept. “The joy that isn’t shared,” says one poet, “dies young.”

By now I feel like a shaken-up can of soda. I just can’t talk about this stuff without getting all excited. It’s the good news of our Unitarian Universalist faith, fizzing and frothing and bubbling up, ready to be shared. So today our focus is liberal evangelism—what that can look like for us. Getting us all shaken up like I am, so the pressure of our Unitarian Universalist message becomes so great within us that we have to do something about it. And then to talk a little about what this “something” might be—to offer up some hints that come to us from one of the preeminent evangelists in our history: the Rev. Quillen Shinn, credited with starting at least 40 congregations all across North America, one of which was the First Universalist Church of Atlanta, Georgia, organized February 24, 1895. Because of people like Quillen Shin, we are. Literally. Others may give him fancy names like “the Saint Paul of the Universalist Church,” but here in Atlanta, we can call him grandfather.

There’s something you might want to know up front, however, about Grandfather Shinn, and this actually takes us farther along the road of exploring our Unitarian Universalist good news as it has evolved from classic to contemporary form. Quillen Shin proclaimed an abundance message that, in at least one respect, is significantly different from our own today. He preached a Universalism of dogmas: the centrality of the Bible, the love of God, the parenthood of God, the immortality of the soul, the divinity (though not the deity) of Christ, the certainty of punishment for sin, and the universality of salvation. He preached these dogmas as central to what it meant to be a Universalist, against what he saw as a rising infidelity in many of his fellow ministers and especially against what he called those “go-as-you-please Unitarians.” “Occasionally,” he once thundered, “a church falls into decay under the leadership of an upright pastor because that pastor is too indefinite, too vague and uncertain. He talks too much about ‘Truth for Authority,’ and too little about ‘The spiritual authority of Jesus Christ.’ Of course,” says Quillen Shinn, “’truth is authority,’ when we know what the truth is, and take our affirmation of ‘The universal Fatherhood of God.’ The world received that not by evolution but by revelation. Christ is our authority for this sublimest truth, believed and cherished by man. When a minister ceases to regard Jesus as authority, he steps away from the bed-rock of faith, and drifts into those vague ‘Universals’ fascinating to many who call themselves liberals and who seem to be well equipped with circumference, but without any center.” That’s what Grandfather Shinn said, around the turn of the nineteenth century, and clearly he was feeling the growing trend in liberal religion, which had been building for decades, ever since the advent of such things as modern Biblical scholarship, the comparative study of world religions, and Darwinianism. The trend was away from an exclusive Bible-centered faith, towards one that opened up to the riches of the world’s religions, as well as to the findings of science. The trend was away from Jesus Christ being at the center, towards the Mystery at the center. And all who wanted to live into this Mystery were welcome in our congregations, together with whatever path they chose, whether or not Jesus was meaningful for them, or God a meaningful concept.

Even though Quillen Shinn did not like it, Universalism went the way of all liberal religion, towards a deepening appreciation of the abundance of Mystery. He saw it as decay and as drifting away, and he feared that it would be our doom. But on the side of history we’re on, we know that what happened was what happens to the snake when it sheds its skin. We were simply reborn into something more honest and therefore more vital. This side of history, we affirm that whatever the Sacred is, it is an elephant too complex and too big for any individual blind man to fully comprehend. No single book or system of belief can possibly hold all the truth. What’s at the center is fundamentally a Mystery—and therefore it is endlessly fascinating and provocative, provoking interpretation after interpretation, inviting a personal creative response from each of us. While we can no longer speak about Universalism like Quillen Shinn did, in a one-size-fits-all way, the central abundance insight nevertheless remains: that there is in reality some process or power that is larger than the individual person, and when we connect with it, we are transformed in ways that we cannot transform ourselves. Use whatever language you want to describe it. Some will talk about God. Others will talk instead about the reality of the unconscious, or synchronicity, or the interdependent web, or Buddhamind, or the Goddess, or simply the embracing arms of healthy human relationships. Still others will speak a rich vocabulary of all of these and more, seeing each metaphor as a uniquely valid pathway into an experience of the Sacred. The point, though, is that at our center is Mystery—this is where the past century has brought us—and it means that our faith is abundant with creativity, abundant with diversity, abundant with possibility. The good news message of our faith is all about abundance.

But now, how to share this with the world? Now here’s something that would make Quillen Shinn smile. “In truth,” he once said, “no [person] knows the full joy of Universalism until he sends it to another; and, in fact, he cannot keep it for himself in its fullness, unless he is sending it abroad.” So, how to send it?

First of all, send it and say it with purpose. A humorous story about Quillen Shinn comes to mind. His biographer says that once, when he was at seminary, he delivered a somewhat rambling sermon, and he was asked by his professor to describe the subject he was trying to preach on. He replied, “I didn’t have any subject but I had an object and that was to show that Universalists have the best principles and that they ought to be the best people.” You better believe that his preaching improved over time, but the basic principle never changed: have an object; have a purpose.

Definitely our purpose in sharing Unitarian Universalism can’t be about declaring what is best in general; we are too modest for that. It definitely can’t be about declaring what’s best for you, or else; we don’t even believe that. But what the purpose can be is this: to share how it has been best for us. How the message about abundant human potentials has enabled us to think thoughts and do deeds that other contexts and communities would have stifled or denied. How the message about abundant love that is larger than us as separate individuals has lifted us up and supported us when we were in the deep end and could not swim anymore—abundant support of this caring community, abundant arms of Life. How the message about abundant Mystery has encouraged active exploration of our spiritual depths, opened us up to the riches of the world’s religions and of science, invited us to be creative in our religious lives. Our purpose in sharing Unitarian Universalism is helping another person know how powerful this abundance faith has been for us—and perhaps they are in a place in life that makes them ready to receive. Perhaps. We can share it with the same graciousness as we would news about a fantastic restaurant, or a brilliant movie. Without any heavy-handedness, and only to say: it has brought wonderful things into my family and my life, and maybe it can do the same for you.

Say it with purpose. Also say it with structure. Don’t ramble on like Quillen Shinn did in his seminary attempts at preaching. One of the ways of preventing this—of ensuring that you have a focus to your conversation—is by developing for yourself an “elevator speech,” or a short statement about Unitarian Universalism’s value to you that, theoretically, you could give in the three or so minutes it takes you to go from the bottom floor to the top. While real conversations often aren’t as tightly compartmentalized as this, and tend to go on or spill over, still, the discipline of the elevator speech is a good one. It challenges you to think about what’s especially important and meaningful to you about our faith. Clearly, It won’t say everything, but it can at least get you started, get your foot in the door—either plant a seed that will ripen sometimes later, or move a person to open up right then and there for a richer conversation.

I’d actually recommend having several elevator speeches on hand, each one doing a different thing, to be called on depending on circumstances. Practice developing these with each other. Sometimes just a general historical orientation seems to be called for, so you might say, “Unitarian Universalism comes out of the Protestant tradition in Christianity, and some of the oldest churches in America are UU churches. Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson were UUs.” In other words: not many people may be familiar with us, but we are as American as apple pie. Other times you will want talk theology, and you could say this: “Unitarian Universalism says that God is bigger than any single book or single religion. That’s why we draw from many sources of wisdom and truth.” Another good one is this: “Unitarian Universalism doesn’t tell me what to believe about such things as God or an afterlife because it knows that all such specific beliefs are way too important to be answered for us by someone else. It tells me that people have to come to their own answers, first-hand, for them to be truly meaningful.” Yet a third category of elevator speech addresses current events—you draw on recent things you did at UUCA that were meaningful for you. As in, “A couple Sundays ago, there was a guest speaker who talked about slavery after the Civil War, and I had no idea. I love the fact that my congregation gives me new insights into justice issues and expands my sense of things!” And it IS cool—it is evidence of the core abundance of our faith.

Say it with purpose. Say it with structure. And then also say it with confidence. Some years, Quillen Shinn traveled 25 to 30,000 miles, and you better believe that, to be received as he was, he needed to be nonanxious. Surely we can model this same calmness in the relatively few conversational miles we will travel!

How we say something communicates far more than what is actually said. When evangelism comes out of a place of anxiety, you might stutter and stumble over your carefully prepared elevator speech. You might actually look offended, get defensive, even get angry. Or you might come across as cool as an ice cube—giving off the impression that, for you, Unitarian Universalism is of no more than clinical interest. All would raise red flags in the questioner, make them wonder if the emperor has no clothes, if there’s something to be ashamed of, if there’s some terrible secret to hide, or if it’s somehow not OK to ask. But our goal is to make the abundance of our faith contagious. Not to force it on anyone. Just to share something that has meant so much to us. What moved Quillen Shinn to plant his first church was the memory of his mother, and all that she had given him. Same thing goes for us. We give because we have received. So let this thought relax us. We can take a deep breath. We can ungrit our teeth, relax our bodies, and take a curiosity stance towards the journey that each conversation will take us on. See where things go.

Yes, sometimes the other person will use it as an opportunity to tell us we’re wrong, but we’re allowed to agree to disagree. We don’t have to allow ourselves to be abused. We can rest confidently in our experience, knowing what our faith has done for us. Uncomfortable conversations will happen. But then there will be the conversations that make it all worth while. Because you say yes to evangelism and make yourself available, in your own person you will transmit some of the abundance of our faith to another, and they will catch a glimpse, and what they see is something they have been looking for but never even knew existed, never even knew it had a name. Someone wanting to get out into deeper waters, just waiting for permission. Someone in deep waters over their head, looking for encouragement. And you give them what they need. That’s what you do.

There are times when deeds don’t go far enough. The hungers of others require words that only we can give, and evangelism becomes the means. Walking the talk must be matched with talking the talk. Our faith tradition is all about abundance, and it fizzes and froths and bubbles up, ready to be shared. So let’s do that. Let’s make our Grandfather Shinn proud. He helped start us up, so let’s start something up too. Make him proud.  

 

 

Comic Spirituality

Coyote is a key trickster figure in Native American mythology. He’s a shape shifter, part human and part animal, combining within himself all that makes up the human character. In numberless exploits, he is portrayed as greedy and gluttonous, thieving and lecherous. Clever and foolish at the same time. Yet he is the one who created the world, created people, stole sun and moon and the seasons and made them available to the people he created, shaped the very character of the land. 

Here’s one story about this fascinating being: Coyote is sealed up in a hollow log as punishment for some trick he played. Once again, he’s been too smart for his own good. So he’s caught in this log and he tries with all his own personal power to escape but it’s useless, he can’t move an inch, the fit is too tight. He’s stuck.

Which makes what happens next so ironic. There he is, stuck in the log with no way out, and all of a sudden he hears the sound of a woodpecker pecking away at the hollow log. And while you’d think that Coyote would be overjoyed at this possibility of release, he’s cranky instead. “What a racket!” he says to himself. “What an irritating sound,” he says. Doesn’t even occur to him that Woodpecker was going to be his salvation. He just hates all the noise. So he shouts at Woodpecker to get away. “Stop that!” Luckily, Woodpecker keeps on pecking. He can’t hear Coyote shouting from within the log. He keeps on pecking away until he’s drilled a small hole that lets in a bit of the light.

And Coyote sees the light—in more ways than one. Suddenly he’s not at all irritated by the sound. Now he wants more of it! He starts shouting again, but this time, it’s to say, “Hurry up! Get me out of here!”

But now that there’s a hole, Woodpecker can hear Coyote more clearly, and Coyote’s shouting scares him away. He just flies away. It’s only when Coyote begins to appreciate the humor of his situation and disengages from all his anger and irritation and just shuts up that Woodpecker feels safe enough to come back and start pecking at the log again, according to a pace and a rhythm that is natural for him. Coyote just shuts up. Doesn’t say another word. Just waits until enough of the log is pecked away, and he is free, and then … he laughs! 

For me, a story like this suggests some of the central themes of comic spirituality, which is what I want to talk about today. Comic spirituality is about being at home in the world amidst all its conflicts and struggles and dangers. Comic spirituality counters the temptations of the tragic point of view. Comic spirituality also says that, when life is at its worst (or when it just happens to be another round of Daylight Savings), a sense of humor saves. Laughter saves. Asbestos gelos. The person and the community and the world that laughs, lasts.

One of the things I love about Coyote stories is that they give us a behind-the-scenes look at how things came to be and how they are—which is playful. Coyote represents an unquenchable lust for being and life, and he creates and acts out of this lust, but he does not do this like the God of the Hebrew Bible, who always seems to know what he is doing and has everything in control. Coyote acts, but he is vulnerable to the surprising and unexpected consequences of his actions, so he can find himself stuck in a jam, and he’s got to figure a way out, and he does, and this results in yet another close call, leading to yet another burst of creativity, and on and on, and such is the process of the evolution of the world. Not by long-range planning—design established from the very beginning and then executed ideally without flaw—but experimentation, throwing yourself into it, seeing what happens next, facing loose ends and incongruities, experiencing breathtaking beauty and meaning but only to the degree you expose yourself to risk and therefore to pain. Shrugging shoulders at this fact of life; perhaps even laughing at the joy and absurdity of it all….

This is what Coyote stories reveal to us, as they take us behind-the-scenes of our everyday here-and-now. The heart of reality is not serious, but playful. Incongruity and pain are an integral part of the deal; sometimes it’s our fault, sometimes it’s not, and our best bet is to stay cool—to resist nurturing resentments and rage—to go with the flow, stay creative and loose. “One day,” goes another story, “Coyote was walking along. The sun was shining brightly, and Coyote felt very hot. ‘I would like a cloud,’ he said, so a cloud came and made some shade for Coyote. But he was not satisfied. ‘I want more clouds,’ he said, and more clouds came along, and the sky began to look very stormy. But Coyote was still hot. ‘How about some rain?” he said, and the clouds began to sprinkle rain. ‘More rain,’ Coyote demanded. The rain became a downpour. But now Coyote wanted a creek to put his feet in, so a creek sprang up beside him, and Coyote walked in it to cool off his feet.’ It should be deeper, said Coyote, and so the creek became a huge, swirling river, and now Coyote got more than he bargained for. He found himself swept up into the currents, rolled over and over, thrown up on the bank far away, nearly drowned. When he woke up, he saw buzzards circling him, trying to decide if he was dead, and he shooed them off. He looked around him. He had made the Columbia River. This is how that great river began.

I always think of Coyote when I sing “Bring Many Names,” #23 in the grey hymnal. There’s a verse that captures his essential spirit: “Young, growing God, eager still to know, / willing to be changed by what you started, / quick to be delighted, singing as you go: / hail and hosanna, young, growing God!”  This is the only kind of God I could ever believe in, I think. Not a God that somehow stands outside of the natural order of the universe, who intervenes supernaturally in ways that favor one person over another or one tribe over another. Not a God that is locked inside the metaphor of maleness, or the metaphor of the human. Not a God that is all-powerful, with unlimited ability to act and yet appears to remain passive and uncaring when evil in the world is truly excessive, far beyond what seems needful for people to grow strong and wise. Especially not this last part, since then, how could the heart of reality be playful? How could anyone truly feel at home in a world in which a God existed who had the power to prevent evil but held back from using it? Allowed the very worst to occur?

There is a current in contemporary theology, called process theism, that takes very seriously the idea that behind-the-scenes is a playful force like Coyote, or the “young, growing God” of our hymnal. Process theism sees God as the creativity of the universe, and there are two sides to this. One is the body of the universe, the evolving interdependent web of all existence. Process theology tells us that it is sacred: galaxies and stars, trees and animals, you and I. All of it is part of God’s growing body. The world is God’s body. That’s the first side, and here is the second. God is a consciousness over and above the universe, just as you and I have a consciousness that is over and above our own bodies. You and I feel our bodies and think about them; we hope things for them and envision goals and futures; and it’s the same thing with God. God has a conscious side to complement God’s physical side. God is both the world and the consciousness of the world. Put the two together, and this is the kind of God that process theology envisions.  

One of the immediate implications of this picture of things takes us right back to Coyote, and to comedy. God simply cannot force the universe to do whatever God wants. Therefore, things can get tangled up. Slapstick happens. Evil happens. God’s power is not unlimited. The universe has creative independence and freedom, just like your own body when it gets sick. Your mind doesn’t want it to be sick, but it is anyhow, and you have got to deal. Same thing with God. God doesn’t want the world to be sick, and yet the world has creative independence. God simply can’t enter into the world supernaturally, like a bull in a china shop, and stop this and start that. All God can do is influence the world from the inside—and I know this might sound strange, but think of how cancer patients participate in their own healing. Cancer patients visualize their immune system as strong, as powerful, as potent, and the immune system responds. Similarly, God visualizes blessing and healing for this world, and if we are open to it, we can respond and receive. Nothing supernatural here at all. God influences the world from the inside, showers continual blessing up on us, impartially, universally, and does it without us having to ask. But the world has creative independence too, and so the blessing might not be received, we might be so stuck in the log of our fears and angers and resentments that we can’t hear God’s still small voice…. The blessing might not be received. That is simply the reality and risk of freedom.

And by now you may be noticing something about comic spirituality. It’s not frivolous. It’s a way of being in the world richly, in the midst of incongruity of every kind—pain, suffering, death. It says, if the heart of reality is like Coyote, or like the God of process theism, then there’s nothing malicious behind-the-scenes for us to resent and rebel against, like some tragic existential hero. Life is an open adventure. Accidents do happen. We can get firmly stuck in logs of all kinds. But don’t forget about the woodpeckers out there, who are on their way. All we have to do is stay calm, and let them do their work to free us, so we can continue the adventure.   

And this takes us to the next theme of comic spirituality, which has to do with resisting the temptations of the tragic point of view. The temptations are great. Two quick illustrations are in order. One has to do with an observation about kite string. Ever gone kite flying, and (wind being the trickster that it is) your kite takes a nose dive, and in the process of reclaiming your kite, you tangle up the string? If you are like me, trying to untangle it can make you impatient, and then angry, and suddenly you feel like a tragic hero. The world is unfair, the world is against me, the world is doing this to me … and before you know it, you have forgotten that your best bet is to finesse things. You are pulling on the tangles way too hard, jerking and tugging them, making a bad situation worse. What was originally just tangle is now a hard knot, an unredeemable mess. 

Second illustration. Think Achilles, from ancient Greek mythology: his famous rage. Rage is the fundamental emotion that moves Achilles in the Trojan War—rage at being dishonored by the Greek general Agamemnon, so he will not fight; then rage at the Trojans who killed his close friend Patroclus, so now he will fight. Rage has him in its grip, and he is bursting with it, and not once does he question whether the Gods are on his side. He does not think: he acts. His deeds are larger-than-life and always to be remembered, but no one would call Achilles wise. The tragic mindset is not wise. Fundamentally reactive as it is, it simply cannot step back from the righteous heat of the moment and cool off; and this means it has a hard time being self-critical, or empathetic towards a different point of view, or creative. Every problem is a nail, to be solved by hammering. Our world—with all its curves and complexities and behind-the-scenes jitters—is just not a good fit for straight-arrow people like Achilles, and that’s why the traditional ending of a tragic story is not the journey that runs ever on, but the journey stopped short by the death of the hero. Tragic heroes are swept under and destroyed by the very life that they are so ill-equipped to understand and work with.

Succumb to the temptations of the tragic point of view, and the result is disaster. We never get out of the log, in one sense of another. Emotions like anger and sadness and fear sweeping us away, and out of these we react to whatever life sends us; we become so noisy we scare away savior woodpeckers for good. This is the key ingredient of the tragic mindset: stuckness in difficult emotions, endless rumination, which makes it difficult to stay loose and creative in our thinking, keeps things way too serious, causes us to feel discomfort with ambiguity and complexity, prevents us from being able to walk a mile in another’s shoes. In other words, low emotional intelligence. People finding themselves in a tangle, challenged by a diversity of valid perspectives and valid concerns, and before you know it, the tangle, which could have been finessed, has become a hard knot, another Middle East conflict. Well intentioned people wanting to fight for justice and for peace, but somehow they bring the fight to each other, and there is petty bickering and posturing and rigid political correctness and a party line; and suddenly these well-intentioned people, wanting to fight for justice and for peace, find themselves in the middle of a circular firing squad of their own creation. If you have ears to hear, then hear this.

But a comic perspective keeps things sane. It keeps us working together in world that is impure, keeps us hopeful even when the system we can’t extricate ourselves from is compromised and flawed. In this regard, I like what Chinese writer Lin Yutang has to say: “[T]he tremendous importance of humor in politics can be realized only when we picture for ourselves … a world of joking rulers. Send, for instance, five or six of the world’s best humorists to an international conference, and give them the plenipotentiary powers of autocrats, and the world will be saved. As humor necessarily goes with good sense and the reasonable spirit, plus some exceptionally subtle powers of the mind in detecting inconsistencies and follies and bad logic, and as this is the highest form of human intelligence, we may be sure that each nation will thus be represented at the conference by its sanest and soundest mind. […] Can you imagine this bunch of international diplomats starting a war or even plotting for one? The sense of humor forbids it. All people are too serious and half-insane when they declare a war against another people. They are so sure that they are right and that God is on their side. The humorists, gifted with better horse-sense, don’t think so.”

Amen to that. The temptation of the tragic point of view is ultimately a temptation to do violence and war—especially in the name of our highest and noblest ideals. But comic spirituality counters it. A sense of humor saves us. Which leads to the third and last theme of comic spirituality I want to address today: the power of laughter—unquenchable, invincible laughter. Asbestos gelos. The person and the community and the world that laughs, lasts.

Consider the experience of Captain Gerald Coffee, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. After three months in captivity, Coffee’s Vietnamese jailor ordered him to wash in a rat-infested shower room littered with rotting things and garbage all around him. As he felt the stream of cold water against his body, he was overcome with despair. There he was in a dismal hole, body broken, totally uncertain of his fate, pressure to do this, do that, hostility his daily fare, men dying every day, the fate of his crewmen unknown. That’s where he was, mind, body, spirit, as the cold water washed over his body. Then he raised his head, and saw something. There at eye level on the wall in front of him, scratched in by some other American who’d been there before him, were these words: “Smile, you’re on Candid Camera!” And he couldn’t help but smile. In that crazy place, woodpecker had come for him, and he laughed out loud. He felt such gratitude for the spunk of that unknown American who was able to rise above his own dejection and pain to inscribe a line of encouragement. And Captain Gerald Coffee, there in captivity in a Vietnam prison, found strength to go on.

Sometimes laughter takes us by surprise, and we find strength to go on. Better yet, though, is a conscious intent to nourish our sense of humor regularly. Never allowing the humor tank in us to go empty. Brush your teeth every day, top off your humor tank every day. Watch John Stewart, or Bill Maher, or South Park. Read The Onion. Whatever. Whatever can puncture our self-righteous pretensions, loosen us up, bring us back down to earth, keep us energized and plucky. We laugh so that we can last.

I want to close with some humor aerobics. It’s just like regular aerobics to get the blood pumping—humor aerobics to get the sense of humor pumping. To do it, you don’t have to feel particularly happy beforehand; although by the end, you might just be laughing like crazy, and it feels so good….

Here’s the exercise. It’s one of my favorites—it’s called The American Bat Face. It’s especially good to do right before you are about to enter into a difficult conversation. Let me describe it first: 

1. Place your hand on top of your head, with the fingers pointing straight forward

2. Reach down with the middle two fingers and touch the tip of your nose—pull the nose up, flaring the nostrils

3. Flap your tongue in and out of your mouth while making a high-pitched squealing noise

4. Think to yourself repeatedly, “This is not stupid, it’s silly.”

If this feels too uncomfortable for you, you absolutely have permission not to do it. But I hope as many of you as possible will try it and see what happens. As you do it, see if you can hear Coyote laughing with you…

Ready? Let’s go on three…..

*

You see, there’s an important difference between “stupid” and “silly” that comedian Steve Allen’s son, Steve Allen Jr., points out. He says that “stupid” means ignorant and uneducated. But having fun and playing is not stupid—it’s “silly,” and “silly” is a word that comes from the Old English, meaning completely happy, completely blessed. Silly was a blessing you wished upon those you loved.

I wish that upon you today, and forever. Be more silly in your life, and be blessed.

 

 

The Uses of Adversity

This morning I want to talk about the uses of adversity, and in doing so, I am mindful of a piece of wisdom that comes from the brilliant rabbi and scholar Adin Steinsaltz. Adversity is good, he says, though “the good is hidden” and “often several levels of excavation are needed to get to it.” Yet he also reminds us of an important teaching that absolutely needs to accompany this insight: “the injunction that we can say this only about our own suffering, and that we are forbidden to say it to someone else who is suffering.” “If you fall and bang your knee,” he says, “my response to you must not be, ‘Well, it’s for the best.’ On the contrary, if I see someone suffering, my one obligation is to try to help relieve that suffering. Telling a suffering person that everything is for the best is called, in the Talmud, ‘the sins of the friends of Job.’ Job suffered greatly, and his friends said to him, ‘Don’t you have faith in God?’ This is not what the friends should have said. … It is not appropriate to speak this theology while a person is struggling with pain and grief.” 

I wish more people knew this. Though I agree with Rabbi Steinsaltz that good can come out of adversity—that what is ultimate is neither tragedy nor failure—still, when I am in the midst of a particular loss or sorrow, and I am with someone else in a personal conversation, the last thing I want is for that person to try to clean things up for me, tell me it’s all for the best. Don’t do that. Don’t theologize. Just acknowledge my feelings about how it hurts, how it feels unfair, how it sucks. Do that for me and do it for everyone. Just give a hug, or hold a hand. Be present. If you don’t know what to say, say THAT. Help them know that they are not alone.

At some point today, I hope you’ll take a moment to look at the purple insert in your order of service. It lists just some of the ways in which this congregation helps people stay encouraged and connected in good times and in bad. We’re a community of care, here at UUCA. Know that this is what you are helping to sustain and grow through your continued gifts of energy and money. It’s so important in times like these. 

But Rabbi Steinsaltz is not done with us. What if the person in the midst of adversity is not someone else, but oneself? Here’s what he says: “If I fall and bang my own knee, I have a choice. I can wallow in my own pain, or I can use the experience to stimulate my faith and prompt me to examine my life more carefully and to grow, in empathy and understanding, from my experience.” That’s what Rabbi Steinsaltz says. Each of us is responsible for making some positive sense out of the reality of our suffering. Perhaps we need to wallow for a bit—we’re only human. But then comes the time to move beyond that and go deeper. Can adversity have positive uses? Is it really true, as psychologist Jonathan Haidt says in his book The Happiness Hypothesis, that “people need adversity, setbacks, and perhaps even trauma to reach the highest levels of strength, fulfillment, and personal development”? And, what does that look like? Rabbi Steinsaltz is saying to each of us today: choose to go deeper. Choose to find the good that is hidden beneath the pain. Seek it out courageously.  

To this end, we’re going to explore the adversity story of a person named George Bailey. We know him better in December than in other months, perhaps, because he’s the main character in the Christmas movie classic It’s A Wonderful Life. Yet George Bailey is nothing less than a modern-day Job-figure, having something to say to us in every month. So much to learn from his story. Starting with an up-close look at his particular struggle. See if any of it resonates with you. I know it does with me.

When George Bailey was a teenager, a fantasy formed in his mind of being a world traveler, going to Tahiti, sailing the Emerald Sea—exploring all these exotic locations and more, far away from Bedford Falls, the boring town of his birth. As he grew older, the hopes only grew more ambitious. In the movie, when he’s 21, we see him buying luggage for his trip to Europe. He’s got his life all figured out. First he’ll go to Europe, and then he’ll go to college, and then he’s going to build things: skyscrapers hundreds of feet high, bridges a mile long. He’s going to be a millionaire.

t’s around this time that his father asks him if he’d be interested in returning home after college to run the family business, the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan Company. Hearing this, George goes quiet. Right before, he was laughing and joking raucously with everyone in the house, but when his father asked him this question point blank, George got real quiet. Said, “I couldn’t face being cooped up for the rest of my life in a stuffy little office. I want to do something big, something important with my life!”

Just imagine how George’s father hears this—what this says about how his son misunderstands him. Parents and children miss each other like this all the time. George isn’t seeing his father’s life with eyes of compassion. He’s too caught up in his own success fantasy of skyscrapers and bridges and lots of money.

But you know what happens next. Even if you’ve never seen It’s A Wonderful Life, I’ll bet you know. George begins living into one of the mysteries of the human condition, which is the reality of limits. As a member of the middle class, naturally he’s been brought up believing that people are free to control their own destinies. No limits. Just do it. The only person stopping you from climbing the success ladder … is you. This is where George is coming from. This forms the core of his youth. But now one event after another is going to expose the lie.

His father dies, and George must give up his trip to Europe so he can settle his father’s business affairs. The long road of missed opportunities and regret begins. Then, just as he’s handing off important papers to the Building and Loan’s Board of Trustees, moments before he’s out the door on the way to college, his father’s arch-enemy, Scrooge-like Henry F. Potter, makes a motion that the Building and Loan dissolve. Potter, who is wealthy beyond measure and could easily afford to give, asks, “Are we running a business or a charity ward?” Hearing this, something snaps in George and he finds himself saying to Potter: “You’re right when you say my father was no business man. I know that. […] But he did help a few people get out of your slums, Mr. Potter. And what’s wrong with that? […] Doesn’t it make them better citizens? Doesn’t it make them better customers? […] Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you’re talking about … they do most of the living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn’t think so. People were human beings to him, but to you, a warped, frustrated old man, they’re cattle. Well, in my book he died a much richer man than you’ll ever be.”

What a wonderful but ironic speech! This is the same person for whom success in life is equivalent to world travel and skyscrapers and bridges and lots of money. This is the same person who basically told his father that he and his stuffy office were small and unimportant. Yet already we are seeing some of the uses of adversity. One of the benefits is that it challenges us to get clearer about what it is we genuinely value, and we discover that true success and happiness in life can mean something very different from what we think they mean. Only in the moment of facing down Henry F. Potter does George realize in himself a genuine and deep appreciation for what it is his Dad did. Only in the heat of that challenging moment. It was a gift of adversity—although it is not necessarily a gift that makes things simpler. George now has two competing success visions warring away in his heart. One is focused on service to his community and being rooted in that community; the other is focused on an almost Peter Pan-like desire to travel and build things and make lots of money. More on this internal conflict in a bit. For now, it’s enough to acknowledge that George’s speech was a moment of great personal discovery, and inspiring for others as well. The next thing that happens is that Building and Loan Board rejects the motion to dissolve but only if George takes over his father’s job as leader. And he does, but with great ambivalence. Life keeps on throwing him curveballs. Once, he thought he had it all figured out. But now he’s more like the poet Dante, who once said about midlife, “I found myself within a dark woods / where the straight way was lost.” What else can he do, but keep moving? He gives his college funds to his younger brother, Harry, and goes to work.

Circumstances crowd out the fantasies of youth and supersede them. In the end, George finds himself where he thought he’d never be: working in his Dad’s stuffy little office, stuck in Bedford Falls. He gets to continue his father’s work of economic justice in the community, and while this is important to him, still, his heart is at war with itself. Regret upon regret pile up. He’s just a mess of contradictions. He marries a beautiful caring wife, he has wonderful children, he is loved and respected throughout Bedford Falls, but all the wild wonderful energy and humor of his youth gradually go away. He’s cranky. He’s cynical. “I want to do what I want to do,” he complains, but no one’s listening.

The bounce in his soul is gone. And it’s like this with so many people today. The adversity of conflicted selves, heavy with regret. Thinking and feeling they are failures even as they are doing great work in the world. Afraid because of the economy, even as they are surrounded by something far more reliable than money ever could be, which is family and friendship, the beloved community of a place light this, and within: the sustaining and transforming power of the Spirit of Life. As close-up to our individual lives as we are, who are we to judge them wrong, or a failure? Who are we to offer up a global judgment like this, as if we were able to transcend our myopia and see ourselves from a God’s-eye point-of-view?

The bounce is gone. And if it’s gone, how is a person going to bounce back in the face of sudden crisis and change? The problem just escalates.

Here’s what this looks like for George. What happens is that absent-minded Uncle Billy misplaces the $8000 which was supposed to have been deposited in the Building and Loan funds. George faces bankruptcy, scandal, prison…. In complete desperation, he sees no alternative but to turn to his enemy Henry F. Potter for help. Asks for a loan. And Potter, who sits in the cat bird’s seat now, says to George, “Look at you. You used to be so cocky. You were going out to conquer the world! You once called me a warped, frustrated, old man. What are you but a warped, frustrated young man? A miserable little clerk, crawling in here on your hands and knees, begging for help.” 

It’s horrible. I mean, the movie may be called It’s a Wonderful Life, but when it gets down to this part, I’m watching it through my fingers, like I do with the The Exorcist or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Especially the scene where George wanders onto the bridge near Bedford Falls. It’s night and snow falls in large sticky flakes. George’s face is screwed up in pain. Potter’s words ring in his mind—“you’re worth more dead than alive.” Below him—the raging torrent of a river. He’s thinking suicide. He’s thinking The End.

But is it? Despite all that has happened, can George bounce back? And we as well? For I know that George is not alone with his outrageous reversals of fortune. Some of us may be on that bridge with George right now, and the rest of us can relate. The past few years have brought reversals of fortune to us all, in some way or another. Bad things happening to good people. It can feel so unfair.  

But what happens next in the story illustrates yet another use of adversity: we learn that we are stronger than we know…..

Picture the scene. There he is, George Bailey, a man who’s lost the bounce in his soul nd it’s so flat, it can’t cope with the loss of $8000. He just can’t take it any more. He finds himself alone, beaten, standing on a snowy bridge in the night, raging river below. Suicide seems the only way. And then—splash! Someone else has taken a dive! And suddenly, instinct takes over. Takes him two seconds to grasp the situation, and he jumps right in to save that person who’s drowning. He risks his life to save another.

Now this is incredible. Adversity has broken him down completely, and yet, in the midst of direst weakness, he discovers that strength still remains. And so can we. You know, often we can find ourselves saying, as we contemplate horrible possibilities, “If such-and-such happened, I could never survive it.” Or, “If such-and-so happened, I wouldn’t know what to do.” And yet when the worst happens, and we go numb with shock, we discover a persistence within us simply to take things one step at a time, one moment at a time. Events rush and swirl past us. The broken pieces of life overwhelm, but for a time we let things be. It is enough just to keep moving, and somehow we do. Somehow we just keep going. “More and more I have come to admire resilience,” writes poet Jane Hirschfield.  “Not the simple resistance of a pillow, / whose foam returns over and over to the same shape, / but the sinuous tenacity of a tree: / finding the light newly blocked on one side, / it turns to another. / A blind intelligence, true. / But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs / all this resinous, unretractable earth.” Adversity helps us discover this same persistence in ourselves, when the worst happens, and we come to realize we are stronger than we ever thought possible. A confidence in ourselves starts to grow, and we learn that, whatever else the future may bring, we have stood in the fire before, and we can stand in the fire again. We can. We are stronger than we know.   

This is what adversity teaches. In fact, there are times when it lifts us out of ourselves completely, and we find ourselves blessed with a better dream and a healing vision of life that we realize directly, first-hand—one we never could have known otherwise. Adversity can have this use as well.

Here’s how it happens for George. If you’ve seen the movie, you know that the person he saved from drowning is none other than Clarence Oddbody, Angel Second Class. He’s an angel, and he comes to earth to give George a great supernatural gift: direct experience of what Bedford Falls would have become had he never been born.

And it’s terrible. Horrible. Without George Bailey, Bedford Falls turned out to be a hellish place. And it blows his mind. It opens it up. He was living a wonderful life without knowing it. Everything he honestly and truly needed for happiness, he already had. Even with all the bad luck circumstances that seemed, time and again, to prevent him from pursuing his youthful hopes—even though he never became a world traveler, or went to college; even though he never built a skyscraper hundreds of feet high or a bridge a mile long—even so: the worth of his life was diminished not one whit. Worthy dreams can happen, even in a stuffy small office, in boring Bedford Falls. A hero journey, right there in the everyday. Being there for people in need, again and again, even when it put him at risk. Standing up for the little guy against bullies like Henry F. Potter.

Even in Bedford Falls, greatness can happen. And George finally gets it. The big picture pulls all the pieces of his life together, grasps him in his soul, heals his conflicted and regret-filled heart. The greatness he has always longed for—he realizes that he’s already been doing it. His father as well. And now he doesn’t want to give it up. The hero adventure is right here and right now! Who needs to travel to exotic locations like Tahiti, when you can have everything you want in Bedford Falls? Clarence!” he cries, “Clarence! Help me, Clarence. Get me back. Get me back. I don’t care what happens to me. Get me back to my wife and kids. Help me, Clarence, please. Please! I want to live again! I want to live again. I want to live again.”

Change your mind, and life changes. George Bailey wants to live again, and I would have you see clearly how badly he wants it. He wants it despite the fact that, as far as he knows, he’s still out $8000. Despite the fact that coming back to life will mean facing bankruptcy, scandal, prison…. But it no longer matters. How can he give up the life that he’s always wanted, which is the life he’s always been living but only now realizes it? 

Wherever you are this morning—whatever adversity you might be facing—I invite you to consider its uses. It clarifies our values, it teaches us that we are stronger than we know, and it also makes us relentlessly hungry for a transformed vision of who we are. We do not need to be visited by an actual angel to learn how to see our lives through angel eyes. Eyes that see clearly the truth of the preciousness of friendship and community and life even if some version of bankruptcy or scandal awaits us. The preciousness of friendship and community and life… And also this: how the world needs us and doesn’t care that we might never have traveled to that exotic location, or gone to that school, or built that mile long bridge.

Tap into angel vision, and the bounce in our souls comes back.