Planting Seeds of Soul: The Seed of Clear Thinking

I want to start out this morning by introducing you to a tongue-in-cheek syndrome called Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder. Meditation teacher Warren Lee Cohen talks about this, in his book Raising the Soul. “This is how AAADD manifests itself: I decide to wash my car. As I start towards the garage, I notice that there is mail on the hall table. I decide to go through the mail before I wash the car. I lay my car keys down on the table, put the junk mail in the trash can under the table, and notice that the trash can is full. So, I decide to put the bills back on the table and take out the trash first. But then I think, since I’m going to be near the mailbox when I take out the trash anyway, I may as well pay the bills first. I take my check book off the table, and see that there is only one check left. My extra checks are in my desk in the study, so I go to my desk where I find the can of Coke that I had been drinking. I’m going to look for my checks, but first I need to move the can of Coke aside so that I don’t accidentally knock it over. I notice the Coke is getting warm and decide to put it in the refrigerator to keep it cold. As I head towards the kitchen with the Coke, a vase of flowers on the counter catches my eye. They need to be watered. I set the Coke down on the counter, and I discover my reading glasses that I’ve been searching for all morning. I decide I’d better put them back on my desk, but first I’m going to water the flowers. I set the glasses back down on the counter, fill a container with water and suddenly I spot the TV remote. Someone left it on the kitchen table. I realize that tonight when we want to watch TV, we’ll be looking for the remote, but nobody will remember that it’s on the kitchen table, so I decide to put it back in the den where it belongs, but first I’ll water the flowers. As I pour water on the flowers, some of it spills on the floor. So, I set the remote back down on the table, get some towels and wipe up the spill. Then I head down the hall trying to remember what I was planning to do. At the end of the day,” concludes Warren Lee Cohen, “the car isn’t washed, the bills aren’t paid, the trash hasn’t been taken out, there is a warm can of Coke sitting on the counter, there is still only one check in my checkbook, I can’t find the remote, I can’t find my glasses, and I don’t remember what I did with the car keys. Then when I try to figure out why nothing got done today, I’m really baffled because I know I was busy all day long, and I’m really tired, but now it’s time to check my email.”

Can you relate? It’s Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder. Busy all day long, but nothing really gets done, because it’s hard to maintain undivided attention on the task at hand. Hard to focus on just one thing at a time and not allow ourselves to be distracted by additional problems that inevitably pop up along the way.

And if it’s this way with the things in our outer world, how is it with the inner world of our thoughts?

The careful, deliberate, reasoned search for truth is a cornerstone of our free faith. Says the father of Unitarianism in America, William Ellery Channing, “Without … inward spiritual freedom outward liberty is of little worth. What [does it matter] that I am crushed by no foreign yoke if, through ignorance and vice, through selfishness and fear, I want the command of my own mind? The worst tyrants are those which establish themselves in our own breast. The man who wants force of principle and purpose is a slave, however free the air he breathes. The mind, after all, is our only possession, or, in other words, we possess all through its energy and enlargement.” That’s what the father of Unitarianism says. A capacity to be principled and purposeful in our thinking is simply basic to our way of faith. Without it, as we sail on OUR passenger ship, we’re lost. We can’t reliably read the signs of the times, nor discover what to do next. As Channing says, we fall prey to “a narrow, dark, confused intellect, which sees everything as through a mist, gives to everything the color of its own feelings, confines itself to what coincides with its wishes, contents itself with superficial views, and thus perpetually falls into errors….” This is not free faith. This is not who we are.

This morning, we tend to our most intimate relationship: the one we have with our thoughts. What are some of the tyrants that can establish themselves in us and muddle our thinking? And how might we develop our thinking so that it can be clearer? Today’s sermon is the second installment of the “Planting Seeds of Soul” series, so remember what I said last month about “wax on/wax off.” We’re going to learn our second “wax on/wax off” exercise today, to raise Unitarian Universalist soul in this place. That’s the goal.

But first: tyrants. One that comes immediately to mind is fallacious reasoning, or patterns of thinking that are bad according to logical standards but nevertheless make an impression on people who don’t know any better. Here’s an example of what I mean. I opened my Atlanta Journal-Constitution from yesterday and read that Georgia Congressman Nathan Deal “wants the president to prove he is an American citizen.” The article clarifies: “In June 2008, Obama’s campaign office released a digitally scanned image of his birth certificate … that shows he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Aug, 4, 1961. Government officials in Hawaii have verified that the document is official. Yet Deal and others say they still have doubts.”

In any introductory level logic class, you’d learn that this is an textbook example of an ad hominem fallacy in formation, which tries to discredit a person’s policies and viewpoints not by presenting genuine evidence against them but by attacking the person, rendering his or her character so disgusting that no matter how good the policies are, no matter how penetrating the viewpoint, no one’s paying attention, no one’s listening. This is what the Birther movement hopes for, as it continues to nurture doubts about Obama’s citizenship status even in the face of an official birth certificate….

It’s just been one ad hominem attack after another. Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, joking about the similarity of Barack Obama’s name to that of the terrorist Osama bin Laden—and using the machinery of his organization to spread the joke around until it becomes no joke. Tea Party participants, carrying signs that feature Obama’s face with a Hitler mustache. A Thomas Sowell article, where he says, “Recent videos of American children in school singing songs of praise for Barack Obama were a little much, especially for those of us old enough to remember pictures of children singing the praises of dictators like Hitler, Stalin and Mao.” Do you see the steady building pattern of character assassination here? And too many Americans are completely persuaded by it, too many Americans vulnerable. The tyrant of fallacious reasoning, securing a place in our minds, and we don’t know any better. Not as a Democrat, but as an American, does this concern me, for how can I think about what President Obama is trying to do when psychological strings are being pulled and I can’t think straight? It’s horrible for democracy.

It’s definitely been horrible for reasoned debate about health care reform. Ad hominem fallacies one after another, together with others kind of fallacies. How about this one. I spotted it in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution just a few days ago: “Opponents Rally Against Health Care Bill”: 35 year-old David Seward, saying, “I think health care is expensive, but I like it and I’m scared to death of the government running it … I’m worried about the bureaucracy of the federal government getting involved.” This is what he says, and besides his completely ignoring the fact that government-run Medicare is a great success, do you see the underlying false dichotomy? It’s either big government or small government, and no other alternatives are possible…. Yet the issue is not so much big government vs. small government as the right amount of government really needed to solve the problem, to cut through the greed and the waste of the third-party payer medical-industrial complex. Big government vs. small government doesn’t tell the whole truth about how to solve this problem.

I could go on and on—all the kinds of fallacious thinking that have muddied up the debate around health care reform. Rep. Candace Miller from Michigan, commenting on yesterday’s passage of the health care bill in the House, saying, “We are going to have a complete government takeover of our health care system faster than you can say, `this is making me sick,’” adding that Democrats are intent on passing “a jobs-killing, tax-hiking, deficit-exploding” bill. Sounds like a classic slippery-slope argument to me, one that says that if government takes action to reform the health care system, if it sets a public option side-by-side with multiple private options and enables some REAL competition to take place, then all of a sudden, down the slippery-slope slide we go, and all sorts of horrible, fateful consequences are sure to follow. A classic appeal to fear. I don’t care what political party you belong to. I don’t care which president is in the White House. To me, manipulative language—Republican or Democratic—doesn’t help to create a great country. “Civil institutions,” said William Ellery Channing, “are to be estimated by the free and pure minds to which they give birth.” But our institutions are not being civil, and our minds must struggle against great odds to be free and pure. What would Channing say, if he could see what we see today?

This leads us to a second inner tyrant to become aware of. Besides the tyrant of fallacious reasoning, there is the tyrant of hyperconnectedness in our interactive, digital world. Here, we become experts in skimming and scanning as we flit from Facebook to text message to email to video game—and this can leave our ability to bring a full attention to one thing at a time severely underdeveloped. It can make us unfit to think great thoughts.

Marilee Sprenger talks about this in her wonderful article entitled “Focusing the Digital Brain.” “Let’s look,” she says, “at what happens in the brain of Emily, an average teenager, as she thinks she is focusing on a homework assignment. Emily sits in front of her laptop. Her iPod is playing music by Coldplay. She has three windows open on her computer screen: her Web browser through America Online, MSN Messenger for sending instant messages and e-mail, and her word processing program. Her homework is to write about five causes of the U.S. Civil War.

As Emily is putting her heading on her paper, her cell phone rings. She quickly picks up her phone and a picture of her friend Ivy appears on the screen. ‘Hi Ivy, what’s up?’

‘You’re not going to believe who texted me,’ Ivy says. Emily squeals as she hears the name of someone Ivy is interested in dating. Just then Emily’s computer flashes, ‘You’ve got mail!’ The executive part of her brain drops the conversation with Ivy as she reads a new e-mail from another classmate asking for the homework assignment. Emily answers the e-mail as Ivy rambles on, but she realizes she should get back to work. ‘I’ll text you later, Ivy. I have to get some work done.’

Emily shifts her attention back to the word processing screen. Let’s see, where was I? Her brain must let the snippets of social conversation drop out of her working memory. Attending to the assignment causes Emily’s brain to retrieve long-term memories of her readings and lectures on the Civil War. As she begins to think about the differences between the North and the South before the Civil War, her mind drifts to picturing Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind.

Refocusing takes several seconds as she remembers what Mr. Montgomery told them in class about slavery. Emily types ‘causes of the Civil War’ into Google. Immediately, 12,900,000 hits come up. She clicks on the first link, realizes it doesn’t have any information she is looking for, and tries the next Web site.

Immersed in her search, she is startled by a jangle from her Blackberry. Emily sees Jackson’s text message ‘What r u doing?’ Jackson is Emily’s new love interest, so her brain floods with pleasurable chemicals as she types her reply—these chemicals make it hard to return to homework.

So it goes among the net generation. Multitasking? Not many tasks are getting done.”

Now, I quote Marilee Sprenger at length not to pick on the net generation—after all, I openly confess that I myself have a serious case of Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder. In fact, whatever generation we happen to be in—whatever degree of proficiency is ours in up-to-date communication technologies—it seems that the general tenor of the times is rush and gush. Continuous partial attention. How are we going to do the deeply spiritual work of thinking clearly when we have a limited capacity for patience to follow a chain of thoughts from beginning to end—to resist interruption—to focus on one thing and allow it to unfold its secrets?

“[H]onesty of mind,” says William Ellery Channing, “bears an exact proportion to the patience, steadiness, and resolution with which we inquire.” And that’s exactly what we turn to now. Developing this patience, this steadiness, this resolution. How?

Our wax-on/wax off spiritual exercise for this month—for those of you who choose to practice it with me—is “about learning how to cultivate interest in even the most mundane object and by maintaining your undivided attention on it to increase your ability to focus on anything. This is a step in learning how to give your attention freely and completely, whatever and whenever you should choose.” (Warren Lee Cohen).

Four steps:

Step one: Choose a simple, human-made object—an object manufactured rather than one found in nature, like a cup, or a pencil, a pin, a pair of chopsticks. Warren Lee Cohen, the source of this and all the other exercises, says that the less interesting your object appears at first, the more powerful the effects of deliberately focusing on it.

Also be clear on how many objects you’ll focus on over the course of the upcoming month, and for how long each session will be. I’d recommend one object per week, for around 5 to 10 minutes, at the same time every day. Make the decision, and lay out your plan clearly in your journal. Warren Lee Cohen tells the story of a man who spent 20 years contemplating the same pair of wooden chopsticks. Each and every day, he was able to find something new and interesting to think about; and clearly, it wasn’t the chopsticks that were changing—it was him, the quality of attention he was bringing to them. If he can contemplate the same pair of chopsticks for 20 years, surely we can contemplate the same object for a week, at 10 minutes a pop….

That’s step one. Step two is when you’re actually ready to do the exercise. Situate yourself in a comfortable place, and prepare yourself for the exercise by relaxing your body, calming your mind, just like an athlete stretching before a workout, or a musician tuning up an instrument.

Step three is to place before your mind this object that you have chosen to contemplate. This object that, initially, appears boring: A cup, a pencil, a pin. Train your thinking exclusively on this object in a clear and factual way. Focus on one fact and then link it to the next—in step by step fashion, follow your thinking as you deepen your understanding and interest in this simple, ordinary, human-made thing.

For example, say you choose to focus on a pencil. (Thoreau would like that—he was a pencil maker, you know…) You might start by describe how the pencil appears and of what materials it’s made. Then you might go on to describe how these materials were processed to get them into this form—to think through all the stages of manufacture. Then you might go on to consider how the object is used. Then you might think about who invented it, and how its invention is connected with the invention of other similar things. And so on—inquire with patience, steadiness, and resolution….

Notice that in this approach, you just jump right in. But there are alternative approaches to keep in mind. Do the one that works best for you. One alternative is to do a little research about your object first, before you start thinking about it. Another alternative is to do no research in advance but to develop questions naturally through the course of your own thought processes and then, when the time feels right, seek out answers through research. Enriched by that, return to the object and keep on thinking about it, keep on going deeper.

Finally, there’s step four. When your five or ten minutes is done, review the general direction of your thinking. What was the initial fact that grabbed your attention? Where did you go from there?

And this is the exercise. Do it along with the “review of the day” that I introduced last month. “Even if you cannot slow down the pace of your life,” says Warren Lee Cohen, “you can create regular moments of slowness or concentration each day. These can then become seeds, essential reminders of the qualities you would like to cultivate more in life.” That’s right. We’re planting seeds of soul. They look small—focusing on a boring-looking object for 10 minutes seems small—but if we do the exercises faithfully, the results will be big. Will strengthen our minds against manipulation. Will counteract Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder and counterbalance the continuous partial attention of the digital brain. “The mind, after all, is our only possession,” says William Ellery Channing; “we possess all through its energy and enlargement.” So let us energize and enlarge it. Make Channing proud!

Spending Our Lives

“Near the end of March, 1845,” says Henry David Thoreau in Walden, “I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber. It is difficult to begin without borrowing….” Ever afterwards, the question of whose axe Thoreau borrowed has been an open one. Was it Emerson’s? Bronson Alcott’s? Ellery Channing’s? What we can know is that, this morning, as we contemplate our own experiment in living more simply and wisely, we borrow Thoreau’s angle of vision. We borrow the bent of his genius which, as Thoreau himself wryly admits, is “a very crooked one.” We do what he did: “see our native village as if we were a traveler passing through,” “to think new thoughts and have new imaginings, for the deepest and most original thinker is the farthest traveled.” We borrow all this from Thoreau as we begin deliberate travel through our own native village, seeing everything with new questioning eyes as we pass through. And as for where each of us ends up? Once, Thoreau tells us, “a young man of my acquaintance … told me that he thought he should live as I did, if he had the means. [But] I would not have anyone adopt my mode of living on any account. […] I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead.” Robert Sullivan, in his excellent biography of Thoreau entitled The Thoreau You Don’t Know, puts it like this: “Thoreau doesn’t offer answers. His is the analysis that leads to the questions. For application purposes, you can apply Thoreau to any question, not to find the answer, but to imagine how he might pose it anew. When you ask what car to drive, imagine Thoreau asking where you are going, or if the car is driving you…”

We borrow all this, as we begin pursuing our own way. Not an axe, but an angle of vision, the bent of a genius, a way of making the familiar strange, a manner of questioning. The first chapter of Walden is entitled “Economy,” but characteristically, Thoreau invites us to use this word not in its conventional sense of wealth creation or fiscal frugality. He wants us to go straight to the ancient Greek origin of the word—oikonomia—which means caring for the household, a holistic way of living in which your use of life resources is in alignment with vital values of freedom and sustainability and beauty. “I am convinced,” he says, “both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely.” “Economy,” he says, “is synonymous with philosophy.” This is how he uses the term in the first chapter of what has become, in the 155 years since it was published, sacred scripture for Unitarian Universalists today.

Economy is about how you maintain yourself on this earth. Could be a joyful pastime, but what Thoreau discovers as he travels through his own native village of Concord is people experiencing something very different. Just listen to some of his observations:

“Most men … through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. […] The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat each ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.”

Or this: “The childish and savage taste of men and women for new [clothing] patterns keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the particular figure which this generation requires to-day. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable.”

Or this: “As with our colleges, so with a hundred ‘modern improvements;’ there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. […] Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end…. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

Or this: “One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bone with;’ and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle.”

Or this: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.”

All are observations Thoreau makes as he travels through his native village of Concord. One after another indicates not joyful pastime, but hardship of some kind or other, and perhaps they echo observations you yourself have made, as you’ve traveled through your own village of Atlanta or elsewhere. The rush and gush of our days; time crunch in an era of so-called time-saving devices; “no time to be anything but a machine.” Or how our culture aims at creating more wants in us (rather than focusing on genuine needs)—churns out expert consumers who are fine-tuned to fashion trends but are blind to more important trends of intellect and heart and soul. How communication technologies today are far more powerful than any of the dreams of yesterday and yet still we can question the value of what is being communicated: obnoxious opinions of know-nothing demagogues; undigested data without pattern or context or meaning—“as if the main object were to talk fast and not talk sensibly.” Or people around us, not paying attention to the evidence of their experience, unconsciously in the grip of beliefs that they have never personally questioned or tested: Thoreau’s farmer condemning vegetarianism even as the vital oxen who unfailingly plough his fields are themselves… vegetarian. Finally, all the do-gooders in our world, unconsciously in the grip of the belief that they themselves are not embroiled in the injustice that they try to ease, that they are strong while others are weak—and so through their do-gooding, they administer band-aids and aspirin, never realizing that far more is needed, radical change needed, the kind of change we need today, for example, in health care. Hardship, in the economy of our time as well as in Thoreau’s, and so no wonder the first chapter of Walden is full of sharp social critique and satire, pages howling with anger and pain. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” he cries. “From the desperate city you go to the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.” In other words, to bolster your courage, you’ll have to rely on the example of furry little animals, because human examples are simply hard to come by. “I have traveled a good deal in Concord,” says Thoreau, “and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.”

There has got to be a better way. A better way of maintaining ourselves upon this earth. In fact, that’s the core of the problem right there. People don’t think that alternatives exist. “They honestly think that there is no choice left. But,” says Thoreau, “alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices.” “Man’s capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried.” “What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.” All of these, golden lines of hope. Alternatives do exist, and we can find them. But we must put ourselves out there, in some liminal, in-between space, where creative solutions can find us. Let that be our self-culture practice. We have to borrow Thoreau’s genius, which is a very crooked one, and risk being misunderstood by our family and our peers, risk harm to our reputation. Shift the nature of our business, towards trying to hear what the wind is saying.

This is what led Thoreau to borrow an axe and begin his social experiment of one at Walden Pond. To see if his humanity could be recovered from the machine-like schedule of his days. To escape the tyranny of a consumeristic culture, and peel away all artificial wants to get down to essential needs. To discover what is worth communicating—to write out his heart and soul. To test his beliefs and see which ones actually reflect and extend his real experience. Not to be a reactive do-gooder, but to better understand the evils and problems of our world—distinguish roots from branches—and attack the roots, take his axe and chop at that. “It would be of some advantage,” he says, “to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods are used to obtain them. […] For the improvements of the ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man’s existence; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.” Thoreau goes to Walden to return to essentials, and to sanity. He is a Transcendentalist.

Now I will tell you plainly that the first time I picked up Walden, I had no idea what this guy was talking about. I was in the eighth grade, and I had heard that the book was a classic. Being a student in the gifted and talented program at my school—being a future member of my high school’s I. Q. Booster Club—how could I not want to check it out? I found it in paperback, there on a dark dusty wooden shelf, wedged in tightly among other classics. The cover was not promising—had a weird-looking guy on it with a neck beard. Did he just forget to shave his neck? What’s up with that? I flipped through the pages: tiny print, no picture. Uuugh. Then I started to read. Sentences that had way too many phrases and commas in them, each like long tangled thread. References to Greek and Roman mythology, world religions, science; allusions to stuff I could only vaguely sense. Now, I know that Thoreau is like a contemporary Unitarian Universalist preacher in that he builds the nest of his thought from many sources of insight and wisdom; now, I know that he loved puns and paradox and wordplay, enough to drive his friend and mentor Emerson crazy; now, I know he believed that “in writing, conversation should be folded many times thick.” Now, I know—but then, not at all. Walden was indigestible. I struggled with it for a time, and then gave up.

Now I am in a different place in my life. Perhaps more mature; perhaps more able to navigate his conversation folded many times thick. Definitely hungering for an alternative to the quiet desperation that is contemporary life. And voluntary simplicity as a spiritual discipline sounds very good to me. To what degree does our genuine happiness and wellbeing depend on the clothing we wear, the shelter we possess, the food we eat, the work we do. Is there a way to “get one’s living honestly, with freedom left to pursue one’s proper pursuits”? “The more you have,” says Thoreau, “the poorer you are.” We don’t own our things; our things (or our debts) own us. Simplicity preserves an ability to journey freely through life; but a richness of things weighs us down, puts the cart before the horse, distorts and distracts, “cooks us a la mode.”

At times Thoreau is tongue-in-cheek hilarious as he figures out how to live his voluntary poverty principle. “I had three pieces of limestone on my desk,” he says, “but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground.”

Or this story: “A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best,” Thoreau concludes,” to avoid the beginnings of evil.”

And can you imagine being his friend? “I sometimes try my acquaintances,” he says, “by such tests as this;–who could wear a patch … over the knee? Most behave as if they believed that their prospects for life would be ruined if they should do it. It would be easier for them to hobble to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon.” Is he right? Is this true? Are we so completely enslaved to keeping up appearances, when in reality all that matters is the inner person, the goodness of a heart, the clarity of a mind, the depth of a spirit?

Applying the voluntary simplicity principle in a consumeristic culture like ours seems hardly possible. Yet I wonder at the effects of at least trying. Reminds me of another story that Thoreau tells, about his axe: “One day, when my axe had come off and I had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed the whole to soak in a pond hole in order to swell the wood, I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently without inconvenience, as long as I staid there, or more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life.” That’s the story. We are the snake in its torpid state. Yet there is a spring of springs that can arouse us, and raise us up to a higher and more ethereal life.

Above all, this higher life is one of trust. “I think we may safely trust a good deal more than we do,” he says. “Nature is well adapted to our weakness as to our strength. The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well night incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do: and yet how much is not done by us! or, what if we had been taken sick? How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith is we can avoid it; all the day long on the alert….” Perhaps the root of all evil is none other than this—our pride—and to it, we must take the axe of voluntary simplicity. Greater than anything we can do or any thing we can own is the world’s graciousness, its simple things; we can trust that life is worth living, no matter what.

This is what the first chapter of Walden is all about. Describes nothing less than a hero journey in the economy of life, picks up huge themes like suffering, the quest for healing, discovery, renewal. Thoreau’s unique angle of vision on all this is what we borrow, as we begin. I’ll close with a poem by Norah Pollard that puts it all in perfect and precise cameo:

I knew a woman who washed her hair and bathed
her body and put on the nightgown she’d worn
as a bride and lay down with a .38 in her right hand.
Before she did the thing, she went over her life.
She started at the beginning and recalled everything—
all the shame, sorrow, regret and loss.
This took her a long time into the night
and a long time crying out in rage and grief and disbelief—
until sleep captured her and bore her down.

She dreamed of a green pasture and a green oak tree.
She dreamed of cows. She dreamed she stood
under the tree and the brown and white cows
came slowly up from the pond and stood near her.
Some butted her gently and they licked her bare arms
with their great coarse drooling tongues. Their eyes, wet as
shining water, regarded her. They came closer and began to
press their warm flanks against her, and as they pressed
an almost unendurable joy came over her and
lifted her like a warm wind and she could fly.
She flew over the tree and she flew over the field and
she flew with the cows.

When the woman woke, she rose and went to the mirror.
She looked a long time at her living self.
Then she went down to the kitchen which the sun had made all
yellow, and she made tea. She drank it at the table, slowly,
all the while touching her arms where the cows had licked.

Planting Seeds of Soul: The Seed of Self-Knowledge

How many of you remember the 1984 movie hit The Karate Kid? It’s a story about a high-schooler named Daniel who’s moved from New Jersey to California and finds himself the target of a group of bullies—karate students from the Cobra Kai Dojo, taught by a teacher who is himself a bully, John Kreese, who says over and over, “Mercy is for the weak. An enemy deserves no mercy.” They’ve decided that Daniel is their enemy, and he’s in trouble.

Enter Mr. Miyagi. Daniel initially knows him as the eccentric maintenance man at the apartment complex he and his mom are living in, but as the bullying at school gets worse, Daniel learns that there’s more to him than meets the eye. He’s a karate expert in his own right. Learned it from his Dad, but not as a way of spreading hurt in the world. Karate is a discipline of the spirit—a way of beauty and strength. “Fighting always last answer to problem,” he tells Daniel. The crucial issue is attitude—that’s what’s wrong with the bullies from school. He says, “No such thing as bad student, only bad teacher.”

Soon after that, Mr. Miyagi goes with Daniel to the Cobra Kai Dojo—goes right into the lion’s den, this fragile looking elderly man who is, like, two feet shorter than John Kreese. John Kreese just towers over him, exudes brutality. But Mr. Miyagi calmly stands his ground. Let’s solve things at the karate tournament coming up. Allow Daniel to train for it. No more bullying. Resolve things then.

It’s the kind of movie that makes you get up and cheer (even if the soundtrack is soooo 1980s). Daniel trains night and day with Mr. Miyagi, to hone his karate skills. He also learns more about his mysterious mentor—the fact that he was a World War II hero, the fact that his wife died in childbirth while she was at a Japanese internment camp. This is a man with courage and integrity. And in the end, at the karate tournament, when Daniel wins, he wins with courage and integrity. That’s what karate is really all about.

Now, to move us closer to our focus for today, consider how Mr. Miyagi trained Daniel in karate. If you know the movie, a phrase should spring instantly to mind: “wax on, wax off.” He says to Daniel, “I promise teach karate. That’s my part. You promise learn. I say, you do, no questions. That’s your part. Deal?” And of course, Daniel is all ready to go. “It’s a deal,” he says enthusiastically, with visions of advanced karate moves dancing in his head. So you can understand how confused he is when Mr. Miyagi then says, “First wash all the cars, then wax. Wax on right hand. Wax off left hand. Breathe in through nose, out through mouth. Don’t forget to breathe. Very important. Wax on, wax off. Wax on, wax off.” And then he leaves Daniel to the task. Daniel has just promised Mr. Miyagi to do what he says, no questions, so he jumps on it. Wax on, wax off. But after several more days of oddball tasks like this—sand the floor, paint the house, paint the fence—Daniel has had enough. How is any of this relevant to learning karate? How is any of this going to keep him alive when he fights those Cobra Kai bullies at the upcoming karate tournament? He thinks Mr. Miyagi is just using him. Says, “Four days I’ve been busting my butt, I haven’t learned a thing.”

But Daniel has. He just doesn’t know it yet. Mr. Miyagi has been planting seeds all along, seeds of karate skills, and now he’s going to open Daniel’s eyes. “Not everything is as it seems,” he says, and then he asks him to make the motions of “wax on, wax off.” Daniel proceeds to do exactly that—makes perfect half circles in the air. Then Mr. Miyagi does something completely unexpected: he throws a chest punch at him, and before Daniel even realizes what is happening, one of his circling hands has intercepted the punch and deflected it effortlessly. All along, without his conscious knowledge, his body has been absorbing the karate lessons perfectly. Sand the floor, paint the house, paint the fence have trained him in moves that effortlessly deflect all kinds of punches and kicks. Finally Daniel understands. He’s well on his way.

Not everything is as it seems. And this opens the way to our topic today: planting seeds of soul. How the seeds may not seem like much, at first glance, but if they are allowed to grow, the results are amazing.

As in Daniel’s situation, there’s urgency around this. We face bullies, too, which cause harm and hurt. Educator and spiritual activist Parker Palmer says it well, in his classic book, Let Your Life Speak. He says, “We arrive in this world with birthright gifts—then we spend the first half of our lives abandoning them or letting others disabuse us of them. As young people, we are surrounded by expectations that may have little to do with who we really are, expectations held by people who are not trying to discern our selfhood but fit us into slots.” Parker Palmer goes on to say, “In families, in schools, workplaces, and religious communities, we are trained away from true self towards images of acceptability; under social pressures like racism or sexism [or homophobia] our original shape is deformed beyond recognition; and we ourselves, driven by fear, too often betray true self in order to gain the approval of others.” That’s Parker Palmer. Cobra Kai bullies of one form or another surround us. Our true selves, like Daniel in the movie, are fighting for their lives. And if we lose touch with them—if we give them up in exchange for living other people’s values—then life turns desperate. We turn brittle and bitter. We burn out. “Only when I give something that does not grow within me” says Parker Palmer, “do I deplete myself and harm the other as well, for only harm can come from a gift that is forced, inorganic, unreal.”

The situation is urgent. “The reason the earth lies shattered and in pieces is because man is disunited from himself.” Emerson said that. We must remember our true selves, re-establish the relationship, root ourselves down in the soil of our souls. Continually work at this, in the face of bullying forces that continually conspire to make us forget, to break the relationship, to pull up roots.

Enter Mr. Miyagi—or, actually, a book that came into my life this past summer, by meditation teacher Warren Lee Cohen called Raising the Soul: Practical Exercises for Personal Development. I was and am favorably struck by his approach, for four reasons. First, his use of the word “soul” fits in with our Unitarian Universalist way, in that what he has to say about it—what the exercises try to accomplish—puts the question of whether souls in a metaphysical sense exist to the side. Some of us believe, others do not, but what all of us can believe is that soulfuless as a quality of living is a far better thing than soullessness. That’s the central focus here: self-awareness, balance, perspective, non-anxiousness, also compassion—being able to deal with the inner critic and the inner chatterer with greater effectiveness. Doing justice to the inner self so we can do justice to the outer world. Soulfulness.

I like Warren Lee Cohen’s emphasis here, as well as the emphasis on safety, complementarity, and comprehensiveness. The series of seven exercises he teaches have been practiced by many people from all walks of life for many years, and they are completely safe, he says, “if performed as described. Their apparent simplicity does not detract from the power of their enduring effect when practiced steadily. They work gently over a long period of time, and will promote lasting change.” But what if you are already engaged in another contemplative or meditative practice—as quite a few of us here are? I’m thinking in particular of our wonderful Buddhist meditation group. The answer? Great—“the seven exercises are an excellent complement to any path of inner learning, and will help keep you grounded and in balance.”

As for the issue of comprehensiveness. This is the part I like best of all. As a Unitarian Universalist, I don’t want to check any aspect of myself at the door, as the price of coming in. I want to bring in my feelings, I want to bring in my will, and I want to bring in my thinking. Feeling, willing, and thinking all have to be a part of my spiritual way, for it to be right for me. Happily, the seven soul exercises that Warren Lee Cohen teaches reflect this. Just listen to their names:

Review of the Day
Clear Thinking
Intention in Action
Balance in Feeling
Positive World View
Open Mind
and
Gratitude

Especially fascinating to me is the order in which they are given. The first, Review of the Day, which is the one we will learn today, lays the foundation, and the rest follow in an intentional sequence. “Try not to skip an exercise or stay focused on any one for too long,” says Warren Lee Cohen, “as this will detract from their harmonizing, mutually enhancing effect.” It is a question of balance. Genuine soulfulness requires emotional intelligence as much as intellectual intelligence. And even if you have both, if willpower is weak, then the result is frustration. We need all three to be strong.

And now, like Mr. Miyagi said to Daniel, I say to those of you who are interested, and want to practice these soul-raising exercises over the course of this year, “I promise teach karate. That’s my part. You promise learn. I say, you do, no questions. That’s your part. Deal?”

Actually, you can ask questions. That’s OK. Another difference between what we’re doing now and the movie is that I’m going to be a fellow learner. We’re going to be planting seeds of soul together, one seed each month, for the next seven months.

And so: the first exercise: Review of the Day. Here it is, in all its “wax on, wax off” glory:

1. Create a space of 5 to 20 minutes for this exercise at the end of your day. Make it a part of your daily practice. Get into a new rhythm—try your best.

2. Situate yourself in a way that minimizes distractions and discomfort. Some people choose to walk as they do this; others stand; still others sit in a chair, or on the floor, or in bed. Find a place and a posture that suits you.

3. Relax your body—calm your mind. Think of an athlete stretching before practice or a musician tuning an instrument before playing. Warm up.

4. Begin the rewind. Starting with where you are, picture yourself going through your day backwards, as if you were witnessing things from outside, as an onlooker. Capture as many sights, sounds, smells, tastes, conversations, as you can. See how far you can get. Can you get to your first waking thoughts? Can you even get beyond this, to your dreams before you woke up? Allow knowledge of yourself to unfold.

Three pointers here, before we go on to the next and last step.

First one: What if your mind veers off on a tangent, as is so easy to do? Try to follow your thoughts back to where you left off. Track them down, thought by thought, image by image. Then continue where you left off. Of course, since we such are complicated creatures, when you find yourself veering off, in the moment you realize it, the inner critic might decide to show up and start berating you. I’ll have a lot more to say about the inner critic this year—doing these seven exercises is going to give us lots of practice in dealing with our inner gremlin, trust me. For now, just don’t allow yourself to get sucked in by the drama. Try to be patient and forgiving of your limitations. Respond to the inner critic gently. “Thank you for sharing your perspective, but now I will carry on with what I was doing.” Something like that. A good way of dealing with outer critics as well.

Second pointer: “Some people complete this exercise easily in 5-10 minutes. Others struggle to do even part of their day’s review in half an hour, or fall asleep right in the middle of things. What is most important, however, is not that this exercise is done perfectly, but that you have put effort into it, and that over time you are improving. It is the effort, the active work of soul, that fosters development. The point is to learn how to live a more meaningful life, not to be perfect, so be kind to yourself. Forgive. This is essential in any undertaking and even more important when the challenge is to develop your soul.”

And now the third pointer: “If it is very difficult for you to review your whole day, then I suggest you try to review just a part of your day, say from lunch back to breakfast, or from what happened when you returned from work or school. Again, perfection is not the point. What is the point is establishing a regular rhythm to your inner work—trying to do it every day and better still every day at the same time. Getting into a regular rhythm is key. Rhythm will strengthen your practice and will, in time, bring the best results.”

As for the final step of the exercise:

5. Finish up in a way that feels good for you. I say this out of consideration for the kind of impact the Review of the Day exercise can have. It can help put the day to rest; give it a sense of completion; enable a sounder sleep—some people even testify that it helps ease insomnia. Above all, the Review can help us see our lives with greater perspective. While we’re living our day forward, what happens may at the time seem insignificant or completely ordinary; yet looked at again, it can shine in a whole new light, for now it is finding a place in the context of the whole day. Positive patterns emerging and becoming known. True self emerging. We may also get clearer about the things in our day that drain our energy and leave us depleted—enabling us to be in a better position the next day and the next for making better choices. In light of all this, you may choose to end the Review of the Day with an entry in your journal, to write about the insights that arise, goals for the future. Another way of ending might be to share your reflections with a friend or a spouse—if you both do this, it can lead to strengthening your relationship, and that’s great. Yet a third way of ending can simply be to say thank you—thanks to the universe, thanks to God, or just plain thanks—for the gifts of the day, or simply the opportunity to become more aware of them.

It’s all about planting seeds of soul. One seed each and every month. Earlier, Parker Palmer talked about how we can be trained away from our true selves by various bullying forces: in families, in schools, in workplaces … and then he adds to the list religious communities. (Did you notice that? I did.) It’s true. We can lose our souls even in the very places that are supposed to help us find them. But not here. Here we are growing Unitarian Universalist souls. We’re going to raise the soul here in our midst, work hard to do that. And if you take up my challenge to join me in practicing the seven exercises, remember, if and when you find yourself wondering what they have to do with justice in the larger world and justice in our souls, remember Mr. Miyagi, and Daniel, and wax on, wax off. Sand the floor, paint the house, paint the fence. Not everything is as it seems. True self will rise.

Cutting Through Abstractification

I begin with a story about one of my cats, who was originally named Xena (as in “The Warrior Princess,” after a favorite TV show of the time) but we soon realized that the better name was Zeno (as in “we made a mistake about something very crucial, but we’re going to make the best of it.”) Zeno passed away back in 2003, but he’s still with us in spirit and memory.

The story happens in Chicago. My family and I are living on the south side, in Hyde Park, right there on the campus of the University of Chicago. We’re living up on the third floor of an apartment, perhaps 100 yards away from the corner of 57th Street and Woodlawn, which was a very busy intersection—students and professors and all kinds of people intent on going someplace, either a university building or a café, or market, or bookstore. There was a bus stop at the corner as well, so at certain times of the day, there’d often be a line of people waiting.

That’s usually when Zeno would show up. With his mysterious cat eyes, he loved to watch people in all their busy-ness. He loved to be loved, and offered himself without any hesitation or shame to people’s caresses. It was all easy as pie, there at the corner of 57th and Woodlawn—just like shooting fish in a barrel. On a daily basis, he would come down the three flights from our apartment and settle right in the middle of things: people in midstride, people waiting in line, the whole world turning. We knew that this was his regular habit because, also on practically a daily basis, we got phone calls. People leaving messages on our answering machine. “Did you know that your cat is on the corner of 57th and Woodlawn?” “In case you’ve been looking for your cat, just wanted you to know that he’s on the corner of 57th and Woodlawn.” Helpful voices all, but tinged with anxiety, as if something were wrong. It would make us laugh, because we knew Zeno was just fine. Doing what he loved to do. People watching. Loving and being loved.

It led me then—and it leads me now—to wonder about how he saw things. And not just him, but non-human animals in general. The mystery of animal sight and experience. How this moment is being experienced right now, by our beloved pets.

A fascinating answer to all this comes from Temple Grandin, a professor of animal science from the University of Illinois who is also autistic and has used her autism as a bridge to the animal world. “Normal human beings,” she says, “are blind to anything they are not paying attention to. [But] my experience with animals, and with my own perceptions, is that animals and autistic people … don’t have to be paying attention to something in order to see it. Things like jiggly chains pop out at us; they grab our attention whether we want them to or not.” That’s what Temple Grandin says. The details are riveting. Animals and autistic people can’t not see them. It’s like Mr. Monk on TV, compelled to touch each parking meter as he walks on by. It’s like my cat Zeno who couldn’t resist the sudden movement of a twirly plastic thingy. It’s like the dog who’s barking his head off, but we’re not sure at what.

It’s also like 1200 pound cows who refuse to enter into a cattle chute because they are so utterly distracted by the thing that lies there at the chute entrance: a white Styrofoam coffee cup. Cows freaking out, crowding, crushing together, as if they had come face to face with a mountain. Leading to conditions that are extremely dangerous for the human handlers. And to this as well: an entire line at a cattle-handling facility shut down. A delay that costs $200 a minute. All because of a tiny coffee cup.

It’s for exactly such reasons that Temple Grandin is often called in to do a consult. The head honchos of farms and meat packing plants, calling her in a panic because the cattle or the pigs or the chickens are acting in bizarre ways and all the resident experts can’t for the life of them figure out why—so she comes on the scene and, bam, just like that, she figures it out. To them, she’s a miracle worker; but all she says is that she just sees things the way animals see them. She sees the details that are spooking them because her autism opens her up to that; the very same details grab at her and won’t let her go as well. Seemingly wrong details, as in sparkling puddles, shiny spots on metal, little pieces of moving plastic, sharp contrasts of light and dark, slowly rotating fan blades, and so on. Details that don’t register in most people, details to which we can be utterly oblivious….

“That’s the big difference between animals and people, and also between autistic people and nonautistic people,” says Temple Grandin. “Animals and autistic people don’t see their ideas of things; they see the actual things themselves. We see the details that make up the world, while normal people blur all those details together into their general concept of the world.” We abstractify, and these abstractifications become our reality.

Two famous psychology experiments make this point plain. One comes from psychologist Daniel Simons, and it’s called Gorillas in Our Midst. People are shown a videotape of a basketball game, and they are asked to count how many passes one of the teams makes. Then, a little while into the tape, while everyone is sitting there counting passes, a woman wearing a gorilla suit walks onto the screen, stops, turns, faces the camera, and beats her fists on her chest. Fifty percent of all people involved in the experiment fail to see the gorilla. Ask them if they saw something weird, and they say, no—don’t know what you are talking about. People abstractify. They live in their abstractifications.

NASA did a study with commercial airline pilots, and the results were full-on scary. The pilots were put in a flight simulator and asked to do a bunch of routine landings. But on some of the landing approaches, the experimenters added the image of a large commercial airplane parked on the runway, something a pilot would never see in real life. One quarter of the pilots landed right on top of the airplane. They never saw it. About this, Temple Grandin says, “I’ve seen photographs of the study, and what’s interesting is that if you’re not a pilot, the parked plane is obvious. You can’t miss it, and you don’t have to be autistic, either. […] But if you are a professional, expecting to see what a professional normally would see, there’s a 25 percent chance [you’ll land right on top of it.]” People abstractify—and professionals doubly so.

Which is not to say that abstractification or professionalism are bad things. Being able to cut through the countless details of our sensory existence to get to what’s relevant is often a very good thing, and allows us to focus on the task at hand. Yet as with anything, there must be a balance. Getting lost in abstractification can get us unto trouble. The professionalized map in our heads at times can get so out of whack with the reality before us that some kind of collision is bound to happen.

There are so many ways in which this can happen. An entire philosophy of scientific change has been built upon this insight—I’m thinking in particular of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Then we could talk about group behavior and groupthink—people impossible to talk with because they are swallowed up by their slogans. Two words: partisan politics.

And then there is this: fear: shame: people who could almost be said to professionalize in these human emotions: people for whom a traumatic event has happened, and the pain is so great it becomes who they are and crowds out every other possibility. It becomes the map in our heads determining how and where we land our planes, determining everything we see. Self-fulfilling prophesy.

But I remember one day, back in Chicago; I was one of those people walking towards the corner of 57th Street and Woodlawn; I was caught up in the abstractification of some worry. And there was Zeno, sitting there on the sidewalk like he owned the spot, watching me with his eyes of mystery. All the details evident to his Zen master eyes. And right then, I felt opened up, released, connected to the moment, restored to my senses. I laughed, I kneeled down, I pet his soft hair. He leaned into me, closed his eyes in bliss. All would be well. Everything was going to be OK.

There are all sorts of reasons why we are here today, in this blessing of the animals service, and surely one of them has to do with how animals helps us cut through our human penchant for abstractification, and release us to be bigger than our mere ideas of things. Especially emotionally. How animals heal our hearts.

Listen to this amazing story that comes from a book entitled Animals as Teachers and Healers. “When I was five years old,” says Sonja Nadeau, “a dog bit me very severely and I had to have nearly 400 stitches in my face. He was my neighbor’s dog, a cranky old cuss, and he was sick. When I went near to comfort him, like I always did with sick or injured animals, he was on me instantly, tearing at my face. The next thing I remember, I was on the sofa at my friend’s house and her parents were sobbing. ‘Oh my God, her face … her face …’ I didn’t know what they were talking about, I must have been in shock, and I said, ‘What do you mean? What’s wrong with my face?’ And they thoughtlessly handed me a mirror.

“I was in the hospital for about three weeks, and the pain was terrible. Afterwards, people’s comments were terrible. I don’t think I ever really faced that time in my life—I just put it away. The fear continued to look large, even as the scar faded and became harder to see. But years later in the safety of a small group, I finally got the courage to bring it up. I talked about the accident and the scarring of my face and how this affected my self-image and my feelings of trust in the world. Our group leader, a man of Native American descent, said, ‘I think it’s time for you to go see Waluna.’

“Now Waluna was his white timber wolf. I was scared to death at the prospect, and yet somehow on that particular evening, I knew it was time. So we went out, through the gate, to Waluna’s pen, went inside. Waluna was a huge wolf with ice-blue eyes, and as she locked eyes with me, her owner released her from her lead, and then he stepped out of the pen. I was alone with this wolf.

“What Waluna did next amazed me. She came over to me and jumped up, putting both paws on my shoulders, never once breaking eye contact. Then she leaned forward and begin making tiny bites all along the faded scar line on my face. She went all along its length with these tickling little nibbles, very slowly and very gently. I knew instantly that in her own way she was mending my face. I stood, not moving a muscle, my eyes squeezed shut. I opened them when Waluna began licking the scar and licking my face. There really are no adequate words for this: I felt a tremendous healing ripple run through me. It wasn’t just my face that Waluna made okay, it was the fear that had been with me for years. In that moment, it had just melted away. The wolf’s eyes met mine again, then she jumped down and left, as simple as that.

“After that night, I finally had courage enough to look at all those fears I’d carried for so many years, and to come to peace with them. The wolf let me know that I could handle those memories, work through them, and that I would be all right.”

Bless our animal companions. Cat or wolf, dog or bird, rabbit or turtle or more, bless them for cutting through our abstractifications of heart and mind. Bless them for bringing us back to the sanity of the precious moment, here and now, and all will be well, everything is going to be all right.

When the Student is Ready

Charles Dickens—famous author, Unitarian also—once said a curious thing: that “The absence of the soul is far more terrible in a living person than in a dead one.” In other words, you can be alive but zombie-like; you can be breathing but your willpower is nil, your heart and mind are numb. This is the opposite of soulfulness. Soulfulness is richness. Soulfulness is courage, and fullness, and abundance.

But to get there, it takes … one horn to make you strong, another to make you pleasing, a third to make you wise, and a fourth to draw you out of the world. Each horn in Mitchell Chefitz’ story represents a key developmental challenge coming before us, as we learn across the lifespan and grow our souls. Let’s take a look.

Starting with the shiny horn of strength. It reminds me of a time in my own life, in the eighth grade, when the man selling horns came knocking on my door in the form of the public school teacher who led the Gifted and Talented Program I happened to be in. For the life of me, I can’t remember her name, but I will never forget what she offered: an opportunity to do some creative photography. She handed me not a horn but a camera. She said, learn how, investigate, explore. One afternoon, when everyone else at my school was in a classroom, we were outside on a field trip, just the two of us, a beautiful sunny day, visiting fascinating old buildings in the neighborhood so that I could take pictures capturing interesting angles of vision, varieties of light and shadow, stories held within silent spaces and walls. Ultimately, the pictures went into a portfolio which was to be my project for that eighth grade year, but the larger lesson was not nearly as time-bound; it has stayed with me ever since. An experience of being challenged to do something that, for me, was hard. A discovery that I was up to the task—that my “seven dollars and seven cents” was enough. And then this: a memory of a teacher who believed in me, so that I could believe in myself.

That’s the horn of strength. Developmentally speaking, it’s about establishing ego-identity and self-esteem—a sense of being a unique individual capable of willpower, mastering difficulties and making a mark upon the world. The sound this horn makes says it all. It’s a blast that rattles windows blocks away. It’s the sound of “Here I am, I am me, deal with it!”

Yet this is only the beginning of our long journey through life. “Impressive,” says the man selling horns when he hears Gabriel blast away, but he is clearly not impressed at all, and he says, “Let’s see how you do with this.” Out comes the silver trumpet, mirror bright. And Gabriel soon discovers that finesse, not force, is the way to playing this instrument. Just the slightest breath, so soft, so sweet. As for the result—completely different from that of the horn of strength: people come to hear. Friendships form. He marries and has a family. Does he play the trumpet, or does the trumpet play him?

The developmental theme here is relationship, in other words. “I am” becomes “we are.” It is no accident that Gabriel receives this horn in his adolescence, which is a time when one’s sense of individuality (won much earlier) opens up to other people. Paving the way to this is surging hormones: one moment you feel the joy of belonging, another moment you feel the pain of being an outcast. Highs and lows. And then passion, romance: does she love me, does he love me? At this time in life, the elemental power of our emotions is revealed, so no wonder that the key learning here is balance and moderation. Gabriel comes to realize, as must we, that all that’s needed to play the silver horn is the slightest breath. Too much—overkill—disrupts the delicate dance of friendship and love—and even democracy, I would add. You end up with something like the recent town hall meetings on the issue of health care reform: namecalling, ugliness. Not attractiveness. Not the dance.

With public issues that are of such momentous importance, but also private issues, relationship issues, it’s imperative that we learn how to play the silver horn. That we learn to live according to the covenants that we establish with each other. That we learn civility. That we learn how to get the work done and live with it even if we disagree.

For 30 years, Gabriel plays this horn—and then his journey through life moves into yet another developmental phase. Interestingly, it echoes something that the great psychologist Carl Jung once said: that the focus of the first half of life is establishing ourselves in the outer world: forming an ego, finding our proper vocation, creating a family, and the like. But then at mid-life comes the crisis. Perhaps we have been living someone else’s life and values and we are only now realizing it. Perhaps we have been feeling content and satisfied and yet, for unknown reasons, confusion comes upon us, disorientation, boredom, depression, disappointment in ourselves and others, or just general restlessness—and now the focus must shift to that of the inner world of meaning and spirituality. Reconnecting with ourselves and the universe at a deeper level than ever before.

Quite unexpectedly, the seller of horns returns. And this time, he offers Gabriel the golden horn of wisdom, which is strange enough to be a thing out of Alice in Wonderland. Gold on the outside, clear like glass on the inside. Light to the touch, but also heavy. Definitely a horn meant to be used, but closed at one end. Seemingly finite on the outside, but infinite on the inside. “Your task,” says the seller of horns to Gabriel and to us all, “is to paint the inside of the horn.” But the horn turns out to be endlessly capable of drinking up conventional paint. So what kind of “painting” is the seller of horns actually talking about? What kind of horn is this, anyhow?

Clearly, for Gabriel it represents a scientific puzzle. Yet it could also be an existential one, a philosophical one. In particular I’m thinking about Henry David Thoreau, a key Transcendentalist spiritual ancestor of ours, who’s been on my mind a lot lately since I’ve been preparing for this year’s First Sunday sermon series, starting in October, and he’s the focus. Did you know that for much of his life, he suffered from chronic illness, specifically, tuberculosis? This, for more than twenty years…. He was coughing up blood and having a hard time breathing when he wrote, “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” He struggled with immense fatigue, and he had pain in all his joints, his muscles, everywhere, when he wrote, “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” All this constitutes its own kind of puzzle. Thoreau’s hopefulness and joy and energy and incredible productivity as a writer—in the midst of his chronic illness. Why do bad things happen to good people? How to live in a world that can be so hurtful and so cruel?

We exist within mystery. Life is a riddle and a mystery. And so, the golden horn of wisdom, above all, is a challenge to our minds. If the horn of strength is about willpower, and the silver horn of attractiveness is about feeling, the golden horn of wisdom is about thinking. How to think about something that is a perfect paradox? How to relate to the mystery with all the intimacy of our thoughts?

Gabriel begins to feed his mind, to free his mind. He learns chemistry, mathematics, physics, cosmology, relativity, string theory. You and I can do that, as Unitarian Universalists, as well as draw from the wisdom of all the world’s religious traditions, in our search for truth and meaning. One thought at a time, we make our way. Yet, as the story suggests, this is not an end in itself. What this phase of our developmental journey does is open us up, ultimately, to nothing less than inspiration. Through careful, one-step-at-a-time study, we develop our minds and make them clear enough and open enough to receive all-at-once flashes of genius. Without careful preparation, though, inspiration has nothing to contain it, nothing to land on.

“With a flash and a rush he knew,” says the story about Gabriel; he sighs into the golden horn of wisdom, paints it with his soul, and the horn “proclaims much more than a sound: understanding and redemption, love and acceptance, grace and beauty.” The implication here is profound. It says that the sign of the truly educated person is not cynicism, but wonder. If you are stuck in cynicism, you are not there yet. “The most beautiful thing we can experience,” Einstein once said, “is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.” Einstein, a prince of mathematical physics, used to have a sign hanging in his office at Princeton, which said, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

Perhaps this is why, at the end of his days, facing the circle of life and death, Gabriel was able to say with eyes wide open, “I’m ready.” “I would like to trade up.” He was full of not fear, but wonder and awe.

The old saying goes, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” Life offers us one horn after another, and our learnings are cumulative. “I am” leads to “we are” which leads to “we exist within mystery” which culminates in “life is a circle.” And all are to be trusted. All these great teachers of soul. These, and the many human teachers and mentors that have walked with us and supported us along the way, here in this congregation and beyond. We have cause for great gratitude and thanks. Let the congregation say amen.

Something to Live For, Something to Die For

I love this Jerry Seinfeld quote: “Life is truly a ride,” he says. “As you make each passage from youth to adulthood to maturity, sometimes you put your arms up and scream, sometimes you just hang on to the bar in front of you. But the ride is the thing. I think the most you can hope for at the end of life is that your hair is messed, that you’re out of breath and that you didn’t throw up.”

Finding meaning within that is our focus this morning: living within the ups and downs of the world richly, with a sense of something to live for and something to die for. While Rev. Keller has focused on this more generally, my focus will be on exploring our story for today from Paolo Coehlo’s great book, The Alchemist—highlighting the specific wisdom it brings to the art of living.

One insight is this: balance the amazing with the mundane, the big picture with the details. In the story, the wise man invites the boy to wander around his castle and witness all its wonders. But then he says, “As you wander around, carry this spoon with you without allowing any oil to spill.” At first, the boy overfocuses on the drops of oil and misses out on all the wonders. Then he overfocuses on the wonders and loses the drops. Neither will do for the wise man. The secret of happiness, he says, “is to see all the marvels of the world, and never to forget the drops of oil on the spoon.”

Perhaps one way of thinking about this balance is in terms of alternation. For me, the drops of oil represent the nitty-gritty of our days: the tasks and responsibilities that keep us busy at work and at home, the established relationships in which our lives are grounded, the habits and patterns which give us comfort and regularity. The drops of oil are all this, as well as the perspective that results from one’s attention being narrowly focused on such things. And this is as it should be, says the story. It’s one part of the good life. But don’t get stuck. Make room in your life for the wonders of the wise man’s castle also. At times, expand your perspective into one that’s more us-centered, more community-centered, more cosmic-centered. Do a random act of kindness, expecting nothing in return. Balance times of great busy-ness with times of reflection and retreat. Step back and see your life from the perspective of history. Read a book. Go to a museum. Come to Sunday services here at UUCA. At night when you arrive home, don’t just go straight into the house—pause and look at the stars and feel awe at your existence. Step out of the daily grind and go on vacation. Go on a date with your partner or spouse. Go dancing. Go sing Kareoke. See a movie that takes you out of yourself and into the world of possibility. Try something new.

The art of living requires an alternation between these two: the drops of oil on the spoon, and the wonders of the castle. Otherwise, trouble. If we fixate on the daily and weekly tasks and responsibilities without allowing for times of retreat or play, we become unimaginative and dull. Same thing happens if established habit and pattern rule our lives and we never question the sacred cows, never try something new. The air in our balloons leaks out, and we’re sagging. Life is no fun, because we take ourselves way too seriously. Whereas we may be building up a cathedral brick-by-brick, all we can see is each individual brick, and we are disheartened. Larger wisdom says about every crisis, “This too shall pass. You are not the only one to ever have experienced this. You are not alone. One step at a time.” But if our eyes are fixated just on the drops of oil, we can’t hear that wisdom. We feel alone in every crisis. We make a mountain out of every molehill.

Conversely, if we dwell only within wonder and possibility, then we are flighty. Flaky. Commitment-phobic. A walking, talking Peter Pan syndrome. Everything has to be made new, which means that we keep wasting energy reinventing the wheel. We love to flit about in the midst of other people’s ideas and achievements, but what about our own? Grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Why can’t we be more like them, we say, but when it is time for us to step up and lead, we say, Not me. “There is a time in every man’s education,” says Emerson, “when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.” This is what Emerson says, which means that if, indeed, we are stuck in wonder, then we remain abstract in our lives. Because we don’t want to get our hands dirty with details, we end up knowing more about history than making it ourselves, here-and-now. No kernel of nourishing corn comes to us, since the plot of ground which has been given to us to till requires too much discipline, too much hard work.

We’re in trouble, if it’s one or the other and not both. The drops of oil which we carefully carry, and the wonders of the wise man’s castle. Remember both, however—take care of both—and that is the secret of happiness.

It’s a question of balance. The art of living.

But now let’s turn to the other kind of balance that the story points out. It’s subtler than the one we’ve just looked at, but foundational, in fact, to everything else…..

It’s about balancing a desire to experience meaning in life with a capacity for patience. The poet John Keats calls this “negative capability,” which is when, as he puts it, “[a person] is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Without a burning desire to know, we would never risk putting ourselves in the midst of uncertainties and Mysteries and doubts; but to the degree that our reaching is irritable, meaning evades our grasp. It’s just one of the frustrating and yet delicious paradoxes of the spiritual path.

Desire to know, and yet a capacity for patience. We see this already developed in the boy in the story, even before he encounters the wise man. Clearly he has a great desire to know the secret of happiness, otherwise he would never have left home. And so for forty days he finds himself lost in the desert, wandering, but he doesn’t give up. For two hours, he has to wait his turn to speak to the wise man, but he doesn’t get impatient. When the wise man appears, he has the audacity to say that he doesn’t have time just then to explain the secret of happiness, and then he gives the boy a truly weird assignment: to explore the wonders of his palace while, at the same time, he carries a spoon with mysterious drops of oil in it. But the boy is game: he does it. And then he does it again. And we know that in the end, meaning emerges—but only because the boy has been able to unite his great desire to know with a capacity to trust the process.

It’s a hard balance to strike. The process of our lives can take us into unexpected, strange places, ask us to do seemingly strange things. Stuff happen. And whereas we could be like the boy, just going with the flow, seeing where it takes us, often we demand far more control, and when our circumstances refuse to explain themselves to us—tell us their rhyme and reason—we pitch a fit. Or I should say, I pitch a fit. I just struggle with this at times, and maybe you struggle along with me.

Reminds me of a poem by Billy Collins, called “Introduction to Poetry.” The speaker is clearly a frustrated professor talking about his students, but the speaker could also be God, and the poems referred to our own lives……

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

How are you interpreting the poem of your life this morning? Are you like the boy in the story—in search of meaning, in a strange place, but able to wait, capable of allowing the meaning to emerge in its own good time? Or are you beating your life up with a hose, trying to torture a confession out of it?

The spiritual way is a paradoxical way. To desire meaning with all your heart, and yet not to reach for it irritably. Trusting that it is there. Loving the questions of life, so that someday, you live right into the answers….

There’s an old Italian joke that writer Elizabeth Gilbert tells about a poor man who goes to church everyday and prays before the statue of a great saint, begging, “Dear saint—please, please, please … give me the grace to win the lottery.” This lament goes on for months. Finally the exasperated statue comes to life, looks down at the begging man and says in weary disgust, “My son—please, please, please … buy a ticket.”

Life stands before us like a big question mark, and at times we can harden our hearts, or our hearts can go faint, because we do not already have an answer in hand. We want the conclusion before we even begin; we want a guarantee up front; we want … a miracle. But what we must do instead is simply buy the ticket. Begin from wherever you are. Take the first step, and then take another. Give yourself to the rollercoaster ride of life. Place yourself in the field of uncertainty, Mystery, and doubt, and do not despair. Allow life to surprise you. Trust. This IS the secret. Right here.

Parents Coming of Age

It was Abraham Lincoln who once said, “You have to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.” Today we honor and celebrate our youth coming of age, which can also mean parents coming of age. Parents struggling and letting go of the “helicopter” instinct to hover—parents renegotiating, once again, their relationship with their children…..

And it’s hard. Listen to this poem by Sharon Olds, called “The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb.” Listen between the lines to the pride but also grief of the speaker, who is a mom, or a dad:

Whatever he needs, he has or doesn’t
have by now.
Whatever the world is going to do to him
it has started to do. With a pencil and two
Hardy Boys and a peanut butter sandwich and
grapes he is on his way, there is nothing
more we can do for him. Whatever is
stored in his heart, he can use, now.
Whatever he has laid up in his mind
he can call on. What he does not have
he can lack. The bus gets smaller and smaller, as one
folds a flag at the end of a ceremony,
onto itself, and onto itself, until
only a heavy wedge remains.
Whatever his exuberant soul
can do for him, it is doing right now.
Whatever his arrogance can do
it is doing to him. Everything
that’s been done to him, he will now do.
Everything that’s been placed in him
will come out, now, the contents of a trunk
unpacked and lined up on a bunk in the underpine light.

That’s the poem. “Whatever is / stored in his heart, he can use, now. / Whatever he has laid up in his mind / he can call on. What he does not have / he can lack. The bus gets smaller and smaller…”

But is it true that “there is nothing more that we can do for him?” Children grow away from parents and into deeper relationship with peers and mentors, teachers and confidants. This is as it should be. But that’s not all there is to their growing. In adolescence, people flicker between maturity and immaturity in the blink of an eye, and so, what is always possible for parents to do is setting reasonable and healthy boundaries, providing a container with which to continue shaping and reinforcing growth into maturity. This as well: in the midst of all the ups and downs, highs and lows of adolescence, parents can be generous with their encouragement and acceptance, no matter what. Be a true home to their children’s hearts and souls.

One day, the bus leaves. It gets smaller and smaller. But, there is a connection between child and parent that can never be severed, no matter what the relationship might have been like. Even if you move across the country, never speak, change your name. Some of us discover this only after our parents are gone, even when we ourselves have been parents for many years. We learn, with Alden Nowlan, what it means to grow up. He says, “The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise.”

Building Our Audacious Future

One day a mother mouse was out taking her babies for a walk, and a cat came out of nowhere to surprise them. The mother bade her children run and hide, and as they did,  she positioned herself between them and the cat, who was peering at them with his big grey eyes. He slowly came nearer and nearer, and then, just when it seemed like he was about to pounce, the mother mouse said, “BOW WOW! BOW WOW!” It stunned the cat; he simply did not know how to take this. He ran away, confused; and when the coast was clear, the children came running to their mother. She turned to them and said, “Children, now do you see the benefits of learning a second language?”

As a congregation, we have been on a collective journey of learning the second language of sustainability. The journey began last fall, when, at our Ingathering Service in September, we declared interdependence. Then came our Stewardship Campaign with its theme of “Creating Spiritual Community … Working for Sustainability” during which, in various ways, we took the conversation deeper, culminating on October 19^th when I asked you to let me and the Care of Earth Team know about the sustainability issues and dreams that were important for you. Out of this eventually grew the Happiness Challenges we heard about in worship from January to April of this year, as well as the Building Our Audacious Future Event last month, enabling us—given all the possibilities of all our various dreams—to arrive at four shared congregational sustainability goals, which people then voted on through their willingness to volunteer. When you think about it, this willingness to volunteer is really the only way of determining whether a goal has initial viability, or not. Given the volunteer results, we’ve got a green light for all four goals, and over the next three to six months, we’ll be getting four teams up and running, to champion the four goals. Just to get to this point is a great win for our congregation. Over the course of the entire year, one event led to the next, until today, Earth Day Sunday, we find ourselves in a place to begin the next phase of our Sustainable Living Initiative, when we actually get to work and start implementing goals. Declaring interdependence through more than just words.  

All of it has been about learning and using the language of sustainability, and it IS a second language. It takes effort to figure out and to use correctly. Sustainability is not equivalent to recycling. Sustainability is not just about the environment. What it IS about is doing whatever it takes to build communities of every size—from world community to nations to cities to congregations to neighborhoods—that last. According to the Earth Charter—a key document developed between 1995 and 2000 through the international cooperation of scientists, scholars, and religious leaders—development that is truly sustainable and is good for future generations as much as for the present generation can’t emphasize just one interest to the neglect or detriment of other interests. We’ve got to look for win-win solutions. We’ve got to think bigger and more systemically. We’ve got to look for solutions that honor the environment even as they grow the economy, create a more just world, and strengthen our individual lives. Honor all four points of the sustainability compass simultaneously—nature, economy, society, and personal wellbeing—and you have found the way. Forget about one or more of them, and you’re lost. The cat in our story from a moment ago has just eaten your children and it has just eaten you.

Thus the need for a second language, a way of standing up against all the forces that the cat represents, and scaring them off. Fragmentation is one of these forces. In the environmentalism community, such fragmentation was named back in 2004 by an article entitled “The Death of Environmentalism.” The article acknowledged the irony of environmentalism being so popular in the world and yet not much concrete progress having been made in combating global climate change despite the investment of hundreds of millions of dollars over 15 years or more. Earnest environmental lobbyists crying out, “You’re talking to me about your job and I’m talking about saving the world!” but the message nevertheless falls on deaf ears. The message of “change or else” just not working. Thus the article’s main point: how people who love the earth and want to heal it can no longer afford to be standoffish and isolate environmental issues from other issues like poverty, jobs, health insurance, war, national security, education, or spirituality. From now on, if we want our work to go to the next level of effectiveness, we must see environmental issues as interconnected to everything else. To truly address a problem like climate change, we’ve got to talk about how fighting it can lead to job creation like we’ve never seen before. To address climate change, let’s talk about brokering an alliance with auto companies so that environmental lobbyists will work to lower the costs of health care for the auto industry in exchange for higher mileage standards. Nearly 100 years ago, Sierra Club founder John Muir said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” An idea that is both beautiful and true. The point of the article was that modern environmentalism needs to hear the message as much as anyone else!  

“Problems,” Albert Einstein once said, “cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.” Sustainability is fundamentally an effort to resist a fragmented view of life and to see how old problems that look like they have nothing to do with each other are actually related at a deep level. That’s why here at UUCA our sustainable living initiative incorporates more than just the zero footprint goal. It also includes a service goal, a story goal, and a happiness goal. We need them all. All together represent our commitment to building our audacious future. If you’d like to volunteer for one of these goals, please visit the Care of Earth table in the social hall after services.

At this point, I want to say a few words about our happiness goal. Earlier, you heard Manette talk about the service goal, Tom talk about the zero footprint goal, and Dana talk about the story goal. The happiness goal is basically this: we seek to celebrate and strengthen individual efforts to live sustainably. It can happen in all sorts of different ways: eating that is more mindful; sustainable living in the home; stronger neighborhoods and communities; increased physical health and wellbeing; better habits around money and shopping; healthier relationships; or an increased commitment to spirituality. Do one or all of these, and happiness of a higher sort grows in your life and in the larger world. Thus our happiness goal as a congregation: we’re going to find ways of encouraging and supporting each other in this.

Please take a look at the yellow insert in your order of service. For a while now, I’ve been asking you to think about what your year-long happiness pledge might be. It was inspiring to hear Kimberly describe hers, and in a moment, I’ll share mine. But first let’s see how the pledge sheet works.

Turn to where it says, at the top of the page, “My Personal Happiness Pledge is….” This is the main side of the sheet I want you to look at. In the box at the top, you’ll write down your basic pledge in one or two lines. Let us know who you are and your contact information. We’d also like to post people’s pledges on the UUCA website, so let us know if we have your permission to do so—see where you can check off yes or no?

When you are done, carefully tear off your pledge sheet along the dotted line, and you’ll turn it in when the baskets come around.

Now take a look at the information under the dotted line. There, you have some example possible pledges, related to several broad categories. For example, look at the category “mindful eating”: beside it you’ll see five different possible pledges…. Each one represents something you could focus on doing all year long. “Preparing and eating food with others,” for example, could turn into a monthly practice of dinner with friends, where you develop your friendships even as you experiment with some healthier food recipes. And so on. It all depends on the kind of new direction you’d like to take in your life right now.   

Underneath, see the box where it says “A copy of my happiness pledge”? Be sure to write down your happiness pledge here too, so you’ll remember it and take it home with you.

Two things to say at this point:

1. What if you don’t want to make a year-long happiness pledge? You don’t wanna…. No problem—this is only a friendly invitation. These pledges are meant to encourage and support people in their lives. For some people, pledges like this give them focus and commitment, and they work.    

2. What if you want to make a year-long happiness pledge, but you aren’t ready? You need more time to think about it, or you’d like to talk to someone first? If this is the case, after services today and also next week, the Care of Earth Team will have a table in the social hall, and you can talk with someone there, as well as turn your pledge in. Beyond next week, you can turn your pledge in to the UUCA office.

As for my own year-long happiness pledge. It has to do with “retiring” a certain jersey of mine. Here it is: [a t-shirt that says, “I love bacon.”) In other words, I’m going to go without meat and poultry for the next year. I just feel ready for this, right now in my life. I’m still going to eat fish, so I guess that means you can call me a “pescetarian.” As with Kimberly, the reasons touch on all four points of the sustainability compass. Not eating meat or poultry is better for the environment; it represents a refusal to go along with the injustices of animal agriculture on a mass scale; it’s easier on the checkbook; and I just want to get healthier and lose weight—especially if I’m going to get back to competing in skating. I’m retiring my jersey. I’ve already gone two weeks without meat and poultry, and I’m feeling great.

Now it’s your turn. When you hear the sound of the happiness challenge, begin filling out your pledge form, tear it off the larger sheet, and in a couple of minutes, the ushers will begin picking them up.

[Happiness Challenge sound--people make their pledges. Then, in a few minutes, the ushers come round to pick them up. “De Colores” is played underneath…. ]

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.