Today's sermon is the first of a series of close readings of sacred texts. Today was the launch of our children's and youth programming for the year, and it seemed appropriate to take "teaching our children" as the sermonic focus too. Enjoy.
Peace,
Rev. Laura
***
Living with the Texts: Hear, O Israel!
The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
September 19, 2010
So what’s this about “Living with the Texts,”
the first half of my sermon title today?
The texts I’m talking about
are the great scriptures of world religions—
like the Bible, the Qur’an, the ancient Hindu texts,
the Buddhist sutras, the Tao Te Ching.
For the next nine months, I’m going to be preaching
on a different one of these texts each month,
because I think they have a lot to teach us.
Let me be clear right up front:
I’m not trying to say the Bible or any other scripture
should be the boss of our spiritual lives.
Ever since Emerson and Thoreau back in the 19th century,
we Unitarians have been saying, we get our religious authority—
we figure out what we believe and how we think we should live—
based on our own personal experience and our own inner wisdom.
Over the years, we freed ourselves from the idea
that we had to accept whatever the Bible said.
We learned to trust ourselves.
Just a couple of weeks ago I preached to you
about using our inner wisdom as a guide,
and I stand by everything I said then.
Yet I am also 100% convinced
that every one of us has a tremendous amount to learn
from the great religious books of the world—
not only the Bible but definitely including the Bible.
I’ve often talked about my personal spiritual practice
of reading sacred texts. Almost every morning, I start the day
by reading a few lines from world scriptures,
or sometimes contemporary spiritual writers,
and I go slow, but I’ve made my way
through lots of the books of Bible this way,
and some of the Asian scriptures too.
I’ve stuck with this practice for years
not because I believe every word in every scripture is true,
but because I do have faith that when something lasts that long,
if something has been meaningful to so many people for so long,
there’s something there that is worthy of our attention.
Maybe something we can learn from.
There’s a Christian practice called lectio divina—
that’s Latin for “holy reading.”
This is a way of reading scripture, or poetry,
or really any text that has some oomph and depth to it,
where you go slow, you read a few lines,
take your time, pause,
think about what the words mean to you.
What do they spark for you?
You ask questions, think some more, play with it—
basically you hang out with the text
and let it speak to your imagination.
This is the kind of reading I try to do in my morning practice,
and this the kind of reading I want to share with you today.
The first thing is, we have to find a text.
For today, I wanted to bring you a text
that could speak to the kickoff of our children’s and youth programming for the year.
Immediately I thought of the reading from Deuteronomy
that we heard as our first reading
(Deuteronomy 6:4–12).
For thousands of years, this text has been part
of the most important prayer in all of Judaism: the Shema.
Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.
Sh’ma Yis’ra’eil Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad.
These are the first Hebrew words that Jewish children learn
and perhaps the last words on the lips of Jewish people
as they lie dying.
No other text from the Bible is so important for Jews.
So, for that reason alone,
I think it’s worthy of our respectful attention.
And when I realized Yom Kippur,
the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, fell on this very weekend,
the message was even clearer: this was our text.
Let me tell you first what I love about this text,
what I think we can learn from it.
I love the challenge I hear in the Shema:
teach your children about your faith.
This is so important,
but it’s easy to forget, especially in a church like this.
This congregation has been around for nearly 100 years.
We built this building back in 1930, 80 years ago this year.
Our sheer physical presence is so solid,
it’s easy to think it’ll always be here no matter what we do.
But in fact, that’s not the case.
We have to pass on our faith, our values, our beliefs to our children,
because they’re the ones who are going to carry this thing forward.
This congregation and the faith that gives it a reason for being,
everything we love about this church,
all that has to be passed down to each new generation.
Someone did it for us.
Someone planted trees of faith that today are bearing fruit for us.
As the text reminds us, we all drink from wells we did not dig.
And all of us who are blessed to make it to adulthood,
we have a collective responsibility to do some spiritual planting
and digging for the generations still to come.
Every one of us, whether or not we have children of our own,
has a vested interest in nurturing our children,
helping them grow in their own spiritual lives,
encouraging them to be Unitarian Universalists
in this moment and their whole life long.
And of course it’s not just for our church;
first and foremost it is for our children themselves.
If we are here for any length of time, I’m assuming that means
we have found something here that is important and precious to us.
I know that’s true for me.
Our message of love and respect for differences,
the way we encourage people to use their brains
and think for themselves,
the inspiration we find to open our hearts and practice justice—
our religion has given me so much hope and challenge
and inspiration and grounding—
and I want that not just for myself
but for you and for all of us
and for our children
and all the children still to come.
I think our kids need to hear from us what we find meaningful,
what we think is important,
that which touches us and opens us to the sacred in our lives.
And maybe some of this happens naturally,
in the sweet little moments that we get to share with our kids,
and in the big and scary moments all families go through.
Some of this happens naturally,
we pass on our faith in those little moments and big ones,
but I don’t want to leave it all to chance.
And I don’t think we get to take a pass
and leave it all to our religious education teachers, either,
wonderful and gifted and skilled as they are.
Let me draw us back to the text of the Shema,
because it gives us some brilliant advice
about what it takes to pass on our faith to our kids.
And in a nutshell, the advice is live your faith 24/7.
Talk about it. Make it really clear what you believe.
The text says:
Recite [these teachings] when you stay at home
and when you are away,
when you lie down and when you get up.
The Jewish tradition interprets this text
as a mandate to say the Shema twice a day,
in the morning and at night.
For us, to play with the interpretation a little—
what I hear the text telling us is, talk about your faith.
Think about what it means to you.
Tell your children what it means to you.
The text goes on:
Bind them as a sign on your hand
and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead;
inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
By the way, this is why some Jewish people wear tefillin
on their arms and their foreheads,
little pouches with passages from the Torah inside.
“A sign on your hand,” “a symbol on your forehead.”
This is why they put a mezuzah on the doorframe of their home,
a case with a scroll inside with the Shema written on it.
For us, what I hear is an invitation
to wear our faith literally on our sleeve.
Bring signs and symbols of our faith into our homes,
as reminders of what we care about,
for ourselves and also for our children.
That’s why I wear a chalice necklace every Sunday,
because I want to have some physical embodiment of my faith
that people can see, to show how important it is to me.
Maybe you have a flaming chalice in your home.
Maybe another symbol that’s meaningful to you.
Something physical, that you can see and touch,
to keep your faith and your values in front of you.
Signs and symbols to keep our faith in our minds and our hearts,
to teach our children.
But now you may be starting to wonder,
why should I do something just because the text says so?
And that’s a really good question,
especially when we’re talking about teaching our kids.
Our Unitarian Universalist faith tradition has always said
religious education shouldn’t be about telling children what to think,
what to believe.
We teach our children what we believe to be true,
what we have found through our own search for truth,
yes, absolutely—we tell them why our faith matters to us
and we hope it will become a living spring for them too—
and we encourage them to think and feel for themselves,
to wake up to the mystery all around us,
to trust their own minds and hearts.
I hope our children will grow up Unitarian Universalist
and choose to embrace this faith as adults.
But even more than that, I hope they will grow up
to be people who love truth and justice,
who practice compassion,
people with a clear head and an open heart.
And obviously this doesn’t mean blindly accepting
whatever the Bible has to say, or any other text.
In fact, moving back to our text of the day,
there is an aspect of this text which we absolutely cannot ignore
and we absolutely do not want to follow.
To explain what I mean,
I need to tell you something about the story behind the text.
Because the Shema text is part of a story.
Moses and the Israelites have been wandering in the desert
for 40 years.
Now, at last, God has told Moses
it’s time for the people to enter the Promised Land of Canaan.
Before they cross over into Canaan,
Moses calls a time-out.
He gets all the people to gather round,
and he tells everyone they all have to be really careful
to obey God’s commands, because if they don’t,
things are going to go very badly for them.
This is the context for the Shema text.
And, OK, I know we Unitarian Universalists
aren’t that big on obedience,
but we can work with that idea theologically—
we can maybe talk about how it’s important
to keep focused on what’s really important,
to honor the commitments we’ve made, that kind of thing,
and as far as it goes that’s not wrong.
But here’s the thing.
You have to know what the God of the Israelites is commanding.
And among other things, God is commanding the Israelites
to get rid of the people in the country they are about to move into.
God very explicitly orders them to dispossess the people
of their land, their homes, everything they have,
and take it all for themselves.
(Numbers 33:50–56)
This is a God who has already ordered them
to exterminate whole tribes of peoples
they’ve encountered in the desert.
Now God is ordering them
to take over the homes and the cities and the entire civilization
of a people who has never done anything to hurt them.
These are the wells they did not dig.
These are the vineyards they did not plant.
Ouch.
And so we see the story of this text,
this story which we want to read
as a beautiful story of freedom and liberation and enduring faith
for the Israelites, and thus for ourselves—
the literal meaning of this story and this text is that the Israelites are becoming
a people that brutally conquers other peoples,
dispossesses them from all they have built,
exiles them from the country they had called their own.
And I so don’t want to have to tell you this is our story too.
But of course it is.
For how is it that we came to be here,
all of us on this bit of earth we call Stockton, California?
We weren’t the first people to live on this land.
We are here at the corner of Bristol and Pacific today
not only because of the legacy of religious freedom
passed on to us by our ancestors, which we celebrate and rightly so,
but also because other ancestors, or maybe even the same ones,
forcibly removed the native peoples of this place
and destroyed their culture, their traditions, their faith.
This is a hard truth,
but I know our minds and hearts are big enough to hold it.
I’m not trying to blame us or anybody else.
I just want to name it
and hold it in this space.
The story of the Israelites is our story too,
and the story of every American
whose ancestors came to this land from across the waters.
But I find I don’t want to just throw the text away, reject it entirely.
As I hold this text of the Shema in my mind and heart,
this most holy scripture for an entire people,
it echoes in my ears as a challenge, a prayer, a whispered hope:
May we teach our children the faith that we have found
through our living and our striving and our dreaming.
And let us keep our minds and our hearts as open as we can,
deeply aware of our capacity for error and cruelty and harm,
and pass this knowledge on to our children too.
May our faith be strong enough to critique itself
in the light of evolving wisdom.
May ours be a faith not fixed like letters on a page,
but one that challenges every generation
to understand more and love more,
to create justice and peace and hope
out of our most tragic failures and devastations.
The text commands us:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart
and with all your soul
and with all your might.
I know I cannot love the God fixed on that printed page,
a God who calls on one people to destroy another.
But I can love that which gives life.
I can love goodness. I can love justice.
I can love peace and compassion and wisdom.
This I can do, as best I can,
with all my heart and all my soul and all my might.
What more could I wish for us all
and for all the generations to come?
Amen.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Monday, September 13, 2010
More on immigration reform
The Unitarian Universalist Association Board of Trustees recently issued an invitation for congregational leaders to weigh in on plans for our General Assembly in Phoenix, AZ in 2012--a national UU gathering to witness on immigration and racial and economic justice. Here's what I sent them--not without some anxiety about speaking up, but carefully considered and strongly felt.
Peace,
Rev. Laura
***
September 13, 2010
Dear members of the UUA Board,
Thanks so much for the invitation to comment on possibilities for GA 2012 in Phoenix. As the sister-in-law of a recent immigrant from South America, I have been so glad to see UUs getting involved in immigration issues.
I am sure the GA planning team will do a fantastic job creating opportunities for those of us who feel energized and excited about participating in rallies and civil disobedience actions. It's been so inspiring hearing about our clergy and lay leaders who have been taking this path. I also hope we can find ways to engage those of us, like me, who feel strongly about what's going on but are less comfortable wearing the T-shirts, chanting slogans, etc.
I've been reading Thomas Merton's Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander and find myself powerfully struck by his words: "All party lines deform the doctrine which they claim to preserve" (New York: Image/Doubleday, 1989, p. 58). They helped me name a discomfort that has been surfacing in me as I follow the "Standing on the Side of Love" campaign. I want this country to welcome and embrace immigrants, and I am deeply alarmed by SB1070 and the ideas behind it. Yet, for us to claim we are "on the side of love," implying others are not, feels dangerously self-righteous to me. I worry about our getting enamored of ourselves as some sort of shining army of good, battling the evil oppressors who are Not Us. Please hear me: I don't want us to sit on our hands or stay silent about what we believe. I feel so blessed to be part of a movement with brave people willing to put themselves on the line for justice. I just hope we can practice with humility, seeking to understand the human lives of those who do not agree with us, even as we do what we need to do. I hope our GA and our continued work for justice will have room for that spirit.
Again, thank you so much for your thoughtful and courageous work. I look forward to being in Phoenix with you in 2012.
Yours in faith,
Laura Horton-Ludwig
Peace,
Rev. Laura
***
September 13, 2010
Dear members of the UUA Board,
Thanks so much for the invitation to comment on possibilities for GA 2012 in Phoenix. As the sister-in-law of a recent immigrant from South America, I have been so glad to see UUs getting involved in immigration issues.
I am sure the GA planning team will do a fantastic job creating opportunities for those of us who feel energized and excited about participating in rallies and civil disobedience actions. It's been so inspiring hearing about our clergy and lay leaders who have been taking this path. I also hope we can find ways to engage those of us, like me, who feel strongly about what's going on but are less comfortable wearing the T-shirts, chanting slogans, etc.
I've been reading Thomas Merton's Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander and find myself powerfully struck by his words: "All party lines deform the doctrine which they claim to preserve" (New York: Image/Doubleday, 1989, p. 58). They helped me name a discomfort that has been surfacing in me as I follow the "Standing on the Side of Love" campaign. I want this country to welcome and embrace immigrants, and I am deeply alarmed by SB1070 and the ideas behind it. Yet, for us to claim we are "on the side of love," implying others are not, feels dangerously self-righteous to me. I worry about our getting enamored of ourselves as some sort of shining army of good, battling the evil oppressors who are Not Us. Please hear me: I don't want us to sit on our hands or stay silent about what we believe. I feel so blessed to be part of a movement with brave people willing to put themselves on the line for justice. I just hope we can practice with humility, seeking to understand the human lives of those who do not agree with us, even as we do what we need to do. I hope our GA and our continued work for justice will have room for that spirit.
Again, thank you so much for your thoughtful and courageous work. I look forward to being in Phoenix with you in 2012.
Yours in faith,
Laura Horton-Ludwig
Sunday, September 5, 2010
What Should We Do? Spiritual Practices for Discernment and Decision-Making
I planned today's sermon to create an opportunity for people to rest and reflect during this Labor Day weekend, and to start framing a conversation in my congregation about the future of our music program in the wake of a beloved staff member's departure. Enjoy.
Peace,
Rev. Laura
***
What Should We Do?
Spiritual Practices for Discernment and Decision-Making
The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
September 5, 2010
Rabbi Zusya tells us:
The Sufi poet Rumi tells us,
if we waste the gifts we are born with,
It’s as if a king has sent you to some country to do a task,
and you perform a hundred other services,
but not the one he sent you to do.
So human beings come to this world to do particular work.
That work is the purpose, and each is specific to the person.
If you don’t do it, it’s as though a priceless Indian sword
were used to slice rotten meat.
(from "The Real Work")
And I must tell you:
these teachings have saved me, over and over again,
the call to be who we are, to embrace the gifts we have,
and let those gifts set our path
in all those times when we don’t know what to do,
the times when the path is not clear
and we struggle to figure out what is right.
Know yourself, know your own priceless gifts,
embrace them and use them for good.
That’s it.
Know yourself, know your gifts, use them for good.
And that would be the end of the sermon right there,
except that it’s all easier said than done!
We are all bombarded with messages from other people,
and the culture around us,
about who we should be and what we should be doing.
Everybody has an opinion about how we ought to spend our lives:
our parents, our spouses, children, friends,
politicians, advertisers, newscasters,
even the person next to us at the grocery store has an opinion
about what we should be doing with our precious time on earth.
Now, sometimes that barrage of advice is helpful.
If our problem is a technical question, an information-type problem,
like if I need to learn how to fix a leaky pipe,
I probably don’t want to rely too much on my inner wisdom!
In that case, advice may be just what we need.
But so many of our problems aren’t technical problems.
I’m talking about problems of values:
What am I supposed to be doing with my life?
What can I do that gives me joy
and brings more good into this world?
Questions about relationships, maybe:
How can I be a better friend, a better partner, a better parent?
How can I be happy in the place where I find myself?
Questions about life transitions:
what am I supposed to be doing in this stage of my life?
All these questions where there really is no one right answer.
No one can tell us what to do.
Or, rather, they can try,
but it’s probably not going to help all that much!
Lots of people just love to give us advice
about these kinds of problems too.
Often the advice is kindly meant.
Sometimes it’s just plain bullying.
Either way, we are drowning in advice and feedback and instructions and best practices and helpful hints,
and some of it may actually be helpful, but a lot of it is just noise
that distracts us from what is really important—
the quiet wisdom within us,
the inner voice which our experience and our faith have taught us
is our best guide we have when we are lost and confused
and struggling to find the way forward.
So today I want to talk about three spiritual practices we can use
to help us tap into that voice of wisdom inside each one of us,
to discern what we should do when it’s not obvious,
when we feel confused and really don’t know what to do.
Two of these practices are for individuals,
and one is for groups, because there are times
groups have to wrestle with these questions too.
All three practices are just different versions of the same big practice:
Name the question.
Create a space for answers to emerge.
See what happens.
We’ll start with individuals.
The first practice is very simple.
If you are struggling to figure out what to do,
you can try sitting quietly for a bit,
settle your mind and your body down,
and then write down your question—
just write it down on a piece of paper—
and now you start writing an answer—
write whatever comes into your head,
don’t think too much,
in fact the less conscious thinking the better,
because what we’re trying to do here
is bypass the conscious layers of our mind
and tap into the wisdom of the unconscious,
the wisdom within us that tends to emerge
only when we’re not grasping for it;
it has a playful quality; it may surprise us with a completely new
and perfectly right idea.
So: write your question down,
don’t think too much,
just write and see what comes.
In fact I want to give you an opportunity to try this right now.
In your order of service there should be a blank piece of paper.
If you don’t have something to write with, please raise your hand
and I will bring pencils around in a moment.
Settle your mind and your body.
Take a mindful breath in and out.
Hold your question in your mind.
Write it down.
Now just start writing—write yourself an answer,
whatever comes into your head. Just write and try not to stop.
We’ll be in silence for a couple of minutes.
Again, please raise your hand if you would like a pencil.
Please begin.
(Silence. Ring bell to bring people back.)
I hope that practice will open up some new insights for you.
The beauty of it is that it’s so simple,
and it helps you turn inward to discern what you should do,
not somebody else, but you—
because so often, there isn’t one “Right Answer”
that’s right for every person.
We have to look within ourselves to discern what’s right for us,
how we can use our gifts. As Rabbi Zusya reminds us,
we can’t all be Moses, and there’s no need to try.
What we can be is ourselves, as fully as we can.
That’s the first practice.
The second practice I want to tell you about today
is the one Parker Palmer talked about in our second reading.
Remember he was trying to figure out if he should take that new job,
and he got a bunch of friends together to help him decide?
This is a very old tradition that comes to us from the Quakers.
It’s called a “Clearness Committee,”
and it’s a very safe and powerful way of asking for help
from people we trust, as we wrestle with these hard questions.
Because sometimes our own inner resources are not quite enough.
Sometimes we do need the help of friends
to get past our habitual ways of thinking, our fears,
our self-judgments.
The Clearness Committee is a way of asking for help
without triggering that flood of well-meaning advice
and judgment and criticism that is not helpful.
In a nutshell, in a Clearness Committee,
you invite a few friends whom you trust
to meet with you for a long conversation, three hours long.
You tell them about the problem you are struggling with,
and they try to help, and the absolutely critical rule is,
they are only allowed to ask questions--no advice-giving at all--
and the questions have to be open and honest,
like the one we heard in the reading:
“What would you like best about this new thing?”
Veiled advice in the form of a question is absolutely not allowed!
The pace is relaxed and gentle. Silence is OK.
Everybody tries to be attentive to the focus person
and open themselves up to be helpful to that person.
And, as we saw in the reading, tremendous insight can come forth
simply through the power of the right question at the right time,
echoing in the silence and calling up the truth that lies within us,
waiting to be evoked in a space of safety and trust.
We don’t have time to practice this today,
but this is something you can try for yourself, maybe for a friend—
it doesn’t cost anything except your time, your care,
and your willingness to be present and open.
If you want to know more about Clearness Committees,
you might visit http://www.couragerenewal.org/parker/writings/clearness-committee.
That’s the second practice.
Last but not least, I want to talk very briefly
about discernment practices for groups,
because here we are in a group, this congregation,
and we too, as a group, are constantly having to ask ourselves,
what are we supposed to be doing?
What is our mission?
How are we supposed to use our gifts,
all the good things we have going for us,
so that at the end of the day we can say,
we are the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
as fully and freely as we know how to be.
We are this church, these people, as fully and freely as we can be—
not anyone else, but ourselves.
It’s so easy for churches, and people, to waste time
wishing they were some other way than the way they are.
If only we had more money...
If only more people came to church...or volunteered...or had a deeper spiritual life...
or whatever—anything to avoid dealing with what is
and embracing it and believing that what is, here and now,
is wonderful and magical and beautiful.
I believe the words of Rumi are just as true of our churches as they are of people:
[H]uman beings come to this world to do particular work.
That work is the purpose, and each is specific to the person.
If you don’t do it, it’s as though a priceless Indian sword
were used to slice rotten meat.
But if we do that work, the work that only we can do—
if we do that and nothing else,
“there’s nothing to worry about.” All is well.
But again of course this is easier said than done!
How do we know what our work is, in this moment?
How do we sift through all the possibilities of what we might be doing
and settle on that perfectly-right,
or even pretty-much mostly-right for now, thing that we must do?
We are so lucky that the Unitarian side of our tradition
gives us an absolutely brilliant model
for discerning our work and our mission.
Once again, it is beautifully simple.
We show up.
We open our minds and hearts.
We talk.
We listen.
Name the question.
Create a space for answers to emerge.
See what happens.
This is what our Unitarian ancestors believed:
when congregations don’t know what to do,
the wisdom of the gathered community,
meeting for thoughtful and patient and heartfelt conversation,
can and will tell us the direction we ought to go.
Maybe not in an hour or a day or a week or a month,
but if we keep talking and listening, wisdom will start to emerge.
Our Unitarian ancestors told us,
the spirit of truth can speak from anywhere.
You can’t predict who will say just the right thing,
voice just the right idea that makes the whole room sigh and say,
yes, that’s it, of course that’s it.
But if we can be with one another in a spirit of open conversation
and seeking, wisdom will emerge.
In this moment in the life of our church,
we’re about to enter one of these conversations.
The issue before us right now is about music,
the kinds of music we love and long to have in our worship.
We’ve said goodbye to a music director who served us so beautifully
for three years. We are facing financial challenges, and it isn’t clear
whether we can or should have a staff position
exactly as it’s been in the past.
But what we can do is be in the conversation.
Show up.
Open our minds and hearts to the wisdom waiting to emerge.
Talk and listen. Especially listen.
My hope is that we will embrace this time
to ponder and talk about the music that touches our spirits
and reflect our community
and offers an invitation to all those people
who aren’t here yet but may be just about to walk in the door.
I don’t have an easy answer for you.
I don’t know what we should do.
But I do believe that when hearts and minds are open
and people come together to share their best wisdom,
to embrace what is and who we are together,
a path will emerge.
We will find our way.
Today and always,
in this moment and every moment,
may we be guided by the wisdom deep within us.
May a path be found for all who seek.
And may we rejoice in this moment
which gives us the precious opportunity
to live into our gifts,
to become ever more fully that which we were always meant to be.
Amen.
Peace,
Rev. Laura
***
What Should We Do?
Spiritual Practices for Discernment and Decision-Making
The Rev. Laura Horton-Ludwig, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
September 5, 2010
Rabbi Zusya tells us:
When I reach the next world, they will not ask me,
“Why were you not Moses?”
Instead, they will ask me, “Why were you not Zusya?”
The Sufi poet Rumi tells us,
if we waste the gifts we are born with,
It’s as if a king has sent you to some country to do a task,
and you perform a hundred other services,
but not the one he sent you to do.
So human beings come to this world to do particular work.
That work is the purpose, and each is specific to the person.
If you don’t do it, it’s as though a priceless Indian sword
were used to slice rotten meat.
(from "The Real Work")
And I must tell you:
these teachings have saved me, over and over again,
the call to be who we are, to embrace the gifts we have,
and let those gifts set our path
in all those times when we don’t know what to do,
the times when the path is not clear
and we struggle to figure out what is right.
Know yourself, know your own priceless gifts,
embrace them and use them for good.
That’s it.
Know yourself, know your gifts, use them for good.
And that would be the end of the sermon right there,
except that it’s all easier said than done!
We are all bombarded with messages from other people,
and the culture around us,
about who we should be and what we should be doing.
Everybody has an opinion about how we ought to spend our lives:
our parents, our spouses, children, friends,
politicians, advertisers, newscasters,
even the person next to us at the grocery store has an opinion
about what we should be doing with our precious time on earth.
Now, sometimes that barrage of advice is helpful.
If our problem is a technical question, an information-type problem,
like if I need to learn how to fix a leaky pipe,
I probably don’t want to rely too much on my inner wisdom!
In that case, advice may be just what we need.
But so many of our problems aren’t technical problems.
I’m talking about problems of values:
What am I supposed to be doing with my life?
What can I do that gives me joy
and brings more good into this world?
Questions about relationships, maybe:
How can I be a better friend, a better partner, a better parent?
How can I be happy in the place where I find myself?
Questions about life transitions:
what am I supposed to be doing in this stage of my life?
All these questions where there really is no one right answer.
No one can tell us what to do.
Or, rather, they can try,
but it’s probably not going to help all that much!
Lots of people just love to give us advice
about these kinds of problems too.
Often the advice is kindly meant.
Sometimes it’s just plain bullying.
Either way, we are drowning in advice and feedback and instructions and best practices and helpful hints,
and some of it may actually be helpful, but a lot of it is just noise
that distracts us from what is really important—
the quiet wisdom within us,
the inner voice which our experience and our faith have taught us
is our best guide we have when we are lost and confused
and struggling to find the way forward.
So today I want to talk about three spiritual practices we can use
to help us tap into that voice of wisdom inside each one of us,
to discern what we should do when it’s not obvious,
when we feel confused and really don’t know what to do.
Two of these practices are for individuals,
and one is for groups, because there are times
groups have to wrestle with these questions too.
All three practices are just different versions of the same big practice:
Name the question.
Create a space for answers to emerge.
See what happens.
We’ll start with individuals.
The first practice is very simple.
If you are struggling to figure out what to do,
you can try sitting quietly for a bit,
settle your mind and your body down,
and then write down your question—
just write it down on a piece of paper—
and now you start writing an answer—
write whatever comes into your head,
don’t think too much,
in fact the less conscious thinking the better,
because what we’re trying to do here
is bypass the conscious layers of our mind
and tap into the wisdom of the unconscious,
the wisdom within us that tends to emerge
only when we’re not grasping for it;
it has a playful quality; it may surprise us with a completely new
and perfectly right idea.
So: write your question down,
don’t think too much,
just write and see what comes.
In fact I want to give you an opportunity to try this right now.
In your order of service there should be a blank piece of paper.
If you don’t have something to write with, please raise your hand
and I will bring pencils around in a moment.
Settle your mind and your body.
Take a mindful breath in and out.
Hold your question in your mind.
Write it down.
Now just start writing—write yourself an answer,
whatever comes into your head. Just write and try not to stop.
We’ll be in silence for a couple of minutes.
Again, please raise your hand if you would like a pencil.
Please begin.
(Silence. Ring bell to bring people back.)
I hope that practice will open up some new insights for you.
The beauty of it is that it’s so simple,
and it helps you turn inward to discern what you should do,
not somebody else, but you—
because so often, there isn’t one “Right Answer”
that’s right for every person.
We have to look within ourselves to discern what’s right for us,
how we can use our gifts. As Rabbi Zusya reminds us,
we can’t all be Moses, and there’s no need to try.
What we can be is ourselves, as fully as we can.
That’s the first practice.
The second practice I want to tell you about today
is the one Parker Palmer talked about in our second reading.
Remember he was trying to figure out if he should take that new job,
and he got a bunch of friends together to help him decide?
This is a very old tradition that comes to us from the Quakers.
It’s called a “Clearness Committee,”
and it’s a very safe and powerful way of asking for help
from people we trust, as we wrestle with these hard questions.
Because sometimes our own inner resources are not quite enough.
Sometimes we do need the help of friends
to get past our habitual ways of thinking, our fears,
our self-judgments.
The Clearness Committee is a way of asking for help
without triggering that flood of well-meaning advice
and judgment and criticism that is not helpful.
In a nutshell, in a Clearness Committee,
you invite a few friends whom you trust
to meet with you for a long conversation, three hours long.
You tell them about the problem you are struggling with,
and they try to help, and the absolutely critical rule is,
they are only allowed to ask questions--no advice-giving at all--
and the questions have to be open and honest,
like the one we heard in the reading:
“What would you like best about this new thing?”
Veiled advice in the form of a question is absolutely not allowed!
The pace is relaxed and gentle. Silence is OK.
Everybody tries to be attentive to the focus person
and open themselves up to be helpful to that person.
And, as we saw in the reading, tremendous insight can come forth
simply through the power of the right question at the right time,
echoing in the silence and calling up the truth that lies within us,
waiting to be evoked in a space of safety and trust.
We don’t have time to practice this today,
but this is something you can try for yourself, maybe for a friend—
it doesn’t cost anything except your time, your care,
and your willingness to be present and open.
If you want to know more about Clearness Committees,
you might visit http://www.couragerenewal.org/parker/writings/clearness-committee.
That’s the second practice.
Last but not least, I want to talk very briefly
about discernment practices for groups,
because here we are in a group, this congregation,
and we too, as a group, are constantly having to ask ourselves,
what are we supposed to be doing?
What is our mission?
How are we supposed to use our gifts,
all the good things we have going for us,
so that at the end of the day we can say,
we are the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Stockton
as fully and freely as we know how to be.
We are this church, these people, as fully and freely as we can be—
not anyone else, but ourselves.
It’s so easy for churches, and people, to waste time
wishing they were some other way than the way they are.
If only we had more money...
If only more people came to church...or volunteered...or had a deeper spiritual life...
or whatever—anything to avoid dealing with what is
and embracing it and believing that what is, here and now,
is wonderful and magical and beautiful.
I believe the words of Rumi are just as true of our churches as they are of people:
[H]uman beings come to this world to do particular work.
That work is the purpose, and each is specific to the person.
If you don’t do it, it’s as though a priceless Indian sword
were used to slice rotten meat.
But if we do that work, the work that only we can do—
if we do that and nothing else,
“there’s nothing to worry about.” All is well.
But again of course this is easier said than done!
How do we know what our work is, in this moment?
How do we sift through all the possibilities of what we might be doing
and settle on that perfectly-right,
or even pretty-much mostly-right for now, thing that we must do?
We are so lucky that the Unitarian side of our tradition
gives us an absolutely brilliant model
for discerning our work and our mission.
Once again, it is beautifully simple.
We show up.
We open our minds and hearts.
We talk.
We listen.
Name the question.
Create a space for answers to emerge.
See what happens.
This is what our Unitarian ancestors believed:
when congregations don’t know what to do,
the wisdom of the gathered community,
meeting for thoughtful and patient and heartfelt conversation,
can and will tell us the direction we ought to go.
Maybe not in an hour or a day or a week or a month,
but if we keep talking and listening, wisdom will start to emerge.
Our Unitarian ancestors told us,
the spirit of truth can speak from anywhere.
You can’t predict who will say just the right thing,
voice just the right idea that makes the whole room sigh and say,
yes, that’s it, of course that’s it.
But if we can be with one another in a spirit of open conversation
and seeking, wisdom will emerge.
In this moment in the life of our church,
we’re about to enter one of these conversations.
The issue before us right now is about music,
the kinds of music we love and long to have in our worship.
We’ve said goodbye to a music director who served us so beautifully
for three years. We are facing financial challenges, and it isn’t clear
whether we can or should have a staff position
exactly as it’s been in the past.
But what we can do is be in the conversation.
Show up.
Open our minds and hearts to the wisdom waiting to emerge.
Talk and listen. Especially listen.
My hope is that we will embrace this time
to ponder and talk about the music that touches our spirits
and reflect our community
and offers an invitation to all those people
who aren’t here yet but may be just about to walk in the door.
I don’t have an easy answer for you.
I don’t know what we should do.
But I do believe that when hearts and minds are open
and people come together to share their best wisdom,
to embrace what is and who we are together,
a path will emerge.
We will find our way.
Today and always,
in this moment and every moment,
may we be guided by the wisdom deep within us.
May a path be found for all who seek.
And may we rejoice in this moment
which gives us the precious opportunity
to live into our gifts,
to become ever more fully that which we were always meant to be.
Amen.
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