Thomas Jefferson Memorial
Church-Unitarian Universalist
Deep Calls Unto Deep
Rev. Leslie Takahashi Morris
January 7, 2007
What if there were a universe, a cosmos,
that began in shining blackness, out of nothing, out of fire, out of a single,
silent breath, and into it came billions and billions of stars, stars beyond
imagining, and near one of them a world, a blue-green world so beautiful that
learned clergymen could not even speak about it cogently, and brilliant
scientists in trying to describe it began to sound like poets, with their
physics, with their mathematics, their empirical, impressionistic musing?
What if there were a universe in which a
world was born out of a smallish star, and into that world (at some point) flew
red-winged blackbirds, and into it swam sperm whales, and into it came
crocuses, and wind to lift the tiniest hairs on naked arms in spring when you
run out to the mailbox, and into it at some point came onions, out of soil, and
came Mount Everest, and also the coyote we've been seeing in the woods about a
mile from here, just after sunrise in these mornings when the moon is full?
(The very scent of him makes his brother, our dog, insane with fear and joy and
ancient inbred memory.) Into that world came animals and elements and plants,
and imagination, the mind, and the mind's eye.
If such a universe existed and you
noticed it, what would you do? What song would come out of your mouth, what
prayer, what praises, what sacred offering, what whirling dance, what religion,
and what reverential gesture would you make to greet that world, every single
day that you were in it?
(
Meditation: May you
know you are good, may you know you loved, may you know yourself to be held by
a larger hope.
Reading: From Kathleen McTigue, Listening to Our Lives
For many of us, our lives
are framed with frenetic rather than measured edges. We catapult into each morning, driven out of
too little sleep by the alarm clock or the first stirrings of children. We grope our way to our coffee and the
shower, get ourselves…out of the door and into our respective currents of the
day, and respond to the crises and routine demands we meet. We come home and time is still filled and
more than filled with various duties that keep our domestic hearths burning….
I recently learned that a
colleague of mine begins every day with an hour of meditation and yoga. A newspaper article about her began with a
photo of her lying on a mat in a yoga position, the clean lines of her hardwood
floor stretching out on either side and giving a sense of visual calmness and
order implied by her discipline.
This is not a snapshot of my life. In fact, the longer I looked at the picture
and tried to project myself into it, the more amusing it started to look to
me. Because if the photo had been of
me,I would have been surrounded by a monstrous clutter of toys, overdue library
books, unwashed laundry, children’s crayons and drawings and dirty dishes. And I, of course, would not be lying there in
meditation, profound or otherwise, but would be snoring.
Sermon: Last night, the last hours of last night to
be exact, the Takahashi Morris family mailed our New Year’s letters. Some of you out there might think this rather
unimpressive. Consider our perspective: Last year the poor little things had to
become spring equinox cards. I’m always
grateful that decades ago I figured out that my theology didn’t require a
December 25th delivery. All
in all, it is a moral victory that they sit this morning in the mailbox. At the time of their deposit, we were still
within the twelfth day—or night—of Christmas, wreaths still on doors, and people
still pondering what they want the new year to be and how they want to be
within it.
In some ways, the cards
are as artificial as the turning of the year. Their few paragraphs of news aren’t newsworthy
to those we see regularly and for those we don’t, are not enough to truly paint
a picture of all we have done and wrestled and dreamed. And yet we send them because they connect us
to people we love as well as those other times and places, loves and hopes that
still have resonance in our lives—and because those letters express a little
bit about our hopes for ourselves and the world. This artificial turning of the year somehow
serves as a marker, calls us out of our usual routine and invites us to look
into the deeper and more aspiring parts of our life. Sometimes we renew the commitments we have
already made. And I know that many of
you have been listening to your life, listening to the sounds of something
beneath the surface of your life—something more real, more deep, something that
calls to search, dig and seek.
For some, in the dark and
theoretical cold of this time, we become more aware of the many ways we do not
feel good or loved or part of anything larger or more hopeful. This is captured in the words of Psalm 42 and
I use this morning Nan Merrill’s translation from her Psalms for Praying:
My
soul is downcast within me,
Therefore
I remember you
From
my mother’s womb to maturity,
Through
all the days of my life.
Deep
calls to deep
At the thunder of your waterfalls;
All
your waves and your billows
Have washed over me.
By
day You lead me in steadfast love;
At night your song is with me,
Prayer from the Heart of my heart.
In a time of listening
and contemplation, we consider taking on new disciplines. Rigors of diet, and exercise are so common as
to be clichéd. And others beckon at this
time, recommitments or reexaminations of relationships, reassessment of vocation,
reevaluations of personal routines and, sometimes, renewed interest in that
largest expanse of cosmos of which our call to worship spoke. We become listeners like our story’s Myo,
learners, even disciples.
Now the idea of being a
disciple, following a set of teachings so diligently that they become part of
our core identity seems pretty odd in our liberal religious culture. While some of us entered Unitarian
Universalism because we needed some deep, listening path, many arrive having rejected
other traditions whose practices and rituals seemed irrelevant to our life or hopelessly
mired in their own self-referential nature.
We are not, most of us, compelled to be followers. The time-worn story of the very poor holy man
of China may capture our ideas about religious practice. Each day before he meditated, he put a dish
of precious, scarce butter up on the window sill as an offering to God. One morning his cat entered and ate the
butter and of course having discovered this treat, the cat licked it up the
next morning. The man began tying the
cat to the bedpost each day before he began his practice. This man was so
revered for his piety that others joined him, using him as an example and
worshipped as he did and he inspired generation after generation. Long after the holy man was dead, his
followers placed an offering of butter on the window sill during their time of
prayer and meditation. And, more importantly, each one bought a cat and tied it
to the bedpost.
Spiritual practice like that
can make us wary. And for others, the
idea that we should be bound to anything that requires us to practice makes us
uncomfortable. In my personal
experience, new spiritual practices are like riding your bike without training
wheels for the first time—it’’ be exhilarating in a while—and first, you are
going to fall a lot. In our dialogue
preparing for this sermon, Laura told me she once edited a book for Rodale
Press which allowed her to interview former president of the Unitarian
Universalist Association, Rev. John Buehrens.
He told her that he often thought that people doing what they didn’t do
normally was a form of spiritual practice.
Those who lived by their intellect might need a physical outlet like
walking or yoga. Those who lived in
motion might need stillness. Clearly, if
this is true, one is bound to feel like a beginner.
For others, it all seems
too self-absorbed. In a world where war
rages, where natural disasters ravage, where human rights atrocities are
committed, where poverty and disease remain unconquered, what does the focus of
one human being matter? For me, they are
connected the way that the spiritual power of the hymn Amazing Grace is found
in the fact that its praise comes out of a place where one man’s spiritual
journey met the obligations of the world.
Sometimes that deep that
calls to us, that asks us to listen, is just too unfathomable, like looking in
the bottom of a well. Dr. Larry Dossey
coined the term spiritual agoraphobia. Agoraphobia is fear of open
places, spiritual agoraphobia is the fear of the expanse and selflessness of
realizing what he calls “nonlocal mind.”
Nonlocal mind as Dossey defines
it involves confronting an eternal or limitless aspect of ourselves that
transcends our usual ideas of time and space; in other words, realizing the
depth and breadth of our connections.
Whether it is spiritual
agoraphobia or wariness of something else, many have observed that fear is
often what keeps people from spiritual practice and ritual. Even if one does not worry about the irrelevant
cat bondage, one can be caught in other kinds of fears and concerns—fears of
not being able to practice well, fears of what is calling from the deep. I know
that when I most need to go into that mode of listening is when I am most
likely to be too busy spinning plates over my head. And many find a new fear when a practice that
has been tried and true for them ceases to work and they are faced with the
need of starting, anew, again.
Our religious tradition
taps a wide range of the world’s religious wisdom. Each is a “listening place” and each requires
that one find a listening strategy. For
while we also have many paths to that place of deep listening, we will never
reach our destination if we never chose a path to follow and rather take a few
steps on this one or wander a bit on that one only to turn back. Our Skinner House Press published a book
called Everyday Spiritual Practice, and
the discussions are not confined to prayer, meditation and reflection. Instead people write about a variety of
mindfulness practices including sitting Zen, sacred readings, memorizing
poetry, movement, martial arts, exercise, fasting, conscious eating,
relationships, parenting, social justice, recycling, giving, quilting, cooking
and gardening. Does this mean that
Unitarian Universalists have no spiritual practice or it could mean that we, as
Unitarian Universalists have a wide variety of spiritual practices from which to
choose if we make the commitment? That
is a question we each answer for ourselves.
The reading from Rev.
Kathleen McTigue, our minister in New Haven, CT, vividly painted a picture many
of us know too well though the particulars might be different. Children might be parents, or renters, or
students. The clutter might be computer
disks instead of toys, paper instead of library books. Yet in her time and place, she found her own
sort of solution, writing:
My
spiritual practice consists of this: I
think back on the events of the day and ask the question: “Where was God in this day?” It’s a question that can be asked in a dozen
different theological voices and if God language fails to resonate, then we might
merely ask, “Where today did I really hear the language of my life?” The question puts a sheen of attentiveness
and care on even the most mundane dimensions of the day. It gives me a way to cradle the moments of a
day just lived and to see them again before they’re too far away, to notice the
regrets and failings as well as the joys.
A wise and esteemed elder
colleague once told me that at one point, as a younger man with a family and a hectic
life as a newish minister, his only prayer occurred looking out of the bathroom
window as he shaved. My own practice is
simple and flexible: I am grateful, I
meditate, I walk, and I write, for words are my bucket in the well. The meditation we did together today starts
my day most days, it holds my prayers to the Heart of hearts.
So, maybe this sermon is
sort of like our New Year’s cards, a little late, out of sync. If you still think the whole idea is trite,
you can always file it with the junk mail.
If you already have your spiritual practice, great, tell someone else in
your church about it sometime. If you
thought you could put that whole thing off until next year, well, think of this
as future planning, one of those reminders of the larger connections which is
this place and community offer.
My worship associate was
a little askance of this topic herself, and yet, I believe she has a practice
and it involves poetry. I am indebted
to her for this one by one of Japan’s most esteemed gay poets, Mutsuo
Takahashi:
"Everyone," he said, "should have
their own well"
Those
words of wisdom, fresh as sun-dried hay,
hit home
to us, as we crossed hill after hill
of
bogland. Guided down to the bottom of a hill,
we found a
well, and as the wooden lid was lifted,
a shallow
body of turf-coloured water trembled.
It
reminded me of an old abandoned well
in my own
backyard far away;
long
sealed-up, its water stained with oil.
When I go
home, I should clean that well.
Or, first,
find and clean the well in me.
The fallen
leaves covering up my well
back home
are nothing compared to the well
of apathy
long stored-up and nursed in me.
Here the
water, drawn fresh from the well
and stored
in a clay kitchen pot, settled.
Sharp and
clear as the blue patch of sky
peeking
through a hole in the clouds, it thrilled
my tongue and throat. Everyone should have a
well.
(And may it be so.)
Benediction Words of Thich Nhat Hanh
The miracle is not to
walk on water. The miracle is to walk on
the green earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that
are available now. It is not a matter of
faith, it is a matter of practice.