Reading (From Parker Palmer’s A Hidden Wholeness)
There was a time when farmers on the Great Plains, at the first sign of a blizzard, would run a rope from the back door out to the barn. They all knew stories of people who had wandered off and been frozen to death, having lost sight of home in a whiteout while still in their own backyards.
Today we live is a blizzard of another sort. It swirls around us as economic injustice, ecological ruin, of physical and spiritual violence, and their inevitable outcome, war. It swirls within us as fear and frenzy, greed and deceit, and indifference to the suffering of others. We all know stories of people who have wandered off into this madness and been separated from their souls, losing their moral bearings and even their mortal lives: they make headlines because they take so many innocents down with them.…
So it is easy to believe the poet’s claim that “the blizzard of the world” has overturned “the order of the soul,” easy to believe that the soul—that life-giving core of the human self, with its hunger for truth and justice, love and forgiveness—has lost all power to guide our lives.
But my own experience of the blizzard, which includes getting lost in it more often than I like to admit, tells me that it is not so. The soul’s order can never be destroyed. It may be obscured by the whiteout. We may forget, or deny, that its guidance is close at hand. And yet we are still in the soul’s backyard, with chance after chance to regain our bearings.
Sermon
Iconfess. I am inordinately fond of making wisecracks. It gets me in trouble from time to time. Making wisecracks is not a character trait that is particularly welcome in a minister. The results can be embarrassing. In a committee meeting of our national association’s board of trustees a few years back we were discussing a bylaw change that would allow us to remove from our membership rolls the occasional tiny congregation that no longer holds services. We needed a better process for cleaning up our rolls. Without thinking, I wisecracked that what we needed was a “dead parrot rule”—referring to a famous wacky Monty Python skit where a character played by John Cleese comes in to a pet shop to return a dead parrot that he had been sold the day before. In the skit the salesperson keeps trying to convince Cleese that the parrot lying lifeless at the bottom of the bird cage is not really dead but just resting. Anyway, for months afterward, to my chagrin, the change to our bylaws became known to the board of trustees as “the dead parrot rule.”
A couple of years ago I made another crack that returned to haunt me. It was during a retreat of senior staff while I worked at denomination headquarters in Boston. During a break someone was talking about spiritual practices. I was feeling overwhelmed with work and I was wishing I were back at the office getting on with my long to do list. I commented that, rather than striving for being fully present in the moment, I had achieved the spiritual state of being fully absent in the moment. It got a good, though pained laugh. The group at my table began joking about how they were on the same spiritual path and that they were appointing me their spiritual leader on the spot. In weeks that followed there were occasional jokes about my being the guru of the cult of the fully absent.
The truth, of course, is that the laughter and the jokes were a way of dealing with something we all felt. Our joking, which was a little too painful, was the uncomfortable laughter of self recognition. The fact is that we all realized that we were indeed on the spiritual path of being fully absent in the moment. We were all consumed with what had happened yesterday and last week and with what we needed to get done that afternoon and next week and next month. Our lives were being consumed with phone calls to return, e-mails to read, meetings to prepare for, planes to catch, memos to respond to, projects to work on.
The image from this morning’s reading of losing our bearings in the whiteout of a blizzard is an apt metaphor for our time. I get lost in the electronic blizzard all the time. As soon as I’ve made my morning coffee I open my laptop and check some major news sites: BBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Google news page. I check the weather forecast here and the national weather map. I download my e-mail, trash much of it, and dash off a couple of quick replies. I will check out the morning paper, too. On the way to church I’ll listen to National Public Radio. The electronic blizzard I inflict upon myself is simultaneously over-stimulating and numbing.
Now, I may be worse than most of you, but I also know that some of you are more lost in the electronic whiteout than I am. (And it is not for nothing that we have to remind everyone to turn off their pagers and cell phones at the start of every Sunday service.) Are you inflicting electronic distractions upon yourself, distractions that waste your time and your attention on the banalities of our culture? Most of us have access to dozens and dozens of channels of mind numbing dreck on television.
But the electronic blizzard is just one part of modern life that alienates us from our selves. We may inflict distraction upon ourselves, but our lives in modern society slice us into the roles that we play. We go through the day wearing and changing masks. I wear my minister mask, my husband mask, my friend mask, my public citizen mask, and so it goes. Think of all the roles you are called upon to play. We have become so accustomed to fragmentation that it has crept into our everyday language. We talk about our work life, our social life, our emotional life, our love life, our family life, our spiritual life. Think about that for a minute! What ever happened to having a life? I have one life, one whole life. You have one whole life.
There is something deep in us that longs for wholeness, that longs for integrity. There is something more to me than all the separate pieces of my life and all the parts I play; there is much more to being you than just adding up the pieces and the parts. We might call that our soul, our true self, the core of our being. There is something in us that wants to take off all the masks, that wants to be our true selves.
We long for wholeness. We have experienced times when we felt at one with our selves, at one with the universe, when we felt that we truly knew who were were. Young children are typically more in touch with who they truly are. How do we stay in touch with that wholeness that we have all known? How do we regain wholeness, and then how do we hold on to it? Where is that rope in the blizzard that we can grab and that will lead us home?
What do the great religious traditions have to teach us? All the traditions share common insights into the human condition and they share certain teachings about what our souls need to be whole.
First, all the great traditions teach that we need to be quiet now and then. While the words “shut up, already” are not in the ten commandments, they might well be added as an eleventh commandment. All of humanity’s wisdom traditions have learned the importance of periods of silence. It might be prayer, it might be meditation, it might be going off alone on a vision quest. Silence is even more important to our souls today than it was two thousand years ago. We are surrounded by chatter that drowns out the very quiet voice of our inner self. We cannot hear our inner self until we are quiet.
When the silence is broken, let us break it with music. Music feeds the soul. As I wrote these words my room was filled with music of a cello and piano duet. I find music helps transport me to a realm beyond thinking. It lets my soul find peace. For those of us who make music, creating music can be like prayer.
All the world’s great religions also teach us that we cannot attain wholeness alone. Yes, we need time to be silent, to reflect, to meditate. We need time to be alone. Yet in all the great traditions, that time alone is only part of the story. We will never achieve wholeness as hermits. Even a silent retreat, as wonderful and necessary as it might be, is a retreat. It is not a permanent way of being. All the great traditions teach that we become fully human in relationship, in community. We cannot be human alone, for to be human is to be in relationship. This is why people in all cultures at all times of history have times to gather in worship and celebration. We gather to remind ourselves of what is essential, of what is worth loving, of what is worth dedicating our selves to. We gather to remind ourselves that we are all in this together and that we have deep need of one another.
Yet coming together as a congregation, as important as it is, is not enough. In order to find and hold our whole selves we also need to go deeper with others in settings that are more intimate. We need good friends, spiritual friends. Any one who has such a circle of friends knows how essential they are. Some have one special friend, a soul mate. One of life’s great paradoxes is that we discover who we truly are in relationship of mutual trust and affection. Just like we are in desperate need of silence in this frantic era, many of us are in urgent need of deep relationship. We all have lots of superficial encounters with others. What we need are ongoing conversations about things that truly matter. We need to share honestly and, just as important, we need to listen with an open heart and without judgment. Our small groups that we call chalice circles are one way of creating settings for honest, safe, deep sharing.
One of the ways we come to know ourselves is to tell our own stories. I don’t mean the superficial events of our lives, but an honest and full telling. Such a telling is always a journey of self discovery. To borrow the tapestry image from Linda Bradford’s chalice lighting this morning, it is by telling our story that we discover the warp threads which are the essential themes of our soul. When we see those warp threads of our lives we rediscover who we are. When we share these we discover each other, and that knowing makes us more compassionate and forgiving.
It is amazing, isn’t it. Religions teach that in order to be whole you and I need to be alone and we also need to be in relationship. We need both.
In order to be whole we also need to attach ourselves to something that transcends us. To be whole is to belong. To be whole is to be committed to something that is more noble, more worthy than our individual desires. This is another wonderful paradox. You and I find our selves when we lose our selves striving hand in hand with others to do something that is selfless. It can be everything from raising our voices in song to raising a house for a homeless family to raising our voices to call for compassion and justice. We serve ourselves best when we serve others and serve with others. The people who find this congregation most fulfilling of their spiritual needs are those who serve. Those who come as spiritual consumers simply to get their needs met never will get them met. When we hoard our selves and turn inward we will never be whole. When we give our selves away we are filled. This is a fundamental paradox and a fundamental truth of human existence. We each need to ask our selves if we are giving enough of our selves away.
We find our way home in the blizzard by being silent and going within. We find our way home by being together, sharing our stories, our hopes and our fears. We find our way home by giving our selves away, by losing our selves in some undertaking that transcends our selves.
Now comes the bad news. It takes time. And it takes effort. We are not going to find wholeness by signing up for a weekend retreat. Oh, a retreat can be a wonderful and important thing to do. But if you and I are going to lead lives that are worthy of our aspirations, lives that are faithful to our deepest sense of what is good and worthy, we’re going to have to work at it. We have to pay attention. We have to make time for silence and reflection. We have to create the time and the energy to be fully engaged, fully present with those we care about. (Being fully absent in the moment is not a spiritual discipline I recommend — believe me, I’ve tried it.) If you and I are going to lead whole lives we have to make time for things like exercise and enough sleep. If you and I are going to lead whole lives, lives we will feel good about having lived when our time is finished, then we need to lose ourselves in something we believe in with all our hearts. That means working with others. That means supporting institutions we care about with generous gifts of time and money.
I have more bad news. The bad news is a spiritual weather report. There are spiritual blizzards on the horizon! The chaos and madness that we euphemistically call “the holiday season” are just around the corner.
We each need to tie a rope to our soul’s home. Let’s not lose our bearings in the whiteout of activity and consumerism.
Let’s make time for quiet. Let a peaceful hush come over you, again and again. Let us make time and quiet so we can hear the whispers of our inner selves.
Let us also make time for each other. Let us share our stories and let our stories weave themselves into a strong fabric of friendship and community. Let us not forget how much we need each other.
Finally, let us give our selves away. Let us give our selves to acts of compassion and generosity, acts that will fill our hearts with joy and contentment.
May this be a place where we discover and rediscover our true selves. May this be a religious home where our true selves are embraced. Together, let us help each other build whole lives — lives filled with love, gentleness, sharing and service.
Grab the rope. Our souls want to come home and be made whole. Grab the rope.
Amen.
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