Walking the High Wire

This is the text of the reflections I offered to the congregation I serve on Sunday, August 5th, 2018.

It was 7:00 am on August 7^th, 44 year’s ago. A young man, one week shy of his 25^th birthday,  stood with one foot on the edge of a building, and the other foot on a steel cable ¾ of an inch in diameter. The man was French wire walker Philippe Petit; the building was the south tower of the World Trade Center in New York; and that cable was about a quarter of a mile off the ground. (By the way, in case you’re interested, 3/4 of an inch is about the diameter of an average adult thumb.)

Petit has described this moment before his walk in his book Man on Wire (which was also the name of the award winning 2008 documentary about the walk, and which is actually what one of the police officers wrote on a form to describe the incident):

“I place my left foot on the steel rope.

The weight of my body rests on my right leg, still anchored to the flank of the building

I still belong to the material world.

Should I ever so slightly shift the weight of my body to the left, my right leg will be unburdened, my right foot will freely meet the wire.

On one side, the mass of a mountain. A life I know.

On the other, the universe of the clouds, so full of unknown that it seems empty to us. Too much space.

Between the two, a thin line on which my being hesitates to distribute whatever strength it has left.

Around me, no thoughts.  Too much space.

At my feet a wire, nothing else.”

He then did shift his weight to the left, stepped free of the building, and proceeded to spend 45 minutes walking, dancing, kneeling, and even laying down ¼ of a mile above New York City’s financial district, on a wire the thickness of your thumb.

Just as the circus art of juggling is often used as a metaphor — you know, “I’m juggling too much right now, I don’t know how I can keep all the balls in the air” — so is the art of the wire walker.  When things are hard, when we feel we need to especially careful, we might say that we feel like we’re walking a tightrope, and that one wrong step …

You often hear relationships referred to as “mine fields,” but its maybe just as often said that you’ve got to be able to walk a tightrope to be in a relationship.  On the one side, your needs and desires; on the other side, theirs.  On once side, being empathetic and understanding; on the other, asserting yourself.  Cap on, cap off, the toothpaste.  Toilet paper over or under the roll.  This is some serious stuff here.

Most Sundays, while telling you to feel free to do here what it is that you, specifically and particularly, need to do to feel fully present while being aware that the people around you may well have other needs that are different than ours, I say that you get to engage the “spiritual practice” of balancing your needs with the needs of someone else.  I’m not just trying to be cute; I mean it.  Balancing my needs with the needs of someone else is spiritual work, and like all spiritual practices it is both really simple, and deceptively so.

A few weeks back I was talking about that near universal deeply seated fear that if someone knew the full truth of who we are they wouldn’t like us anymore and would reject us.  It’s amazing how common this fear is.  If you really know who I am, you’ll reject me.  So most of us have developed a myriad of ways to keep someone from discovering the full truth of who we are.  We keep part of ourselves stashed away – “hidden” may be too strong a word for some of us, but certainly “out of sight.”  (And not in a groovey 1960s way.) 

A couple of days ago I was driving and listening to Santana’s album Supernatural.  I got hooked (as I always do) on the song “Smooth.”  And since during the week I’m generally writing and rewriting that Sunday’s sermon in my head, a part of the chorus jumped out at me.  (And don’t worry.  I’m not going to start singing it now.)  Rob Thomas, vocalist for Matchbox Twenty, sings, “I would change my life to better suit your mood (because you’re so smooth).” 

I would change my life to better suit your mood.  I would become who you want (or need) me to be to make (or keep) you happy.  This might be a little extreme for some of us – actually, I hope it is – yet don’t most of us recognize the impulse behind it?  Haven’t most of us, at some time or another, tried to morph ourselves into something else for the sake of someone else?  Laughed at a joke we really didn’t find all that funny?  Found delicious – or, at least palatable – a meal that we really didn’t find to be either?  Sat through the latest Marvel movie when we really wanted to be one theatre over watching the new romantic comedy? Listened to a story when we’re rather have been watching the game?

Does any of that sound familiar to anyone?  I’d think so, because the folks who gather in Unitarian Universalist congregations on Sunday mornings tend to be good hearted, caring folks. And if we’re at all evolved human beings – as I hope most of us are at least somewhat, and at least some of the time – then I know that you’re needs matter if you matter at all to me.  And being the caring person I am, I want to see that you get your needs me to the extent that I’m able influence that at all.  So while there’s an extreme form of this impulse, there’s also a more reasonable version as well – sometimes it’s good, it’s right, to put someone else’s wants and needs before our own.

At the same time, though, we UUs also tend to be pretty darned individualistic.  And we’re well aware of how easy it is to go too far in the direction of giving ourselves over to another person.  We know that it’s possible to lose ourselves in the process; that it’s not healthy to follow Rob Thomas’ relationship advice and change our lives to better suit someone else’s moods.  So, individualists that we are, we are likely to have in us a spark of assertive “You Can’t Tell Me What To Do.”  Yes, yes, yes, your feelings matter, but so do mine!  The majority of us UUs are part of the “baby boomer generation,” and we were raised knowing how important it is to be authentic, to be real, to be ourselves.  We’ve committed to memory saint Mary Oliver’s poem The Journey – or, at least its sentiment – that we have to leave behind us “the voices … that kept shouting their bad advice … ‘Mend my life!’ each voice cried. … [Nonetheless,] “[we] strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing [we] could do—determined to save the only life [we] could save.”  I can’t fix anyone else; I can’t “mend” anyone else’s life; I can’t change anyone except myself.  And since I can’t it’s important – essential, even – that I focus my energy working “my side of the street.”  That kind of game playing where I try to pretend to be who you want me to be is unhealthy – for both of us.  I mean, we’re not narcissistic or anything, but as Sammy Davis, Jr. used to sing, “I’ve got to be me!”

Yes?

And, so, the balance.  On the one side, the oh so very human need to do whatever we can to deal with that deep, deep fear in us that who we are is not enough and that we need to show the world a more acceptable face than the face we fear will cause us to be rejected.  And there’s the mature and compassionate desire to be understanding of the person (or people) with whom I’m in relationship, to care about their needs as much as my own, to want to do for them what I’d want them to do for me (to coin a phrase).  To want to put their needs first – at least some of the time.  That’s on the one side.

On the other is the felt need to project – and, at the same time – protect my Self, to proudly proclaim my individuality, to declare “this is who I am!”  And there’s the mature and compassionate recognition that it’s unhealthy to collapse myself into another, to change my life so much for the other person (or people) with whom I’m in relationship, that it really is no longer my life.  

Between the two, a thin line on which our being hesitates.  At our feet a wire, nothing else.

I said a couple of times there “the person (or people) with whom I’m relationship,” because all of this is applicable to relationships other than the one-to-one relationships I’d wager most of us were thinking about.  All of this is true to some extent in our relationships with our bosses, our employees, our teachers, our students, our friends, our children, our parents, the people in our Covenant Group, the people on the Board (and vice versa), the people sitting closest to us this morning who might well have needs that are different than our own. 

It’s true, too, in our relationships with whole groups – theists and atheists; parents with young children and retirees with more time for volunteering; people who want more music, people who want more words, people who want more silence; people who want things the way they were and people who want things to be the way they could be; people who want the same thing yet see different ways of getting there; people who want donut holes during coffee hour and people who want only healthful snacks.

In each of these relationships, in all of our relationships, we can see at least something of the dynamic I’ve been talking about – the one side, the other side, and that thin tightrope down the middle.

I want to say something about tightropes:  they’re not really tight.  They’re not as loose as a slack rope, of course.  Nor as tight as a solid rod.  What we call a “tightrope” has to have a little play, a little give, a little “life” to it.  

Does that remind you of anything?  I’ve told many times before the story from the Buddhist tradition (but a good story always bears repeating, and not everyone has been here when I’ve told it before).  Siddhartha Gautama was involved in extreme practices of austere self-denial, when he overheard a sitar teacher talking to her student about the necessity of tightening the strings on the instrument just the right amount. (It’s coming back to some of you now, right?)  Too loose, and they won’t make any sound; too tight, and they’ll snap.  If you tighten them just right — neither too loose nor too tight — the music they make will be perfect.  The Buddha-to-be realized that he, too, needed to tread “the middle path,” between a too harsh asceticism and a too wanton hedonism.  The Middle Way, the Middle Path, that’s what the Buddha called his teachings of the Four Noble Truths which make up the heart of Buddhist teaching to this.  Not leaning too much to one side or to the other.

I want to say something about tightrope walkers, too (both literal and metaphoric).  Actually, I’m going to quote Sgt. Charles Daniels, a member of the New York City Port Authority Police, and one of the people who tried for over half an hour to get Petite off that wire 44 years ago.  When being interviewed soon afterward he said, “Officer Munoz and I observed the, uh, … tight rope dancer … because you couldn’t call him a walker.”  Those people who mount the wire don’t so much walk – at least in the plodding, pedestrian way we usually think about walking.  They dance.

I want to squeeze one last drop out of this metaphor – it doesn’t really matter how high the high is.  In fact, four years ago, for the 40^th anniversary of what I call “the dance between the towers,” Petit celebrated by doing a walk at the LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, New York.  The wire would be only 25 feet in the air – not the 1,400 feet it was in 1974 – yet Petit said that in many ways he was more nervous about this anniversary walk.  Not because he thought his skills had in any way deteriorate – in fact, he said at the time, “I am better at 65 than when I was an arrogant little bastard at 18.”  Rather, this seemingly far simpler walk – dance – was worrying him more because the wire would go over a pond, and he hates water because he can’t swim.  You see?  It doesn’t matter how high or how low the wire is, what matters is that we walk on it, dance on it, lightly.

This all may seem too simplistic, too … airy? (pun intended).  It may seem to have too little substance for a Sunday morning.  Yet spiritual teachings quite often look like that.  At least that’s what I’ve generally found.  And as I said about spiritual practices, the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the world’s great religions are generally both really simple, and deceptively so.  And one of my mentors often says that what we preachers do here in the pulpit on a Sunday morning is really just the beginning of the sermon – what we do with it during the rest of the week is where the heart of it lies.

So I’m going to encourage each of us, and all of us, to spend some times this week we look through this lens at our relationships -- relationships with individuals in our lives, in the groups we belong to – to look at all of our relationships in all their varied permutations.  Use this metaphor to ask:

• Am I leaning too far to one side or the other here?  Am I off balance?
  
• What is the wire beneath my feet?  Where do I find a healthy equilibrium between this and that?
  
• How tightly strung is that wire?  Too loose?  Too tight?  Just tight enough that it’ll hold me up yet still have play?
  
• And, perhaps most important of all:  am I simply walking through this relationship, or am I dancing?

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Note:  If read the book, watch the documentary, or see the more recent fictional film (starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt), you are getting what Petit’s friend and collaborative partner Jean Louis Blondeau has called, “the fairy tale.”  I have had the privilege of corresponding with Jean Louis, and he has reminded me that there is always more to the story of the singular hero.  It took many people to make Petit’s walk possible; they were not simply his helpers or assistants.  In a very real way it was their walk as well.  It was Petit, alone, who danced on that wire that day, but he could not have gotten there without the collaborative relationships that are usually glossed over in the telling of “the fairy tale.”

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