Fear Never Fixed Anything

This is the text of the reflection I offered on February 3, 2019, to the congregation I serve  in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Sam Keen is, as I said during the Story time, a fairly well-known author within a certain niche of readers.  He’s written books like, Your Mythic Journey, Fire in the Belly, Inward Bound (exploring the geography of your emotions), To a Dancing God, and The Passionate Life.  He’s particularly well known to people interested in what’s been called the mytho-poetic movement.  He’s written that we are, “bio-mythic animals.  The true double helix that makes us human is an intertwining of biological mechanisms (IDNA) and cultural mechanisms (or myths).  We are fabric woven of chemistry and narrative, biology and stories, flesh and dreams.”

It’s not too unexpected, then, that he would not only be intrigued by the physical elements of learning the flying trapeze, but it’s mythology-poetic ones as well.  The subtitle of the book Learning to Fly, is “trapeze — reflections on fear, trust, and the joys of letting go.”

It’s a commonly accepted fact among preachers that a lot of adults pay more attention to, and report getting more out of, the story for the children than they do from the more “adult” sermon that is ostensibly written for them.   With that in mind, it’s my intention to give now essentially the same reflection as I did then (with a lot more quotations and, hopefully, a bit more depth).

Keen had, as I said earlier, a lifetime dream of being a trapeze flyer.  But, like most people, as he got older the dream faded into the more quotidian realities of daily life.  [That’s one of the differences – I didn’t so “quotidian” to the kids.]  By pretty much every measure, he had a very successful life.  And yet, there was a point in his life, his career, his marriage, that he found himself troubled.  He asked, “Why was my spirit so heavy?  Why was I so frequently depressed?  So earthbound?  So grave?”  Whether he was conscious of it at the time, he was asking himself questions that made use of the metaphor of the flyer.

“[W]e all yearn to fly.  We are creatures of longing.  We do not need to climb the long ladder to the pedestal or grasp the fly bar to be airborne.  What I call the aerial instinct — the drive to transcend our present condition — is the defining characteristic of a human being.  We are restless animals, eternal travelers who are forever in the process of becoming.  Consciousness itself is a flight from the here and now and to the beyond.”

We are creatures of longing, and Keen still longed to fly.

So, as I also said during the children’s reflections time of this service, one day, when he was near his 63^rd birthday, he saw an ad on television announcing the opening of a new school in San Francisco to teach ordinary everyday people the skill and art of the trapeze.  He went to watch, and found what he described as “an alternating current of fear and fascination.” Interest turned into engagement, turned into a passion.

As with most people who develop a new passion – whether a new intellectual interest, a new spiritual perspective, a new lover, a new hobby, a new passion of any kind, really – he talked about flying all the time.  His friends felt it more than a little odd that this man so known for his insightful intellect would become so passionate about something so physical and so dangerous.  Especially because he was nearly 63 years old.  But about passions Keen has written:

“[A]ll passions are strange passions to those who do not share them.  The passions that animate individuals thrive in the most unexpected nooks and crannies.  There are people who are ecstatic about collecting stamps, old motorcycles, vintage Levis.  Or painting pictures of barns.  I know otherwise normal people who are wildly enthusiastic about riding around on manicured lawns in electric carts and hitting little white balls into holds in the ground.  [I have to digress here for a moment.  I recently read somewhere that golf is the only sport in which the goal is to play less of it.]  I have met numerous cabdrivers who can’t keep their checkbooks balanced but can give you the batting average of everyone who ever played in the World Series.  And many a [person] has kept the smell of the salt sea in [their] nostrils while building a sailboat in a backyard in Iowa.”

He acknowledges that, “Passion is seldom rational and usually blind.”  He says that he has learned, though, that, “it is hazardous to ignore passing fantasies and emerging passions.”  He writes, “[I]n the degree I cease to pursue my deepest passions, I will gradually be controlled by my deepest fears.  When passion no longer waters and nurtures the psyche, fears spring up like weeds on the depleted soil of abandoned fields.”  Hear that again:  “in the degree I cease to pursue my deepest passions, I will gradually be controlled by my deepest fears.”

Many of us would no doubt feel more than a little fear if we were climbing up a ladder to a platform – the pedestal – that’s only six feet long and 18 inches wide, even though it’s 25 feet off the ground.  And that’s a lot of what Keen learned – both literally and figuratively.  He learned about fear.  In fact, as he titled one of his chapters, he became, “a Connoisseur of Fear.”

He’d always been something of a risk taker.  He tells the story of spending an afternoon with the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel.  (Keen had done his doctoral dissertation on Marcel’s work.). At one point they were going through Harvard Square, and Keen was “dodging through the traffic.”  His wife said to Marcel, “Sam likes to take risks,” to which Marcel replied (and Keen remembers there being a twinkle in his eye as he said this), “Only take interesting risks.”

Interesting risks.

Facing our fears, living into our fears, is something that most of us try our best to avoid.  He notes, “It is reasonable to play it safe, not to leap — but it is not always reasonable to be reasonable.”  His begins that chapter about, “Becoming a Connoisseur of Fear,” with an epigraph by Aldo Leopoldo — “It is a poor life in which there is no fear.”  Keen writes,

“As nearly as I can figure, the rock-bottom truth is that life is both wonderful and terrifying.  The German philosopher Rudolf Otto said that our confrontation with that ultimate reality within which we live and move and have our being (which, for lack of a better name, we call the Holy) is always a mystery that evokes both fascination and fear. […]

[T]o ask, ‘Why face danger?’ Is the wrong question.  The right question is ‘What happens if I try to build a life dedicated to avoiding all danger and all unnecessary risk?’ If ‘security’ and ‘safety’ become watchwords by which I live, gradually the circle of my experience grows small and claustrophobic.”

What happens if I try to build a life dedicated to avoiding all danger and all unnecessary risk?

“Death says, ‘Play it safe.’ Life says, ‘Risk it.’  At the vital edge something dangerous calls my name.  What will I risk to stay alive?”

Keen says that there are three basic, instinctual fears which all humans share.  Only three:  “the fear of falling, the fear of being imprisoned in a tight space, and the fear of loud noises.”  He adds, though,

“I have noticed that once the fear of literal dangers has been mastered, a more complex fear of symbolic danger emerges.  I am afraid of failure.  I am afraid of what others will think of me.  I am afraid I will embarrass myself.  I am afraid I will lose control.  I am afraid I can’t trust you.  I am afraid I will be abandoned if I do not measure up to your expectations.”

Do any of you know anything about any of that that?  I do.  Oh how I do.  And I know, too, that what Keen says about the limiting nature of a life ruled by fear is true.  And I know, I know, that if I let my life be ruled by my fears I will not really be alive.  And I know that that’s true for each of us.

It’s true of institutions, too.  Groups, communities, organizations, (churches), can become ruled by fear, afraid to make that leap of faith from what we know, from what is safe, into the void of the unknown, because “it is reasonable to play it safe – not to leap.”  We risk – again, our institutions, and us as individuals – we risk so very much when we let go, not entirely sure that we will be caught. And yet, as Keen asks, so should we:  What happens if I, if we, if all of us try to build a life dedicated to avoiding all danger and all unnecessary risk?  (Even the “interesting” ones.)

It is a poor life in which there is no fear. 

This doesn’t by any means mean that we should be foolhardy and leap at every opportunity.  One of the things learning the trapeze taught Keen is that you should only take risks that you’re ready for.  Every time he went too far beyond his ability, trying to do something that really was beyond his grasp, he hurt himself.  Every time.  And, really, only at those times.

Part of that preparation, as I said to our kids (and to those of you who were listening), is to practice falling.  Notice how similar the words fall and fail are?  Before trying a new trick he learned to practice missing the trick, to practice failing, to practice falling, because the ability to fall correctly is essential.  Fall wrong, and you can hurt yourself seriously.  It’s imperative, then, to recognize our propensity for failing, for falling, to embrace the fact of its inevitability, and to prepare oneself for it.  There is, “a fundamental principle — learn the fall before the trick; prepare for failure.  From the moment when a fledgling accomplishes the first free fall, progress in flying and falling go hand in hand. […] the great flyers have always been great fallers.”

It stands to reason, then, that if you should you prepare for the falls that are unavoidable, you shouldn’t try to avoid them.  Keen writes, “If you aren’t failing frequently it is because you are too timid or too stuck in your rut to try anything new and risky.”  I have heard it said that clergy and congregations need to get better at doing memorial services for ideas, things tried that didn’t work or that have simply run their course.  We too, individuals and institutions, can become stuck in our own ruts.  Too intent on playing it safe.  Too focused on staying safe.  We can make a priority of making sure that we protect what we have and our sense of who we are.  It is, after all, reasonable to play it safe.  It is only sensible to not take that leap. And yet, it is not always “reasonable to be reasonable.”  We can limit our ability to grow, to change, to evolve.  These things always involve a fairly sizable amount of risk.  It’s dangerous.

Keen writes, “If I get stuck in who I am now, I will never blossom into who I might yet become.  Today’s identity is tomorrow’s prison.”  If we get stuck in who we are now, who we have been, we will never blossom into who we might yet become.  This reminds me of something the Catholic priest and Trappist monk Fr. Thomas Merton wrote, “If the you of five years ago does not consider the you of today a heretic, you are not growing spiritually.”  How many of us here this morning think our self of five years ago would be shocked at who we are today?  Would find it heretical?  Scandalous?  Couldn’t imagine in a million years that we are where we are?  Or would that us-from-the-past be unsurprised, comforted to know that we’re still safe and sound, that nothing much has changed?  (What would the church of five-years ago think of who we are and where we’re going today?)

“No footbridge leads from reason to faith, from doubt to trust.  Prior to the leap, fear seems more justified than trust, isolation more fundamental than communion, and the flight of the spirit an impossibility.

The short leap from the trapeze to the catcher is a flight from primal fear to basic trust, from I to thou, from autonomy to communion, that can be made only by a total commitment of the self.  Flying, like faith, hope, and love, is an existential act that cannot be accomplished by a spectator.”

This is what it means – part of what it means, at least – to be fully and truly alive: not to be mere spectators of our lives.  We are called to live them.  And all living things must change and grow lest they stagnate and die.  This is as true for you and me as for a pond, a butterfly, or a seed.

As Sam Keen learned the skills and art of the aerialist, he learned about more than the need to let go, prepared for falling while simultaneously willing to fly into the unknown.  He also learned about the net.

“Initially, I thought of the net as nothing more than a safety device that would protect me if I could manage to fall correctly on my back, seat, or stomach. As I gained skill in twisting, turning, and landing, however, I realized it was more than a concession to human fallibility; it was also a platform to launch new flight. A modern nylon net is essentially a large trampoline that invites a flyer to convert a fall into a rebound trick — a somersault, a suicide dive, a high balletic leap. Professional trapeze troupes always end their acts with dramatic dives or somersaults into the net. In fact, the trick, that seems to delight audiences more than any other is one introduced by Tito Gaona [of the Flying Gaonos] in which he plummets to the nets, bounces very high, somersaults, and lands seated on the catcher’s trapeze.

Gradually, I am learning to enjoy the creative possibilities of the rebound. I suppose there are exceptional men and women whose lives are an unbroken series of successes, but for most of us the ascending path is punctuated by times of descent, downfall, and depression. My failures have taught me there is always a second chance. What I have managed to create after falling has often turned out to be better than the trick I planned. Failing gives fallible human beings the chance to start over. This is why every man, woman, and society needs a safety net.”

My friends, we can be that net for one another.  We can catch each other when we fall, and help to propel us to new, and perhaps as yet unimagined (and even unimaginable), possibilities.  We can, when we do this “community” thing right, trust one another so that we can more easily let go of the known in order to take the leap into the unknown because we know there is this net before us.  I know that we can do this, and be this, because we have been.  Because we are, now.  (Yes, even now.) 

As we move into this still-new calendar year, and round the corner on the second half of our church year, let us be brave, be bold, in looking for the “interesting risks,” that abound around us.  Let us not live from a place of fear, knowing that fear never fixed anything.  Let us, instead, live within the fundamental and omnipresent realities of faith, hope, and love.  Let us live with courage, boldly, so that we might blossom into who we might yet become.  So that we might fly.

I used the following passage as the Closing Words for the service:

“Paradoxically, when we invite our fears into the hearth of our awareness, they cease to be an undifferentiated mass of terrifying demons and become tolerable guests.  Each day befriend a single fear and the miscellaneous terrors of beading human will never join together to form such a morass of vague anxiety that it rules your life from the shadows of the unconscious.  We learn to fly not by becoming fearless, but by the daily practice of courage.”

I used the following words to introduce the morning's Closing Hymn -- #1019 in Singing the Journey – “Building a New Way”:

“[W]e have become captives, driven by the demands of our corporations, the market economy, and the pressures of globalization, which exist side-by-side with the escalating violence caused by tribalism, nationalism, and anarchy.  It is a hot and heavy world.  Not much joy in high places. […]

We are in the grip of the spirit of seriousness, which Nietzche equated with the devil. ‘When I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn; it was the spirit of gravity — through him all things fall.’”

Pax tecum,

RevWik

An illustration for Learning to Fly

Too Fast

This is the text of the reflections I offered to the Unitarian Universalist Congregation here in Charlottesville -- which I have the privilege of serving -- on Sunday, May 28, 2017.

For Muslims, the holy month of Ramadan began on this past Friday evening.  Ramadan is so central to Islam that it is considered one of the “five pillars” of the faith, and fasting is central to Ramadan.  With only a few exceptions (which I’ll get back to in a moment), every Muslim is expected to fast during the month of Ramadan, taking no food or water from sunrise to sunset.  (I’ve read that the actual timing is described as being from the moment when you are first able to discern the difference between a black hair and a white one, until the last moment that you can.  I don’t know why, but I love that.)

And while the prohibition against eating and drinking between those times is highlighted, that’s not the only aspect of the fast.  Wikipedia’s article about the Ramadan fast notes that:

During Ramadan, Muslims are also expected to put more effort into following the teachings of Islam by refraining from violence, anger, envy, greed, lust, angry/sarcastic retorts, gossip, and are meant to try to get along with each other better than normal. All obscene and irreligious stimuli are to be avoided as purity of both thought and action is important.

This is important to keep in mind.  The Ramadan fast -- as is true of all religious fasting practices, actually – is about a whole lot more than not eating.  As the Prophet, peace be upon him, said: "The one who does not give up false speech and evil actions, Allah does not need their refraining from food and drink."

Yet it is the “refraining from food and drink” that is the most obvious element of the Ramadan fast – and all religious fasting – so I think it’s worth looking at those exceptions I’d mentioned earlier.  Islam requires all Muslims to fast, except for those for whom it might be unsafe or unwise.  Specifically mentioned are pre-pubescent children; those with medical conditions such as diabetes; elderly people; pregnant or breastfeeding women; and those who are traveling or ill.  In other words, and these are my words, you’re expected to fast unless doing so would be harmful.

I find this especially important, because the last time I preached about fasting was during my first two or three years as a preacher.  It was, as I recall, a decent sermon, but what I remember most is that afterwards a member of the congregation called me, very upset, and asked if she and her daughter could come to meet with me.  When they did, the mother explained that her daughter struggled with an eating disorder, and that on the way home from that service the daughter had said, “You know mom, the minister just gave me permission not to eat.”  They provided me with a lot more information and insight about eating disorders than I’d had, and I’ve since tried to always be clear that when I’m talking about fasting, and particularly when I’m talking about fasting from eating, one should never fast if doing so would be harmful.

But why do it in the first place?  Why choose to give up something?  Why choose to do without something that we like, that we enjoy, maybe even that we need?  There are lots of reasons.  Some are purely health related – a cleansing fast would be an example, and I might do that because of all the junk I typically eat, or to try to reduce some of the stressors on my body from living in the toxic atmosphere of a 21^st century city, or because I’m going to have one of those medical procedures for which you need to be “cleaned out” beforehand.  But I’m thinking about religious fasting, fasting as a spiritual practice, and there are many reasons for that, too.

I don’t think it’ll come as any kind of shocking surprise to anybody, but life can get pretty hectic.  Or, for many of us, life is pretty hectic, and it can get hectic-er.  There is so much going on, and the pace can be exhausting.  We have access to more stimulus of more kinds, from more directions, with more intensity, than perhaps at any other time in history.  And so much of it, really, is entirely unimportant, is just fluff, noise.  Someone has said that said the hardest thing to explain to a time traveling visitor from the 1950s would be that we have in our pockets devices that give us near immediate access to virtually all of the information we humans have ever encountered, and we use it to share pictures of cats and get into arguments with strangers.  And there are a lot of cat pictures, and a whole lot of people on the internet who are wrong.

Put simply, for so many of us our lives are often crammed to overflowing, with more and more being added all the time.  How many of us have found ourselves trying to find the time to add a meditation practice into our day so that we can experience a little peace and simplicity?   Trying to find the time to set a little time aside for nurture and self-care, yet we just can’t seem to find the time for it?  And making the time to do something to reduce our stress just adds ... a whole lot more stress.

This is one of the reasons for fasting – it takes something out.  And not just something, not just any old thing, but something that matters to us, something that is part of the fabric of our lives, something that is so integral to our days that we hardly ever even really think all that much about it.  In the case of food we so often eat on autopilot, at our desks at work, or in the study carrel, or in the car on our way from one thing we need to do to another thing we need to do.  But fasting makes us stop; makes us think about it.  Fasting makes us stop, makes us get off autopilot.  This thing most of us in this society take for granted – eating – fasting make us take a look at it.  Ironically, it makes us look at it by making us not do it.  Where normally we might reach for a bag of chips, or an energy bar, without thinking, we now have to think about not doing so.

I am certainly aware that not everyone in our society – not even everyone in our congregation – is able to take food for granted like this.  Some people, some people here right now, many people, struggle hard to figure out how to get food on the table.  The numbers of people who make use of our first-Friday food pantry are testimony to this; the numbers of people who need the Thanksgiving baskets we work with the Ebenezer Baptist Church to make, or the Christmas food drive we do here; the numbers of people who come to my office, sometimes with some regularity, to ask if the ministers’ discretionary fund might help them afford to buy groceries for another week is proof that not everyone in our society, or in this community (however affluent it might seem), can take food for granted.  I want to be clear that I am clear that fasting from food – intentionally abstaining from eating – is something of a luxury we all can’t afford.   For some of us, it’s not an option, not a spiritual practice, it’s a near-daily reality.

So this is a good time to say again that fasting is really about more than not eating.  We can fast from anything that matters to us, that is part of the fabric of our lives, that is so integral to our days that we hardly ever even really think about it all that much.  It could be checking in each day with Rachel Maddow, or checking your twitter feed every 23 ½ seconds.  It could be stepping away from Facebook for a time.  Or it might be, as in the Muslim tradition, refraining from “angry/sarcastic retorts [or] gossip.”  (Which for some of us might be well-nigh impossible.)  You can fast from anything, really, that’s become a habit, that’s become such a habit that you don’t really notice it anymore.  Because so much of our lives are lived habitually, and that’s one of the gifts of a fast – it makes you notice.  Fasting can help us to notice the ways our living has become “habitulalized.” 

Many of us, most of us, fill up so much of our time with things that we don’t even ever really experience, because they’ve become a habit, so fasting opens up a space.  And then we get to ask ourselves – what shall we do with this open space in our lives?  In most religious traditions, the answer is that the time we would normally have been spending in unconsciously preparing – or driving up to a window and buying – food, and the time we would normally have spent eating it, can now be spent thinking about, and connecting with God.  As I said earlier, “during Ramadan, Muslims are also expected to put more effort into following the teachings of Islam,” and a Muslim can expend this extra effort precisely because they are not expending effort on all that goes into eating.  (And the same would be true, of course, of whatever kind of fast we might make.  The time we might spend on Facebook, the energy we might spend tweeting and retweeting, consciousness we spend on binge watching something on Netflix or Hulu – all of that time and energy is freed up to consider, if not God for you, then what your life is really all about, the choices you have made (or are in the process of making), the things about yourself that are worth loving, and the parts of you that are worth loving if you could let go of your old voices and tapes that tell you that they’re not.  Fasting – whether from food or anything else – is really, essentially (meaning, in its essence) not about what you’re not doing, but about the space that not-doing creates and what becomes possible in that space.

I’d like to lift up one more gift that fasting – that “intentionally giving up, consciously choosing to go without” – offers: faith.   Especially for those who have made fasting a regular part of their spiritual practice – like Muslims during Ramadan, or devout Christians during Lent – fasting reminds us of the truth “we can get through this.”  From all I’ve been told – and I admit that I’ve never done it myself, so I can’t say first-hand – refraining from eating and drinking for a day, thirty days in a row, is not easy.  But always there is iftar, the meal that breaks the fast each evening right after sunset.  I have done shorter fasts, and can say that that first piece of sweet pepper with which I return to eating is the sweetest thing I’ve ever eaten.  There is another side to this seeming deprivation, however difficult it is.  And this experience of renewal, this direct, first-hand experience of resurrection (if you will) can be generalized to other dimensions of our lives.

As with most spiritual practices, when honestly and deeply engaged, the practice of fasting leads to a greater sense of trust, of faith, in life.  So much of the busy-ness with which we fill our lives comes from fear – fear that we’ll be missing out on something good or important, fear that what we have won’t last, fear of scarcity, that we don’t have enough (of whatever we fear we don’t have enough of), fear that we are not enough and that we must constantly prove ourselves by all that we do and have.  These truths are among the things that people who regularly fast say that they discover in that space that is opened up by their fasting.  And their practice or fasting, over time, helps them to realize that these supposed truths are not really true at all.

So much of our lives are lived from a place of fear.  So many of our choices are made in response to our fear.  So much of who we are, and who we can be, is wasted by fear.  Perhaps this is the greatest gift fasting can offer us – the lived experience that enough is enough, that our lives, that we, don’t need to be always full, always stuffed, always moving, always doing ... that we are enough.  And when we know that we are enough, those fears fall away.  And as those fears fall away, courage emerges.  And when we live our lives with courage, all things are possible.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Lessons From (and for ) the Circus of Life

This is the text of the reflection I offered on Sunday, March 19th, 2017, at the congregation I serve, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian Universalist.  This is the version from the 11:15 service, which was slightly edited from the one given at 9:15.

As I said earlier, this month we’re looking at “risk,” which is something we have to deal with every day, whether we’re conscious of it or not.  There are the big risks of course – telling someone you love them, or that you no longer do.  Leaving the security of the job you have, to find a job that you’ll love.  Going deep with someone, revealing who you really are.  Committing to changing who you are because it’s not who you want to be.  Giving up an advantage because you know it isn’t right. Showing up in solidarity with people who are marginalized, oppressed, vulnerable, even though that might put you at risk for the same. 

Yet even if we aren’t doing any of these kinds of things, we’re dealing with risk all the time.  If I walk down a set of stairs there’s the risk I could fall.  If I drive down the street there’s the risk of being in an accident.  If I decide to eat some pizza that was left out overnight, or drink some milk that’s a little past its “Use By” date …

Those who are newer to TJMC may not know that before I entered the ordained ministry I was a performer – a juggler, magician, clown, escape artist, fire eater …  None of these is without a certain amount of risk; some of them are flat-out Risky with a capital “R.”  And over the years – I started performing when I was about 11 – I’ve learned a lot more than just the skills I was practicing.  I have come to see that the circus arts offer metaphors for ways we can live our lives more richly and fully.  I believe that the things you can learn as a juggler-magician-clown-escape artist-fire eater are lessons that can apply to our lives.

How often have you felt as though you’re balancing on a tightrope, where a wrong step this way or a wrong step that way could spell disaster? 

You might think that the logical thing to do, the safe thing to do, would be look down at your feet to make sure that you put each one in just the right place … but you’d be wrong.  In fact, doing that actually makes it virtually impossible to maintain your balance.  Instead, the tightrope walker lifts their gaze and focuses on the end of the rope.  And perhaps counter intuitively, it’s that forward gaze that makes all the difference.

Now … I’m not a tightrope walker, but I am a juggler, and Cypress just read a great piece about some of the lessons you can learn from that art.  I’ll add one more.   A lot of us feel at times that we’ve got “too many balls in the air.”  I can’t tell you how many check-ins, in how many committee meetings, at least one person has said something like this, or in how many personal conversations it comes up.  But one of the things you learn when you’re juggling is that although it seems like there’s too much going on, the truth is that there’s always only one thing happening at a time.  You’re catching a ball, or you’re throwing a ball.  Catching a ball or throwing a ball.  That’s it, and that’s true if you’re juggling three balls, or the world record of 11.  

But I’ve been building up to something here.  Of all of the odd skills I’ve picked up in my pursuit of sacred play, nothing is more risky than fire eating.  First … well … there’s the fire.  And then there’s the beard.  And then there’s the fire again.

My teacher was a woman named Margie Brown – Rev. Margie Brown, actually, because she was an ordained United Methodist minister.  She learned to eat fire from a man named Ken Feit – Father Ken Feit, to be precise, because he was a Catholic priest.  Now … you might not think that fire eating is the kind of thing that clergy folk would do, but according to Maggie, Ken once made the insightful observation that every religious tradition we know anything about has used fire as a symbol of the sacred.  And every religious tradition we know anything about has some form of communal experience of eating.  So, Ken said, it’s only natural to bring the two together in religious fire eating.  [He also said that the way to learn to eat fire is to sit for an hour in a darkened room, staring into the flame of a candle.  Then ... eat a habanero pepper, and you’re all set.]

Margie was a nationally known storyteller.  But when a conference or other big event wanted to hire her for that, she had condition – they had to give her a place where she could teach fire eating.  I can’t imagine how many people she taught over the years and, through her teaching and her presence, influenced.  But talking about fire eating is like talking about a recipe.  It’s good as far as it goes, but the thing itself is better.  So …

Why was Margie so committed to teaching fire eating?  Why do I love to do it so much?  Well … for one thing … you gotta admit that it’s pretty cool.  But there’s a lesson in it, too.  A pretty important one.

At the end of her workshops Margie would tell her students that she didn’t really care if they ever ate fire again.  What she wanted us to take away from the experience was the memory, the experience of having come face-to-face with something scary, something dangerous, and that rather than running from it we moved in closer.  We didn’t push it away, we pulled it towards us.  There was a risk in doing so, of course, but when we did – with full conviction and commitment – we saw that scary, dangerous thing transformed into something beautiful and awe inspiring.

I haven’t always had the courage to do it, to take that risk.  But I’ve never forgotten the lesson, nor the ones I’ve learned from magicians, jugglers, tightrope walkers, elephant wranglers, ring masters, escape artists, clowns, and fire eaters.


Pax tecum,

RevWik

The Best Place to Hide From God

This is the text of the reflection I offered on Sunday, March 5, 2017, to the congregation I serve -- Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian Universalist.  As always, you can listen to it if you prefer.

It was during the first few years of my first settled call that I first started working with a spiritual director, and this guy was the real deal -- spiritual director, Episcopal priest, and Jungian analyst.  A seeker’s trifecta.  I remember one day when we were talking about the wrestling I was doing in my spiritual life – wrestling with the powerful pull of that "sacred something," combined with a concomitant dread bordering on terror.  I remember at some point saying, "It's not supposed to be this hard, is it?  I'm a minister, for God's sake!"  "Hadn't you heard?" he replied.  "They say that the best way to run away from God is to join the ministry."  I’ve heard this now, a number of times in the years since.  I've said it more than once myself.  I've also heard it put another way:  the best place to hide from God is in church.

Before I go on let's assume that I'm as Unitarian Universalist as you are, so it's not likely that I'm talking about that "God."  And I do understand that some of us "God" is not only something we don't believe in, even more, it's a word with literally no meaning.  For some of us, talking about "God" is like talking about "unicorns with Ph.D.s in astrophysics" -- it's not a question of "belief" or "unbelief."  It's an issue of nonsensicalness. 

So don't call it "God," then.  That's language that makes sense to me, that's meaningful to me, but if it's not for you, by all means, don't use it.  We sing "Spirit of Life" here most weeks.  Perhaps you can substitute that whenever I say, "God."  The UUA's Statement of Sources uses the fairly long phrase, "that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life."  For that matter, call it "The Force" -- "an energy field created by all living things [which] surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together."  In a book that collected children's descriptions of "God" there's one I love:  "the really real."

Whatever you call it, we're mostly likely talking about pretty much the same thing -- the beating heart at the heart of life; the Mystery; the aliveness, the isness of things; That Which Cannot Be Named Nor Known; the really real; ruach elohim; Life; Love; God.

So why would anyone want to run away from this?  Why would anyone try to hide from it?  Why would anyway feel "dread bordering on terror" at the thought of facing -- Life?  Love?  The heart of the heart of things?

In her wonderful book Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard gives voice to at least one of the reasons in her description of the modern Christian church -- because it's dangerous.

"On the whole," she wrote, "I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches,” she says, “are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return."

"Children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. ... Ushers should issue life preserves and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews."  Sounds kind of frightening when you put it that way.  “[T]he sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”  Have you ever noticed that just about the first thing angels say in every encounter they have in the Biblical accounts is, "Be. Not. Afraid."  That's the kind of thing you say to somebody who's scared silly. 

Why do people so often try to run away from, try to hide from, this experience I'm calling, "God?"  Because deep down we know -- we know -- that in such encounters we should be wearing crash helmets and life preservers.

"Absorption" is one of the things my Spiritual Director said people often fear -- the feeling that if we ever truly had a deep encounter with that "sacred something" we would find themselves ... absorbed.  A perhaps absurd, though not necessarily unhelpful analogy -- in the Star Trek universe there is a species known as the Borg, and everyone who encounters it is "assimilated," forcibly brought into The Collective that is the Borg. All individuality is erased, the life you've known is obliterated and, of course, "resistance is futile."  A somewhat less odd example comes from Buddhism.  It is said that when Siddhartha had his enlightenment experience he was tempted to remain in that bliss, rather than return to the world to teach.

Deep down we know – we know – that there’s the risk of being drawn out “to where we can never return.”  That, or changed.  Drastically, irrevocably changed.  In the Hebrew Scriptures Abram’s God changed his name to Abraham, more than a mere symbolic transformation; and in the Christian Scriptures, Saul’s God transforms him into Paul, transforms him into one who now championed what he’d only recently condemned.

There’s a Jesuit priest whose writings have always spoken to me.  His name was Anthony De Mello, and he was born and raised in India, so he brought something of his early Hinduism to his Catholicism.  I purchased his book Awareness with great eagerness to glean more of his wisdom.  Imagine my surprise to read this:

The first thing I want you to understand, if you really want to wake up, is that you don’t want to wake up.  The first step to waking up is to be honest enough to admit to yourself that you don’t like it.  You don’t want to be happy. […] I [am] saying that we don’t want to be happy.  We want other things.  Or let’s put it more accurately:  we don’t want to be unconditionally happy.  I’m ready to be happy provided I have this and that and the other thing. […]  We cannot imagine being happy without those conditions.

When I was doing my Spiritual Direction training with the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, I had the opportunity to study with the great Gerald May.  He told the story of being in prayer, fervently committing himself to following God’s will.  He said that he “heard a voice,” and it asked him (and I’m paraphrasing here), “Would you follow my will if it meant giving up your wife?”  “Yes, Lord.”  “Would you follow my will if it meant giving up your career?”  “Yes, Lord.”  “What if you had to give up fishing?”  He said he never prayed that prayer again.

We run from deep, true encounters with the Holy and the Sacred because deep down we know – we know – that we might be called on to change, and we don’t want to change.  Not really.  Or, as Fr. De Mello noted, we want to change as long as we can keep doing this or that.  We say we want to change, transform, grow, evolve, yet whether we say it or not what’s really true is that we want to change, transform, grow, evolve on our schedule, under our conditions.  And we know – or, at least, we really, really fear – that that’s just not the way it works.

Earlier Leia told us the story of the boy with holes.  And let’s be honest, all of us have holes, don’t we?  All of us have spaces in our lives – in our hearts, in our souls – that feel empty.  Incomplete.  And because of these “missing” parts, the boy acted out in ways that were not, shall we say, in alignment with his “better angels.”  We know about that, too, don’t we?  Maybe we don’t try to sabotage other people’s fun, maybe we don’t try to interfere with other people’s lives … or maybe we do, but not consciously, or in such conspicuous ways.  But who here can say that they always act from the best parts of themselves?  Who here cannot say that it isn’t sometimes our holes, our wounds, our brokenness that direct our behavior?

So the boy in the story sets out to find completeness.  Wholeness.  (And there’s that lovely wordplay in the story that is etymologically accurate – hole, whole, and holy all share the same root; they’re a … whole … lot more connected than we probably often think.)  And the journey on which he embarks is not an easy one:

Wind whistled through his holes and blew him about.  Branches snagged him and stopped him short.  Vines grabbed him.  Animal sounds frightened him.  The river roared right at him; its spray splashed and soaked him.

Sounds a lot like a description of the spiritual journey, the journey of our own quest for deep completeness.  Wholeness.  Holiness even, maybe.  No wonder we try to run away from the call to embark; no wonder we try to hide from the summons.  Who would want to intentionally deal with all of that.  Life may not be perfect as it is, but it’s a darn sight better than that.  I may not feel entirely complete, but at least I’m somewhat comfortable.

But here’s the thing.  Despite the wind, and the branches, and the vines, and the threat of animals, and the roar and spray of the river, the boy journeyed on.  He persisted.

And he eventually came to that other village, where there was that other boy, that other boy who had his own holes but who was a complement to our hero.  The whole story is an allegory, of course, but that other boy isn’t really another boy.  If we take on this quest we’re not going to find another “us” out there, another person who will complete us.  (That kind of romanticism is best left on the silver screen.)

Yet even if there isn’t another “you,” or “me,” the promise of the spiritual journey is that there is that which will make us whole.  Make us holy.  I don’t believe that there’s anything that will fill all of our holes, yet that doesn’t mean they will always be nothing but empty space.  (How that works should be the subject of another sermon someday.)

For now, here, this morning, I just want to point out a problem I had with the story.  After the two boys merge into one, they say goodbye to the people in that second village.  That second hole boy leaves his home, and journeys back, now one with the first boy, to the first boy’s village. 

That doesn’t seem fair, does it?  Why didn’t the newly whole boy stay in the second boy’s village?  Why did he have to give up his life?  Why did the first boy get to return – transformed, yes, but able to resume his life more or less as it was?

I don’t believe he did.  I believe that there’s an untold epilog to the story.  I believe that, after returning home, and thanking that woman for her faith in him, this newly whole boy said his goodbyes as well.  He had to.  Having taken the journey, having found the completeness, the wholeness for which he searched, his adventure was really just beginning, and, so, he had to set off again, in search of new lands for he was, in truth, a new person.

And maybe, in the end, that’s what we fear.  Maybe that’s what we run from, what we hide from.  Because we don’t want to be new, at least not so new that we have to give up the old.  But that story is an allegory, and it may not mean exactly what it seems to mean. And the angels say, “Be not afraid,” and maybe they know something we don’t.

I’ll give Fr. De Mello the last words:

Spirituality means waking up.  Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep.  They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up.  [This sounds a lot like our own Henry David Thoreau’s observation that “most live lives of quiet desperation,” and live lives that are not life.  De Mello continues:]  They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing we call human existence.  […]  [T]ragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep.

In this season introspection Christians call Lent, in this month when we, here, are exploring the idea of “risk,” let us take that risk of truly looking within, truly venturing in, of not running from but running toward.  Let us take the risk of the journey, of waking up, of seeing the beauty of “this thing we call human existence,” of discovering the holy wholeness of our hole-y lives.

Closing Words:

Our closing words are a poem from Mary Oliver.  It’s one you may be familiar with – “The Journey.”

Pax tecum,

RevWik

fair isn't always fair

In response to the protests following the election of, now, President-elect Trump I have heard two assertions over and over again.  The first is that Donald Trump was elected "fair and square" and is the legal President.  The second is that the election of other Presidents has caused a portion of the citizenry to be afraid of what the new administration would bring (and that those fears turned out to be largely unfounded).

Let's begin with the last one.  First of all, whether or not those fears were unfounded is a matter of perspective.  The average white American may not have seen the worst of those fears realized, but communities of color, and other marginalized groups, would certainly tell a different story.

But let's even, for the sake of argument, say that those fears were unfounded in previous  transfers of power from one President to another.  Would that mean that fears about a Trump administration are also likely overblown?  I think not.  Candidate Obama never said that he was going to come and take everybody's guns.  He never said that he was going to establish sharia law.  He never advocated any of the extreme positions that those who were feeling fear named as the cause of that fear.  Candidate Trump has said that he intends to deport 11 million people who live in the United States, no matter how long they have been here as a part of our society, no matter whether it breaks up families to do so.  He said this; it is not conjecture nor projection.  He called for a ban on Muslims entering the country, and the registration of Muslims who currently live here.  This is not a fear based on what we assume he might do; these are things he has declared he will do.  And he has -- subtly and not-so-subtly advocated for violence and intimidation among his supporters, going so far as to say that he would pay the legal bills of supporters who beat up people who opposed his candidacy.

There are not groundless fears.  They are direct responses to things he has actually said he will do.  This is different than in previous elections, in which people feared what might happen.

The fears people are expressing today are born not only from things he has said, but also from things he has actually done.  Over and over throughout the campaign -- throughout his public life -- he has demonstrated a remarkably thin skin and vindictive attitude.  He has not only promised to punish people who have opposed him, he has a history of trying to do so.  His behavior betrays a man whose primary concern has been himself, and who is willing to lie and cheat to improve his "brand."  And he's not just been accused of sexual assault by several women, he has bragged about getting away with it.  And these are just a few examples of actual behavior which, elevated to the office of the Presidency, are incredibly frightening.

These are not groundless fears being expressed.  This is different.

As to the point that he is our fairly and legally elected President ...  I would simply note that Jim Crow laws were fairly and legally established; that our current practice of racially disproportionate incarceration is based on laws that were passed "fair and square;" and that it was at one time perfectly legal, and by many considered a good thing, to enslave Africans, to prevent the so-called "mixing of the races," and to deny the right to vote to women and people of color.  All of these were legal and, in their own day, considered not only fair but right and just.

The #notmypresident movement is not just a case of "sore losers" who aren't able to accept an election outcome with which they disagree.  It's a declaration of respect for the ideals of our country, and a commitment to the strides that have been made to make true our founding credo that "all ... are created equal," and a dedication to the work that still needs to be done.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

The Election of Donald Trump: a response

I went to bed early last night, fully confident that what has happened couldn't possibly happen.  But it did.  And now we -- as individuals and as a nation -- have to live with it.

For many of us, this outcome has been inconceivable.  We never truly imagined that it could happen.  I've seen friends posting on Facebook that they had spent so much time and energy railing against the realities of the Trump campaign that they never spent much time at all imagining a Trump Presidency.  For many, fear and despair are rushing in to fill that gap.

Blame is not close behind.  If only the millennial had turned out to vote.  If only the FBI hadn't acted as it did.  If only there weren't so many bigots in the country.  If only people hadn't voted for third party candidates, or had simply shown up to vote at all.  If only they -- whoever "they" might be for us -- hadn't done whatever it was the did (or didn't) do.

Friends, we won't get through this mess, and certainly won't get out of it, with blame.  You might say that blame is one of the things that got us into it.  A large portion of the United States citizenry has for some time now felt frustrated, angry, hurt, forgotten and uncared for, displaced, disparaged and discarded, scared -- more so than many of us knew.  Or, to be honest, really cared to.  And for many of them all of those feelings had to go somewhere.  So they blamed immigrants, and African Americans, and women, and educated "elites," and "political correctness," and ... well ... anyone and everyone who seemed to be getting more care and attention than they were.

Most people do this in our own ways.  When things are hard we look for a reason -- something or someone to blame.  Donald Trump excels at taking this very human tendency and directing it to the traditionally most marginalized among us.  Yet as they say, fighting fire with fire doesn't really work. Meeting blame with blame doesn't, either.

To those of us who are horrified and terrified by the realization that our country not only could elect someone like Donald Trump, but actually has, I would say this:  we must try to resist our own tendency to blame.  Instead, we are called on to find a way for love to win -- not only in our nation and our world, but in our own hearts.

A lovely piece was published earlier on the Huffington Post, What Do We Tell The Children?  It's author offers several suggestions for how educators can respond.  I think that each of us could use these suggestions for our own responses, whether we have children in our lives.  Those of us who are stunned and disbelieving need comfort and reassurance, too.  The author writes:

Tell them [the children in your school] that we have democratic processes in the U.S. that make it impossible for one mean person to do too much damage. Tell them that we will protect those democratic processes ― and we will use them ― so that Trump is unable to act on many of the false promises he made during his campaign. 

Tell them, second, that you will honor the outcome of the election, but that you will fight bigotry. Tell them bigotry is not a democratic value, and that it will not be tolerated ..."

I have heard people make apocryphal predictions for what our future holds.  I say that we must refuse to cede our role in making that future.  People are saying that this election makes a mockery of all of the gains many of us thought we've achieved, yet I believe that we can use this as fuel to increase the fire of our commitment to making this nation and this world truly live in to, and out of, the vision that "all ... are created equal."  That ideal still shines before us, beckoning us onward.  We can (re)dedicate ourselves to following its light.

No one said any of this was going to be easy.  No one said that there would be no setbacks.  And all of this is relatively easy to say from my position of privilege as a white, cis-male, heterosexual, with lots of education and a comfortable income.  I know that many of my friends, and a great many people I don't know, have a lot more "skin" in the game than I do.  

Earlier today -- yesterday, I suppose -- I posted a video of the singer Rene Martin performing her rendition of the national anthem.  The story behind it is that in 2008 she'd been asked to sing at an event in Denver, but while she sang the expected melody, she replace the words with those of the hymn "Lift Every Voice and Sing."  This song 

was publicly performed first as a poem as part of a celebration of Abraham Lincoln's birthday on February 12, 1900, by 500 school children at the segregated Stanton School in Jacksonville, Florida. Its principal, James Weldon Johnson, wrote the words to introduce its honored guest Booker T. Washington. The poem was set to music soon after by Johnson's brother John in 1905. In 1919, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) dubbed it "The Negro National Anthem" for its power in voicing the cry for liberation and affirmation for African-American people.  (According to its Wikipedia entry.)

It has also been said that this was the favorite hymn of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I'm going to close this response by again posting the video of Ms. Martin's performance.  I do so because it gives me hope.  It gives me hope of a day when "we the people" really includes all of the people who make up the rich mosaic known as the United States.

I encourage you to listen to it.  Then to listen to it again.  Then weep if you must.  Rail if you will. Reach out to the people you love who may need to weep and rail, too.  Reach out to those you don't know, yet who you know will be feeling deeply hurt and scared right now.  And if you're not yet ready or able to reach out to those whose votes have sent Donald Trump to the White House, then at least try to avoid doing anything that will widen the divide that so clearly exists.  Because we will need to reach across it if we are to have any hope of healing it.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Bullies

Driving in to work following the first Presidential debate, I heard a commentator describing the different views of the United States that he'd heard the night before.  Of Donald Trump's he said that it was "negative" and "dystopian," and that it was as if he saw the US as "the skinny kid on the beach with everybody kicking sand" at them.  And a light bulb went off.

None of these are new thoughts, but that image both clarified and anchored something I've heard others saying.  A lot of people in this country feel as though they've become that kid at the beach.   And while not all of them have been used to being one of the most popular kids, they may not have been the big-shot bullies who were busy kicking sand into other people's faces, they were at least in the crowd enjoying the show.  Or, even if not enjoying it, at least knowing that they were safe there, in the crowd, and not down on the sand.

The economy not only crashed for some of these folks, but it has long been transforming in ways that have moved them closer to the country's margins.  And as feminism, and multiculturalism, and a whole host of other challenges and changes to the status quo have come more into the mainstream, these folks who have been used to being near the top of the pile find themselves being more and more relegated to the fringes and the lower areas.

Values, perspectives, understandings that once gave this group clarity, grounding, and a sense of both identity and pride, are increasingly being replaced with confusing new ways of seeing and living in the world.  And "the old ways" are not being outright replaced, they're being challenged or, perhaps even worse, held up for ridicule.

And so the beach no longer feels so safe.  Some of these people believe that they are, now, the ones getting sand kicked in their faces.  (Whether that's unequivocally true or not doesn't really matter.  It feels true to them and so, to the extent that our perceptions are our realities, it is true.)  Others are afraid that they soon will be down on the beach, the place for "losers."

The bullies, of course, are bullies.  We know about bullies.  Very often, perhaps most often, underneath their outward behavior lies an inward fear.  And there are those who actively support the bully -- the bully's "crew."  These folks will crowd around the bully's target, jeering ... sometimes daring to throw in a kick or two of their own.

The majority of the gathered crowd, though, would never dream of actually doing the bullying themselves, and they don't even join the taunting.  They might even think that what they're witnessing is wrong.  But they don't step in to do anything to stop it, rationalizing their inaction with the assertion that nobody's really getting hurt, that the person with the sand in their eyes just can't take a joke or, maybe, for some reason deserves it.

I am coming to believe that it's these people who make up the bulk of Trump's supporters.  They may never have liked what the bully did, but they, themselves, felt safe when the bully was calling the shots.  Everybody knew their place.  The hierarchy on the beach was clear and predictable.  And we feel so much safer when things are clear and predictable.

But now these folks who were once in the crowd either feel that they've become the "skinny kid" on the beach, or fear that soon they're going to be.  And having always given tacit approval to the bullying, they can't help but expect to now be bullied themselves.  And so they look for a bully to come to their rescue, to return things to the way they were before, when things made sense and where they felt safe.

Donald Trump is a bully.  And this bully has surrounded himself with a loyal crew, no question about it.  But it's the people in the crowd -- and not just the ones egging him on but the ones who aren't saying much of anything -- who I really worry about.  I think I can understand their positions, and to the extent I'm right about all of this I can empathize with them.  But they're the ones we have to reach.  They're the ones we have to wake up to the fact that bullies never provided them with safety.  That bullies only care about themselves and that they'll just as easily turn on their friends as they will their "enemies" in order to ensure their own sense of safety and superiority.

As I said, nothing new here.  This analogy has just made it clearer for me than before.

Pax tecum,

RevWik